How many projects can you work on at once and still give them the attention and priority they deserve and need? I don’t think there is one good answer, but it occurred as I was sitting in the audience, waiting to watch a stage adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird, that I also want to revisit the partially completed play I have. I’m probably spreading myself too thin, but it isn’t the writing itself that I find difficult. Even the editing and pre-production is fine (if less fun), but, similar to many other writers I suspect, it’s the marketing that’s the real killer. My children’s books need a whole separate campaign if they are to be pushed, and while the memoir can fit alongside the novels in promotions, any scrip work or revisiting of poetry needs yet another approach. And its exhausting and quite demoralising, knowing that however much activity you might undertake, the actually success is largely down to fate. Unless you happen to reach an influential reviewer, or attain some media coverage (which is such a competitive field), it is down to work of mouth, which is an incredibly slow process. And here’s where the multiple projects makes life more complicated. I now have some decent momentum going for Man In The Bath for example, after a few years, but there are three more novels out since then, a memoir upcoming, a new work half completed, and I can’t give my time equally to all of them. I have to pick a favourite child, it seems, and ‘Man’ is, perhaps, the most commercial that I have out so far, but I hate leaving the other literary babies hanging.
I don’t have a solution here, I just thought it was time for a bit or a rant and to rail at the unfairness of life. And hope for the lucky break we all need.
Stay safe
Kit