Writer's Life is ALWAYS Intense

It's been a busy, busy week. At the day job we had a new version of a web application to be installed Tuesday, then Wednesday a small problem that slipped through testing showed up and had to be fixed pronto. Then I was taken off one project that I'd been working on part-time, and given a new project to take up the slack for a colleague who decided to move on to another job. That work's been taking up most of my time. Things were actually going pretty well until yesterday morning, when an SSL certificate on one of the production servers expired—not usually too much of a problem to fix, but (being a Friday, I suppose) I managed to miss a step and ended up having to do the job twice.

At the same time on the writing front I've been working up a timeline for the scenes in Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia in preparation for a major round of editing. And to be honest it's painful work because I have to switch between the timeline, the chapter outline and the chapter text for each and every scene, and after a while of doing that I have to take a break to rest the eyes. Thanks to the day-job work I wasn't even able to start on the timeline until Thursday, and up until last night I'd only covered two chapters.

Today I've been back on the timeline, and made good progress. Six hours of work, and six more chapters covered. Four more to go (and the last one is less than half the length of the others so it's not quite even that). I was thinking about doing one more today but, quite frankly, I'm sick of the sight of it. It can wait until tomorrow.

I'm really hoping that this will be the last of the prep work, though. I haven't actually written anything for what seems like weeks and I'm itching to get back to it. I want to get this major edit done, because I'm looking forward to seeing how the 'script reads with all the improvements in place. And of course I still have the first draft of Smoke & Mirrors waiting patiently for me to get back and finish it. It's intense.

The life of a writer is always intense.*

It's 5pm Saturday and time to unwind, I think. I've got Castle season 4 in the DVD player, so I'm off to grab a coffee, stretch out and forget about writing for a bit. (Oh... by watching Mr. Fillion playing the part of a writer. That's really going to work. I love the show too much to let that stop me, though.)

* If you haven't seen Repo Man, you probably don't get this.