Tag: deadlines

Deadlines and Breadlines

On By Mick CanningIn blogging, opinion, Pressures32 Comments

My loyal follower will have noticed that I have a tendency to drop off of the grid for a while from time to time.

I do that, yes. Sometimes I feel I don’t really have anything worth saying, and at other times I feel there is just too much (self-imposed) pressure on me to come up with a new blog post or to keep up with all those I follow.

Some people thrive on deadlines and work best that way. Others dread them, especially those who have regular confidence and anxiety issues.

Dreadlines, indeed.

I’m lucky in that I’ve never really had the kind of job where I have someone shouting at me constantly to produce plans or reports by this or that deadline, or else I’ll be sacked and out of work and the family will be thrown out of the house onto the streets and starve boo-hoo. Yet I set myself the task or writing a new blog post once a week or twice a week, or whenever I feel I should be doing that.

Preposterous, isn’t it?

I enjoy blogging, and enjoy following other blogs, but every now and again I wonder why on earth I don’t just go and spend the day walking in the countryside or cleaning the house or exercising the badger or something.

And that is why I’ve been rather quiet for a week or two.

So, here’s a picture of a small boy and three sharks on a donkey in the desert as some sort of recompense for you.

shark boy crop

You’re welcome.

A Bit of a Hiatus…

On By Mick CanningIn blogging, writing18 Comments

Well, blimey. Another of those passages of time when I’ve been just so stupidly busy, that I’ve hardly had time to take breath, never mind look at blogs or think about doing any writing myself. And…it’s going to be quite busy for another couple of weeks.

Yet, here I am grabbing an hour to write something and, hopefully, catch up with one or two other blogs. And I have no idea what to write about! I usually have a few ideas mulling over before I sit down at the keyboard, and one or two half-finished posts on the computer that I can draw on. Today, though, zilch. I have one finished post that is on a somewhat contentious subject, which I’m going to leave a few weeks so I have time to properly respond to any comments it generates (who knows, though, perhaps there won’t be any?), and a couple of partly begun travel posts. I need more time than I can spare at the moment to sort out photos for those.

003a

Random and totally irrelevant photo of the week.

Yet…a blog is a personal thing. We’re not journalists, with deadlines to meet and news stories to tackle before they go cold. We’re not being paid to produce highly detailed technical notes on a particular subject. So my personal blog, today, is simply about my progress, or lack of, with my writing.

So, yes, nothing for the last couple of days. But I promised that I would produce an Author’s page on Facebook by the middle of the month – I will!  – and that I had a bawdy, riotous, Elizabethan short story to post in a couple of instalments at the same time. That one is a bit more interesting! Having promised I would do that (primarily to give me the impetus to write it), I got stuck in and by the end of last week I already had over 8,000 words done.

Far too long for a couple of posts, which I feel should be limited to around a thousand words. Certainly, I almost never read posts that are much longer than that. I don’t have the time, unfortunately. So I have a bit of an editing job to do on that.

When that is out of the way, I am going to collate some of my longer short stories together to publish as an e-book and, perhaps, a POD paperback. I won’t have the novel ready this year, so the short stories will be this year’s publishing project. I hope I have enough decent ones to be able to produce a themed collection.

And then? Back to the novel!

Tally ho!