Two years ago (Sept, 2009), I stepped down as Director of Teens For Christ, reduced my work hours to less-than-full-time and devoted Fridays to writing my first novel. Three weeks later, I reported:
In a way, it seems like things have been going painfully slow, yet there have been some very crucial changes.
Today, two years later, I am doing roughly the same thing. I recently stepped down from leading the youth group at Grace Church Bellingham and switched to working four ten-hour-days so that I can devote Fridays to the novel.
Two years ago, I put a lot of hours into the novel… on and off. Throughout the first year, I did work on it on Fridays, but I also worked on leading a local writers’ group, pouring into a youth group, and creating signs and a website for Grace Church. A year ago, I made an agreement with my employer to work full-time at computer programming for 3 years, saving money so I could take 1 year off to focus on the novel.
This summer, Jessica & I realized that a third of those 3 years were over and I hadn’t made the progress I had hoped for on the novel. So I decided to make some significant changes, cutting back in church leadership and disciplining myself to write in the mornings. But writing a little bit each morning is hard and not as productive as consolidated chunks of time, so I changed my work schedule this week to four-tens so that I could once again focus on fiction on Fridays.
It is difficult when people ask me how the novel is progressing. In a nutshell, the answer is the same as two years ago: “things have been going painfully slow, yet there have been some very crucial changes.” I did create an initial 40-60 scene outline, but I ended up making “crucial changes” that left much of it obsolete.
However, there is (I think) hope. I committed to Jessica to have a “final” 40-60 scene outline finished by the end of the year, at which point I will transition and begin working on full treatments and the actual writing. By “final”, I mean no more “crucial changes” that require the whole thing to be scrapped. I fully expect additional changes as I get into the guts of the full treatments and the writing itself.
I don’t expect to have the entire novel complete in the next two years, but I do hope to have it complete enough to send to literary agents and, through an agent, to publishers. Once I have landed a contract, Lord willing, I will be able to step down from computer programming and focus exclusively on finishing the novel.
