I don’t know if I ever posted about this on here – I have a Tumblr account, it used to be my main website before I moved to this one. A couple of months ago, I chose a better theme and started using it in the same way as other Tumblrers do – mostly reblogging images and commenting below them. Feel free to follow if you like. A lot of it is comic-related, but sometimes not.
Anyway, I never started using it regularly – I had a starting spurt but died off. To be honest, Tumblr isn’t entirely my thing. I’m more a words person than a pictures one, and I don’t get emotionally attached to fictional characters in the animated-gif way. Until the last week or so, just as I reached the first genuinely hard part of my novel edits. What a remarkable coincidence.
It is not really a coincidence
After making the first three chapters worth of edits in a shade over a week, I wrote last week’s blog post, which was so positive, people have commented about it socially. Things were going well, and then I reached the fourth chapter, represented in my notes by a thick line with BIG CHANGES START HERE written along it.
What that means is: this is where I need to start heavily deviating from my original draft, rearranging plot points, writing lots of new scenes and taking stuff off in new directions. Yeah, I had a bit of a wobble. Partly laziness, partly intimidation at the scale of the task, partly fear that I wasn’t capable of it, probably some other things as well.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t leading up to And Then I Did Nothing All Week – I redid chapter four, it’s finished, but it took an eternity, I wasted probably the equivalent of a working day not just procrastinating on Twitter but turning regularly to Tumblr when I ran out of tweets to read (and that took a while).
It was just an extreme slow start, compounded by this being the week I had to draft the Hobson & Choi Extra Long 50th Chapter Extravaganza, which I’ve been looking forward to for ages and didn’t want to end up doing half-arsed. Still, in the end I rattled through two thirds of chapter four today and then worked out my revised outline for chapter five.
Things are happening, but there are even more severe edits coming, and if I’m going to get any momentum going, losing whole afternoons to social media isn’t really an option, especially when I already have to fit the editing around my day job, Hobson & Choi and having an actual life.
Basically, in short, what I’m saying is: if you see me post anything on Tumblr in the middle of a UK weekday, you’d probably be entirely justified in sending a message over telling me to get the hell back to work. Yeah.