Juggling

Now that my life has settled back to normal (well, kinda), I'm reviewing what I'm currently doing.

1. I have a hectic job that requires a lot of travel - Damn, I'd rather be writing, but it puts food on the table. I totally intend to collect as much money as possible so I can retire early and write full time.

2. I have finished my house renovation. It cost me RM 90,000! Totally had to break so many FDs to pay the contractor, who bte doesn't wear yellow boots like Phua Chu Kang but blue crocs. (The real stuff, not the pseudo ones you get from Tesco.)

3. I'm currently rewriting my children's book, Billy Lang, to make it as perfect as possible before submitting overseas. That's my labour of love so I'm checking every comma, dotting every 'i', you get the drift...

4. After a blue period that would have spiraled Picasso into depression's depths, I now have two intelligent maids! To understand how I suffered through the last moronic one who finally ran away, please read my 2008 yet untitled non-fiction book.

5. I'm currently writing a non-fiction book for MPH on Malaysian life, as I see it. I had lunch with Eric Forbes and Janet Tay today after the LitBloggers' Club and I apologized profusely to them for being so 'rojak' in my writing. "I must admit I really wrote very quickly," I said sheepishly, "and dashed it off to you guys without my customary rewriting and rewriting for at least 10 times."

"Oh no," Eric said kindly, "it's not too bad."

"You mean the grammar isn't bad, but the format is all rojak," I insisted. "I dashed half a chapter off to Star Weekender the other day. The editor, who has never complained about anything I wrote before, actually wrote back this time and asked me if I had a point to it. So the moral of the story is that you cannot squeeze a book chapter into a newspaper article, but you can certainly expand an article into a book chapter."

Janet mentioned she was amazed at how fast I could write. And here I was thinking I was a snail - because I could only write 1 chapter a week without running into writer's block. (I never have writer's block when it comes to writing fiction, only non-fiction.)

So - is one chapter a week for a non fiction book considered fast? Or is it really (as I suspect) the pace of an amoeba trying to get from Petaling Street to the Arctic?