Crazy little thing called writing

Writing is no easy feat

Writing…what can I say? Some days I love it, some days I dread it, but it is always at the back of my mind. I get new ideas all the time and have a huge Word file stuffed with them, but somehow I can never fully express on paper what I really mean, as if the paper was not enough. And I think that’s where lies the difference between a good writer and an AMAZING one. Being able to create a world merely by words, making it impossible for the reader to put the book down. Hopefully I’ll get there, soon enough.

Right now I am in the middle of writing two novels, I find that I reach a certain point when it’s better to go on to the next one. Sort of a saturation point, I guess. I started the first about Emma Hamilton, as many might have guessed :), but soon I felt I needed to know more about her life to stay true to her character, so I decided to put it on hold until I got Flora Fraser’s book. Then I started to write about Mademoiselle Du Parc, the main star in Molière’s company, who deserves a post of her own so I won’t tell much about her now.

Marquise, my other muse

On Emma, I have about 15000 words. I still got a long way to go before it’s finished and properly edited, and my main issue is to keep writing on a regular basis. Like often I say, I should give up sleeping altogether if I truly mean to write everyday! Besides, there’s another HUGE problem: my mother tongue isn’t English, but Spanish. And when it comes to writing a whole novel, it matters. I might write twice as fast if I didn’t have to constantly be checking for synonyms or checking my spelling, but if I write in Spanish the process of translating it would take even longer, so I just have to get used to it and accept it. There’s a lot of things not helping too, making my research more difficult, such as not having a credit card and therefore not being able to buy Kindle books. I also heard a lot of praising on Scrivener, and loved the trial version, but I got to stick to MS Word because I can’t buy it, so…

And since I mentioned Kindle, I don’t know a lot about self publishing, and the little I do is very elemental. And after hearing about tax forms and things like that, I’m even more clueless about the whole matter. Has any of you tried it? Any tips?

Long story short, I have a very poor time management (more like no time at all to manage), a difficult research prospect, a not-so-ideal writing software, a different language and two unfinished projects, but I’m confident it will all work out…eventually!