2010: Writing progress so far

Ten days into 2010 and it’s turning out to be a little strange for me in terms of writing. Maybe I’m still half in Christmas holiday mode or something but I seem to be chopping and changing more than the ‘summer’ weather at the moment. Maybe I’ll settle back down into my more usual organised approach. I might actually manage to focus on one project until it’s completed before moving onto the next soon but at the moment I’m flinging myself around like a pollen-mad bee, flitting from flower to flower. I can’t remember previous Januaries well enough to know if it’s to be expected that I go through a chaotic New Year phase before settling back into usual routines or not. I attempted to rein myself a little by compiling a writery ‘To Do’ list. It worked for a couple of days and I completed items one and two of the list but now I seem to have returned to randomly doing bits and pieces on a variety of projects, thus completing none. It’s progress still but it’s progress that’s harder to measure. I have also noticed that even when I sit down to work a particular piece, I’m tending to jump around. I start inserting paragraphs here and there in previous sections, editing or rewriting other parts before returning to writing new material which was what I initially set out to do. So far my reading choices have been slightly unusual as well in that I seem to have read only paranormal YA so far this year (even more unexpectedly, the fairy books are outnumbering the vampires two-to-one so far.) However, I went to the library yesterday and got a range of fantasy, mystery and ‘The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing’ which appears to be a re-imagined historical set in colonial Boston about a boy brought up by a mysterious group of philosophers who are performing sinister experiments. However, a Middle Grade fairy book may have also slipped into my pile of reading material. I don’t know how. I hope that soon I shall return to my usual habits or that I’ll adjust to my approach of writing in smatterings all over the place. At the moment, I feel oddly guilty and bewildered about the whole thing. I suppose I associate being methodical with being productive but I hope that doesn’t necessarily mean that not being methodical is unproductive. If it does, I’ve started 2010 in a very inefficient way. Clearly, the only rational thing to do is to blame the subconscious influence of reading about all those fairies.