It has been a while since I published a book and a few years since I was doing it regularly. Although I have been writing the whole time, it just hasn’t been coming together. I couldn’t tell you how many half-finished manuscripts and abandoned drafts are scattered around my office.
I jumped from tool to tool. Some stuff is in notebooks, buried on the shelves amongst stacks of other half-filled books. There are things written in Scrivener, in Markdown, in Google Docs.
It’s easy for me to look back now and see that it’s all a symptom of other stuff going on in my life, but it felt like the cause at the time and there’s every chance I’m not over it yet. I feel like I’ve settled on a system now, but maybe in a months time this will just be another failed project to throw in with the rest. Most of the time we’re pretty crap at seeing what’s really going on while it’s happening.
But right now I’ve got a system and although it might be temporary, there’s one thing about it I’m fairly sure is going to stick around: going slower.
When I started publishing thirteen years ago, I went fast. At my peak I was publishing a book a month while holding down a full time job and all the other stuff I had going on. And it was fun and exciting but it was totally unsustainable. Even before other stuff happened, I was dropping projects half done and the pace of publishing was slowing.
That’s the biggest change right now. I don’t feel like I’m in a race anymore and I’m optimising for enjoyment. Which I think come out in the writing.
I’ve always felt more comfortable writing by hand. The slower pace forces me to think more about what I’m writing. The dread of the blank page and blinking cursor just doesn’t exist when I’ve got a pen in my hand. Everything feels more relaxed.
There is a lot of flexibility with my new system. My current WIP started in a notebook, now I’m working on the same story in GoodNotes. Neither contains the full draft but it doesn’t matter because at the end of each writing block, I take what I’ve written and convert it to plain text using Claude, then copy and paste that into Obsidian.
That text file in Obsidian is the source of truth. It doesn’t actually matter whether I use a notebook, GoodNotes, or scraps of paper, as long as it ends up in that file. In theory, if I decide I do want to start writing on a computer again, I can do it without missing a beat.
It’s slower, but that doesn’t matter because I find it much easier to be consistent. And it’s better for me to write 800 words every day than it is to write 3,000 words one day, 2,000 words the next, and then nothing for the rest of the week.
The next step is figuring out the editing process because I want to do that with the same approach. Slow and consistent, not quick and sporadic.