As it is very obvious from my long period of bloglessness, I have been very busy.

Now, part of this is real life rudely intruding into my creativity; we are in the middle of recession that is putting huge strained on the humble wage slave and there is no likelihood of things letting up in the near future.

However, I don’t make life easy for myself by taking on too much. Since my last post I have submitted a novella for publication (Steampunk Tales), edited the first recorded episode of my radio serial and received no less than twelve short stories to critique and edit for the next Asylum volume (Beyond the Asylum, due out in September). In addition I have also (probably quite foolishly) committed myself to filming an adaptation of one of my short stories.

So here I am with a big lump of circumstantial and self induced stress weighing on the old grey matter, and if there is one thing that makes writing harder; it’s stress!

The novella that I have just completed, “A visit from Dorian the Anarchist”, became particularly difficult to finish. The story was planned, the text was over half way through, and yet I was struggling to get even a couple of hundred words written in an evening.

Why?

When people mention writers block, the image is that someone is sat at the desk, not knowing what to write. But I knew what I wanted to write. What I couldn’t do was get it down onto the page in a coherent manner. Looking back, I spent a lot of time re-reading what I had already written and I’m not sure this helped. The lesson I am taking from the experience is to make a break when I am struggling. Open a new document and type the next few paragraphs without any reference to the earlier work. It will probably need editing to get it back into the story, but at least it will be written and the project moves forward.

And as for the excess of projects I get involved in – I can’t see that changing whilst I still live and breath!