Thursday, September 09, 2010

Is a flowchart the answer after all?

Well, my retreat is over and I'm back in Manchester and ready for the onslaught of publicity with launches and readings for the reissue of The Birth Machine (details of the three public readings can be seen in the sidebar here). Must say that as soon as I got back my head started filling with all the attendant stuff that in Wales I was able to suppress, and last night I woke up with the sudden thought of things I had to do, and then couldn't get back to sleep for worrying that I'd forget them - and thinking of more, of course.

So today I decided to make myself a flowchart, something I haven't done since I was running the short-story magazine metropolitan, in the hope that I would lose no more sleep and that this time publicity wouldn't interfere with the headspace I need for the novel in progress. And I do seem now to be solidly psychologically grounded in the novel after spending several weeks with it exclusively - in spite of last night's tossing and turning, I managed to write for the whole morning today without being distracted once by thoughts of other things.

Well, we'll see how it goes...

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