Continuing on from my post about tracking the time I spend on work . . .

It used to be the case that while drafting a novel, I would write seven days a week. “No time off for good behavior” was my rueful motto: even if I already had 7K words thanks to some energetic days earlier in the week, I would still write on the weekend. Stopping, even for a day, meant a loss of momentum, my grip on the trajectory and shape of the narrative slipping a bit from my mind. So for the few months it took me to draft the book — three or four for most books; maybe five at the outside — I worked every single day.

That only applied to novel-drafting season, though. Outside those spans of time, I am not and never have been a “thou shalt write every single day” kind of writer. I can’t pivot directly from one book to a new one, or chain-smoke short stories so that I’m always actively working on something. I’d also spend stretches of time revising the book, of course, but I had months in between projects — months during which the next one would compost in my mind, prepping me for my next burst of work.

As near as I can tell, the last time that was true for me was 2016.

That year, I finished one novel (Within the Sanctuary of Wings), one novella (Lightning in the Blood), and one short story (“The Bottle Tree”). My short fiction production had been dwindling for a while, hitting its nadir that year — and since that was also the year we bought a house and moved into it, with 90% of the moving being done by me, I’m not surprised my overall production was low.

Starting in 2017, though, things changed. I began my Patreon: now I was on the hook for a essay every week. Only a thousand words or so, but I had to write it, revise it, and get it posted without fail. Also send out the weekly photo to my patrons, and the bonus essay for those at higher levels, and later I added topic polls and monthly reviews. Plus, of course, each year I had to reorganize the essays into a collection and revise the whole thing, essentially adding a 60K book to my annual production.

I also started to get back on the short fiction horse. Three stories in 2017, five in 2018, ten and four flash stories in 2019. I also started organizing my body of short fiction into collections through Book View Cafe in 2017; later I began producing print editions of those, doing the formatting myself, and going back to do the same for other works of mine, too.

I began collaborating with Alyc, putting the M.A. Carrick hat on my head right alongside the Marie Brennan one. I began writing for games: my L5R short fictions began in 2017, followed by microsettings for Tiny d6 and quest chains for Sea of Legends. In late 2019 I started teaching more, through an online tutoring program and workshops for Clarion West and Cat Rambo’s Writing Academy. I mentored through the Codex Writers’ Group and SFWA’s own program. I started actually cooking dinner sometimes rather than living entirely off prepared meals and takeout.

I added more. And more. And more.

To some extent I did this to compensate for the inevitable fluctuations in a writer’s income. None of those above bits brings in a great deal of money, but altogether it adds up to a meaningful amount. Each dribble, though, requires its own separate effort, its own time and energy, rather than the nice feature of novels where you write them and then they go on earning money (through royalties, foreign sales, etc.) without you having to invest much more in them.

By my rough estimate, I’m working about three times harder than I was in 2016. I don’t keep long-term records of how many words I’ve written each day, and such records would fail to measure all the writing-related program activities that go along with the words anyway, but that’s my best guess at the overall burden I’m carrying. And I’m definitely not earning three times as much money from it! What’s more, a lot of this is stuff that winds up having firm commitment attached; I can’t (easily) just drop a mentorship or my Patreon or a title I promised for BVC’s publication schedule without causing problems. Whereas before, the “bonus” stuff I did, like “A Year in Pictures” where I posted one of my photos to my blog every weekday for a year, weighed more lightly because it was 100% optional — and not jostling for space with twelve other things at the same time.

The upshot of all of this is, my time off from things that could in one way or another be called work has shrunk alarmingly. I like to be productive, but I also need time where I can allow that muscle in my mind to relax. Where I can let go, where I can watch TV with my household and not feel like I should also be dealing with e-mail or updating my sales records or doing work on the BVC website at the same time. Remember what I said in the last post about how often I was doubling up on two categories of work at once? Yeah. That’s honestly not good. The Inner Puritan may nod approvingly, but the Inner Puritan can go to hell.

For a while it felt okay. But this year? This year it has become very, very clear to me that it’s not okay. I can do that for a while, but I can’t do it forever. And so the next (and probably) final post of this impromptu series is going to unpack what I’m doing about it now.