For someone who likes to sees herself as an efficient person, I have to say that that in reality, I’m anything but. While I was working on 5 Acres & A Dream The Book I was diligent to get up early to work on it (between 4 and 5 a.m.). I admit there were numerous times I felt like chucking the project, but I had committed myself to my editor, so I kept at it.
Between a love of writing and a little success (over 900 copies sold in less than 6 months), I’ve been wanting to do a companion volume based on the blog posts I’ve written about our animals: goats, chickens, cats, guinea fowl, llama, and puppies. It’s been fun blogging about them and I’ve learned a lot. Plus folks do love critters.
This project has been approached with the same haphazard style as the first, but with a little less time committed due to other happenings. Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought it would be great to have it out by next Christmas, but at the rate I’m going, you can forget that.
Then I had a brief email exchange with fellow author and blogger Garrett Alley. He asked if I’d come up with a writing schedule for my second book. A writing schedule? Okay Ms. Self-Proclaimed Organized Person (I said to myself), why didn’t you think of that?
I decided to begin with just a small schedule, just a snippet of a complete schedule. If I can manage to stick to it, then I’ll expand and commit myself to the next steps, which would be the rewriting of the blog posts into chapters. For now, I’ve made a schedule for collecting a list of potential blog posts, organizing them according to critter:
- Week 1 – Guinea fowl – done
- Week 2 – Chickens – in progress
- Week 3 – Goats
- Week 4 – Cats
- Week 5 – Puppies
- Week 6 – Llama
That takes me through the first week of June. If I manage that, I’ll move on to step two, and make a serious schedule for the rest.