Project Plan for the Second Half of the Year

My problem lately with writing is I have too many things going on.   My mind is swimming with potential revisions to two stories and the design of a new one.  I'm kind of paralyzed and haven't been able to actually execute any of this, not even one word, for a week. 

My next project is kind of overwhelming, but I really want to do it.  The genre is something like Epic Historical Family Saga with a Dark Comedic Twist.  Why the dark comedy?  Apparently my glasses are tinted with it. 

I was thinking maybe it would be a good idea to build the timelines for what I think will be four novels using Microsoft Project.  I have the stories in my mind.  But the timelines are tricky.  Some of the characters are in more than one story, and a lot of the plot needs to be tied to historical events.  If I can pull this off with Project using characters as resources and historical events as milestones, I'll post about it later.

If you've ever used Project, you know it's kind of annoying to use.  I forgot about that.  I talked my husband into installing it for me.  An hour later, I was ready to get moving on it.  Except it needed me to install an update to the update manager (seriously) and then install 20 updates (I do not exaggerate on the number) to Office. 

Thirty minutes later, when my computer was ready, I wasn't in the mood to work on it anymore.

So I decided to mess around with it and build a project plan for my writing projects for the year.  Yesterday was the last day of the first half of the year.  It's a good time to work on a plan for the second half of the year.

At first, I was going to set it up so I would work on two projects simultaneously, one in the morning and one in the evening. By the time I was done, I decided it would be easier and more realistic to just work on one writing project at a time.  And I felt a lot less stressed after I made that change.

The cool thing is that it turned out that if I put in a little bit of effort every day for the next calendar year starting today, I can - in theory - type up those chapters I jotted down on vacation, finish another around of edits to my three manuscripts, document the plan for my historical series, and write the first draft of the first book of that collection. 

It's all in theory, if I work on it every day for just 2 hours a day.  Every day.  7 days a week.  It should work - if I don't get sick or have a terrible headache like I did yesterday.  If my kids don't throw up.  If no one has somewhere they need to be driven during the time I set aside to write.  If I work through holidays (or work double the day before).  If I don't get stuck. If my Muse is happy with my plan and doesn't walk out on me.

That's a lot of if's, but I think it's plausible because I planned for every task to take twice as long as it should.  And I planned for evening time that I shouldn't really need in case things go badly in the morning or I get behind schedule.

I'm not one of those people that's going to be looking at the details of the plan every day.  I'm not likely to update it with completed tasks - even if I'm on schedule.  It's just good to know that what I was hoping to do this calendar year is possible if I'm persistent. 

Do you have a plan for the second half of the year?  Anyone else get paralyzed when ideas for too many projects consume you?  Does anyone else have a tendency to write dark comedy?  Did you notice spell check isn't working for Blogger today?  Eeek.  (It even let 'eeek' pass through.)