What I've been doing lately.

Okay, so, I got to a point in my first draft of Shadows of What Might have Been, sequel to Memories of What Never Was, and said to myself, yikes dude, you need to put this on the shelf and do a bit more brainstorming before you finish.  So I set that on the shelf, and am working out a few scenes that I need to add to the portion I've already written to make the ending I have planned actually make sense.

So what have I been working on in the mean time?  My final draft of Spires of Infinity.  Coming back to it after a few months off has given me some fresh eyes for finding problems that need to be fixed, things that need to be changed, and things that need to be added/removed.  I'm nearly halfway through, and have made some small, yet pretty significant changes.  Most of them having to do with Gabriel and Sam's characters.  I've added one scene of significant length, reshuffled a few into what I felt like was a better order, and made some minor tweaks here and there.  Mostly I feel that the changes help the story flow along better, and give a bit of a deeper connection to the characters.  So, I just have half of this book to go on editing, and then maybe a quick read through to make sure everything works and then I can start the really hard part, trying to sell it.

I'll admit that I haven't been doing a whole lot of work writing this year.  I'm still feeling pretty burnt out from Christmas at work.  In my 16 years of working at the post office I have NEVER seen a Christmas that bad.  I was working 7 days a week 12-15 hours a day because my complete moron of a boss doesn't realize the need for hiring to replace substitute carriers that quit, and we were horiffically understaffed and insanely overburdened.  I mean, really, Christmas comes at the exact same time every year.  You CAN prepare for it before hand if you're not a complete idiot.  It was a very long, very hard, very draining six weeks.  It just drained out all of my will to do anything productive.  I took a break back in January, but it wasn't long enough, and I already have the rest of my vacation time allocated this year so I can't take another break now and try to recover.  On top of that, I've been working on losing weight, and I'm kind of burning out on that too.  It is HARD work.  I've lost 50 lbs so far, and my goal is to lose 20 more, but it requires a pretty strict diet, and 90-120 mins of exercise every day.  It kind of wears you down.  With how much work and effort it has taken to lose the weight I am SO never letting myself get that fat ever again.  This has been a nightmare.  And it also cuts into my writing time, because it's very hard to maintain a pace on an exercise bike while also reading/editing/typing on a laptop, and completely impossible while out jogging.  Also, I've been working on paying off my car as quickly as possible to clear up some room in my budget, and looking at buying a house, which bring their own piles of stress with them.

Anyway, so that's what I've been doing the last few months since Christmas ended.  It's been a rough few months for me, and I still feel burnt out, but I've been making myself work on Spires of Infinity for at least an hour or so every day.  I am going to finish this thing, dammit!  And once I do, I'm going to finish Memories of What Never Was.  That one only needs one more draft too, I think.  I'm just about finished with both of these projects, and having them so close to being done while not doing anything to finish them has been nagging at me.