Writing and Crunch

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted on the blog, and as is often the case, it’s because I’ve been busy with other sorts of writing.

There are times when I’m writing a novel or shorter stories when I can keep up with the blog. It’s actually a helpful distraction. The focus on something else that still makes use of the creative muscles for writing can help my brain return fresh to the problems of the book. But there are other times when I’m focused on the book and I want to make full use of that focus.

When I worked in the computer games industry we were often faced with the conundrum of crunch time. The quandary was that a certain amount of crunch time was highly efficient. Not only were people working more hours, but the level of focus was more intense than normal. When we were getting ready to ship Starcraft for instance, I found that I knew pretty much everything about the game, I knew where all the problems were, and when a new one cropped up, I had a pretty good idea how to replicate it. The reason for this was that it was all that I did. I didn’t see friends, I didn’t do any hobbies, I put off paying bills or doing any adulting, I barely ever went home or even slept. All I did was work. In short bursts it was an amazing feeling of focus. For an extended period it would be utterly unsustainable.

I find something similar happens when I work on a novel. I write a lot of drafts. Or really I do a lot of passes for all three drafts. When I start out on the first draft, or really the first couple of passes at that draft, it feels very inefficient and I can get lost in the details. This is because I’m still doing other things. On the bright side, I can write other things as well. It’s easy for me at that point to work on creating adventures for the roleplaying games I’m running. And blogging is a natural outlet for all the things I’m thinking about and I have time to write the posts.

Something happens though towards finishing that first draft, the true first draft. Suddenly it’s all I do, and suddenly I know all the details. Part of knowing that level of detail is I’ve gone through what I’ve previously written a lot. All those passes build not just to a completed novel, but also to my knowledge about that novel. Another part of it is that focus. I’m not writing blog posts, or pursuing other creative outlets, at least nowhere near as much. It’s not sustainable for me to do permanently, but months at a time tend to go by and for part of those months I am in expert in only one thing: what happens in that one bloody book.

All this is a roundabout way of saying I have a new book coming out soon. The loose sequel to The Azure Cove Assignment will be out on April 7th on the Kindle and April 14th in paperback. I am also looking forward to bringing a fantasy novel off the back burner and really getting into that, but until I really rev up into a crunch time like focus on that, expect some blog posts. And if you’re interested in reading the follow up novel about by science weirdos, The Many Worlds Interpretation of Azure Cove is available for preorder. More about that soon enough. I’m sure amongst all the other random craziness in my mind, there will be plenty of posts about that book soon.