Thinking about my process today.

Which is so frigging slow.

I write in the morning on the GO Train, maybe half an hour if I’m lucky.

I write in the evening on the GO Train, maybe half an hour if I’m lucky.

Every now and then I’ll write in the evening at home, anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour and a half.

I write when I take my kids to a lesson, anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour.

There are a few other places where I’ll squeeze in some writing if I get a chance.  If I’m home sick, or waiting for an appointment, or on a day off when my kids are in school and my wife’s working, or on those rare, blessed occasions when I’ve deliberately set aside an entire day to write in a cafe (those days are few and far between).

So I generally don’t get a whole lot of writing done in a single sitting.

Which is why I’ve been working on my current novel in earnest from the Fall of 2005 and it isn’t finished yet.  Damn close, mind you, page 316 of 345 of the final draft.

But man it’s frustrating.  I feel like I’m doing claymation, not fiction writing.  Because the pace I write at I feel like I’m completing maybe thirty, forty seconds worth of work a day.  Two or three minutes a week if I’m lucky.  And that’s being generous.   What I mean by that is that on a good day I might complete a paragraph that would take mere seconds to read.  In a week, maybe three or four pages that would take a couple of minutes to read.

When Nick Park was first working on the claymation classic Wallace and Gromit in his basement he considered himself lucky to complete three or four seconds of material a day.  At that rate he’d probably still be working on the first Wallace and Gromit A Grand Day Out had not Aardman Animations helped him finish it.

Of course the reason I work at this pace is because I have a demanding full time job and a young family.  Sometimes I think, man, what I wouldn’t give to be able to write full time.  Then I think, well I wouldn’t give my family, that’s for sure.  Nor would I give my day job, which I enjoy, and which puts bread on the table.  So I will continue to work at this pace for some time.

The good news is this time last year I was on page 245-250.  So I completed about sixty-five final draft pages in a year.  With about thirty pages left to go, I should (knock wood) be done A Time and a Place in about half a year, if all goes well.

And in another ten or twelve years I’ll retire from the day job and THEN get to write full time.  By then, at the rate I’m going, I should have two completed novels under my belt.

Joe the eternal optimist…