slow ground prose

Apologies to those who regularly browse this blog; I haven't posted for three days, but I do have a good excuse, which is that I am up to my neck in other prose, trying to finish the first two chapters of a new novel by Tuesday. Only a self-imposed deadline, of course, but I've found that unless I impose a deadline on myself and take it seriously nothing gets written. I wish I could say that I sit down regularly at such-and-such a time and write x-amount of words or pages or for a particular length of time every day, religiously, but alas, it would be far from the truth. What actually happens is that I fight for time every day, and the time I do manage to reserve for writing gets eaten into by other responsibilities or interrupted by admittedly delightful children - my tiniest daughter offering me a mangled dolly to kiss or one of my boys poking their heads round the door and asking wistfully 'what you doin', mummy?' - which means that things move too slowly for my impatient style of working. I get an idea and I want the whole thing done, written, polished, sent off within days. It doesn't work like that and it probably shouldn't, but I sometimes wish it was possible. My mother wrote a short novel (55,000 words) over a long weekend once and she had five kids too. That's a long shadow. I wrote about 2000 words last weekend and may manage about the same again this weekend. Slow grinding.