As I write this, it is the last week of October. For some reason, the past week has been sunny and warmish – temperatures between 35-58 F / 2-14 C. Taking advantage of the weather, I worked, then reworked the garden area, tilling in leaves and grass and garden scraps into the soil. It’s a task that I enjoy because there will be a payoff in another harvest in the future. If you do the groundwork, there are rewards.
There is no difference for a writer. Just for example, many writers are gearing up for the annual National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo – including myself and Paul who is my NaNoWriMo writing buddy. The thirty-day writing blitz will have us aim for 50,000 words in 30 days, or less that happens in November. For me to hope to be successful in this, I have to do a lot of background work. Tilling the garden and finishing all other seasonal chores is just some of that work. If I have to take time out in November to take care of the tasks I have put off, I lose time for writing.
Choosing to write this blog post and schedule it for November publication is yet another bit of groundwork that needed to be taken care of so that I honour our teamwork here at Naturist Fiction. The last thing I want to do is to find myself scrambling at the last minute to create a blog post while my mind is caught up in a developing story.
Of course there are things that I can’t take care of ahead of time, such as a visit to one of our children’s homes in the USA for an American Thanksgiving celebration. Since I know ahead of time that this is on my schedule, I have done some pre-planning for the story itself in terms of characters and plot. Now, with the groundwork done, I just have to wait until November 1st [eleven days ago when you get to see this post] to put pen to paper, so to speak.