Ironically, my intended final post for this informal series — the one where I talk about reducing the burden on myself and taking some time off — got delayed nearly three weeks because, um, I was too busy.
So if you’re wondering how that “work-life balance” thing is going for me now, the answer is apparently “still very much a work in progress.”
Continuing on from my post about how my work has increased . . .
Earlier this year someone posted to a writers’ group I belong to, asking how those of us who write full-time decide how much time to take off work.
Which rammed me face-first into the fact that I have no answer to that question.
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.
A little way into the covid lockdown, I spent two weeks tracking how I use my time.
My reason for doing this was the realization that . . . I really didn’t know. Specifically, I didn’t know how hard I was working at my job of being a writer. On the one hand, part of me felt like the answer was “pretty hard;” on the other hand, my inner puritan — which is always ready to doubt whether it even counts as work if you enjoy what you’re doing — really likes to tell me I’m being a slacker. The only way to judge which one was right (if either) was to actually pay attention.
Of course, any such tracking runs immediately into the challenge of finding where the boundaries of my job lie. My sister has a story about her college philosophy professor who was late to class one day because he was busy thinking; while on the face of it that sentence sounds ridiculous, the truth of it is that some kinds of work can indeed take place entirely inside your skull. And that doesn’t look like work, does it? I’ve told my husband that if I’m lying across the bed staring at the ceiling, that means I’m working, and he believes me. But sometimes it’s hard for me to believe me. And often the signals of me working aren’t so obvious, because what’s going on is that I’m driving somewhere or I’m in the shower or I’m otherwise engaged in some non-work task . . . but my mind is bubbling away, combing the tangles out of a plot or composting different elements until an idea sprouts out of them.
How do I track that, when half the time I’m not even really conscious of it going on?
For this particular project, I didn’t really try. Instead I tracked more observable categories of activity, which were (in descending order of how much my brain wants to accept that they’re “work”):
Apropos of my earlier post — really, what I need are more environmentally friendly ways of doing the developmental stages. I had some very productive thinking time while showering, and more while driving to and from the city, but I can’t just do those things on a whim to make my brain work!
I genuinely think that my job got harder when I switched over to writing full-time, but not for the reasons that usually get cited: when I was in college, when I was in grad school, I spent a fair bit of my life walking to and from class. That was excellent thinking time. But these days . . . yes, I realize I could just go for walks. It isn’t the same, though? Walking just for the sake of walking feels like it’s me trying to hide the fact that I have scheduled this period for Thinking About the Book, which isn’t effective. It works better when I’m walking for some other purpose. Like errands — but a combination of pandemic + foot problems means I haven’t even done as much of that lately.
Maybe I should take up gardening. 😛
In all seriousness, one of the trickiest things about writing as a line of work is the part that doesn’t look recognizably like work.
I’m currently in progress on a background project, and I’ve had to accept that as much as I would like to be charging ahead and putting words down on the page, doing that right now stands a high chance of producing material I’ll just have to cut later. I need to think. I need to figure out plot beats that will be lively as opposed to merely getting the job done. I need to make sure I intend to stick with my current idea about how magic works in this setting, because I’ve already tweaked it once, and you know what’s not fun? Invalidating a chunk of narrative because things don’t work that way anymore.
This is necessary work — but it is also work that does not lend itself to metrics. It is the opposite of effective for me to set a timer and say, okay, for the next hour I am going to Think About the Book. Nor can I really set a goal where by the end of the week I need to have a clear sense of a particular character and how they’ll get involved with the plot. Trying to set that kind of goal is a really, really good way to make my brain freeze up and produce nothing at all.
And even when the ideation does happen . . . at what point am I allowed to kick back and say, okay, done for the day? I can set a baseline for drafting: for me it’s usually a minimum number of words, but for other people it’s a certain amount of time at the keyboard. Either way, when you hit your goal, you’re done. (If you want to or have to be. There are days when I hit that goal and keep going just because I’m on a roll; yesterday was one of those days.) Thinking, though . . . how do I decide that I’ve made enough intangible progress, and now it’s okay for me to slack off and watch TV? And even if the answer is that I should do more work, how do I do that when the best way for me to think is to be doing something else? Only certain kinds of something else count; TV isn’t a great one. Neither is reading or playing a game. Showering’s great, but we’re in a drought here, so I can’t just take three a day and see what happens.
I dunno. I’ve been doing this stuff for years and I still dunno. I have a good plot bit, though — something that will introduce a bit of action and set up some complications for my protagonist. I still don’t know much about one of the characters involved in it, which is bad because they’re supposed to be moderately important to this story . . . so I guess I have more thinking to do. Eventually.
Maybe tomorrow, when I’m in the car.
Earlier today I posted to Twitter about how I’d been beating my head against a plot problem for about an hour, decided to give up and try again after dinner*, and then five minutes later my brain gave me a usable idea at last.
*The last week or two, I’ve been writing in the afternoon instead of my usual late-night stints. No, I don’t know why.
Naturally, several other writers have chimed in to confirm that yep, that’s often how it works. Of course the difficulty is, that isn’t always how it works; ignoring a problem is not a surefire solution for dealing with it. We’ve got abundant evidence from psychology that doing something else can be a good way to activate the problem-solving parts of your brain . . . but sometimes walking away is actually just you procrastinating. And half the time, you can’t really tell which one you’re doing until afterward.
For all that my job has many awesome aspects, this is not one of them. When I worked at a bookstore or on a Christmas tree form, it didn’t matter too much how enthused I felt on any given day. Sure, the job was more fun when I was into it for some reason, but fun or not, I could get it done. All it really took was the discipline of “you won’t get a paycheck if you don’t show up for work.”
Writing does also require discipline, of course — especially when you’re writing a novel, which is very much the “endurance sport” end of the job. I have long since lost count of how many days I didn’t particularly feel like I was in the zone, but once I sat down and made myself start, it actually went just fine. But the thing is, discipline will only get you so far. If you’re staring down the barrel of a scene like today’s, where I knew what it needed to accomplish but not how to make it do that, a scene I’d been kicking down the road for days already without ever clicking over into a concrete plan to make it go . . . you can’t just will the ideas to happen. Ideas are like cats. Some days you have to coax them out with treats and feather wands. Other days they start walking over your face at three a.m. demanding attention, and no, sleep is not more important than they are. And some days they just want none of it, no matter what inducements you offer.
After this long at the job, I have plenty of inducements. I know the value of things like associating particular music with a particular project, so that sometimes I can jump-start the creativity by putting the music on. I can sit down and logic my way through the structural elements surrounding the question marks, or I can get in the shower and hope for the magic inspiration juice that’s in the water to make things click. (Yesterday that resulted in a second session of writing, even though I’d already written enough for the day, because I had ideas and didn’t want to lose them.) But sometimes . . . sometimes the answers just aren’t there, and they just won’t come.
(I do want to note, by the way, that I’m talking specifically about being empty-handed on a bit of story, not being empty-handed more generally. I had a spate of that latter issue around this time last year, and it’s a different kind of scary. It’s the fear that not only will the solution to this plot question never come, but nothing at all will do so, ever again. That one is obviously much worse, and the solutions to it require you to dig deeper to figure out what the source of the difficulty is.)
I’ve been a writer for long enough that I don’t actually fear that I’ll be stuck forever on a plot problem. Sooner or later I’ll figure out a baseline functional answer, even if it’s not as good as I would like. (Sometimes that’s what revision is for.) But when you’ve got deadlines, you often need “sooner” rather than “later,” and the longer a stuck patch drags on, the more stressful it becomes.
And when you’re a full-time writer . . . in many ways this is a dream job, and I know it. But let me tell you, the part where you kind of need your creativity to perform on command in order to get your paycheck is not its best feature.
It’s always been weird to me that in the modern United States, we will readily tell our friends and even totals strangers about our medical problems and our sex lives . . . but talking about how much money we earn? How crass.
Well, there’s a hashtag trending on Twitter, #PublishingPaidMe, that’s aiming to examine whether there’s systemic bias in the industry against writers of color. You can certainly quibble with the methodology there — are you getting a representative sample? — but let’s face it, we know the answer is probably “yes,” because the alternative would require publishing to be some magical place that escapes the systemic bias permeating our society, and that seems unlikely at best. And since every past look at the stats of who gets published, and even what kind of characters the published ones are writing about, has revealed that bias is alive and all too well, I think it’s safe to assume the same is true here.
Having said that, transparency is good. My agent once went about seventeen rounds on my behalf with a publisher, fighting against a confidentiality clause that would have prohibited me from talking about the terms of my contract; in California (where I live) that kind of thing is illegal in employment contracts, and while a writer selling work to a publisher is not an employee, the underlying principle holds. Barring the people being paid from talking about how much they’re being paid — or any other terms of their contract — is a move that only benefits the company, never the individual. So it makes me sad to see how many writers posting to #PublishingPaidMe have at least one contract where they can’t disclose the advance; it means that poison is threaded through the industry much more deeply than I thought.
Anyway. I posted my numbers to Twitter, but if you missed that and/or want a less cryptically concise version of them, here’s what the life of this particular full-time writer looks like, with footnotes:
After that, as I noted on Twitter, things get squirrelly in a variety of ways. For Born to the Blade, for example, I was paid on a per-episode basis, and each episode is basically a novelette’s worth of words, plus there was payment for the weekend where we all got together to hash out the story and break it into those episodes for writing. Driftwood, being a fix-up of short stories with additional material and also coming out from a small press, had a lower advance ($5000), which is entirely to be expected. For The Night Parade of a Hundred Demons I’m pretty sure I would be in the clear to name the advance, but since that contract does have a confidentiality clause (not unexpected when you’re working with existing IP and proprietary information), I’ll play it safe and say that it’s on the lower end of my range, but not the bottom, because Aconyte is just getting into those particular waters and nobody’s quite sure how things will play out. The Rook and Rose trilogy is $30,000 apiece for three books, but that’s split between me and Alyc — they’re buying the book, not the authors, so they don’t pay extra because there’s two of us.
Footnotes:
[1] These earned out in no time flat, and in fact went on to be the Little Novels That Could; they stayed in print for nearly a decade and earned me roughly ten times their advances in the long run. In case you are wondering, this — not a huge advance — is often how you make a living as a writer.
[2] Although I put the book titles there for clarity, in fact this contract was signed for “two books TBD” on the basis of how well the Doppelganger series was shaping up to do. So it had no bearing on the nature of the books themselves, which wasn’t decided until much later. They also earned out quite rapidly.
[3] This was where I shifted from what had been Warner Books and was by then Orbit to Tor. To this day I’m astonished my agent managed to get that much of a hike in my advance when I was moving in the middle of a series.
[4] I could have had $15,000 apiece for two books, but I accepted a lower per-book advance in order to make it a three-book contract. My reasoning was that I really, really wanted to make sure I’d get to finish the series, and getting Tor to commit to three books gave me more time to build enough momentum to make that happen. (Which wound up being completely unnecessary, as I seem to recall they offered for the rest not long after the first one came out, but I don’t regret the decision.)
[5] Technically the third book in this contract wasn’t Turning Darkness Into Light. It was originally “book TBD,” but I wanted to make sure I had at least a tentative agreement with my editor as to what the third book would be; said tentative agreement wound up being written into the contract, which didn’t stop us from swapping it for something else when we agreed that what I originally had in mind wasn’t the best direction to go in next.
If you’re wondering how I feed myself on an income like this, the answer is threefold: first, the advances aren’t the whole story. Many (though not all) of these books have earned me royalties, and/or have had separate audio deals or translation deals that bring in additional money. Second, I do other things like my Patreon and short fiction and the stuff I publish through Book View Cafe, none of which is earning me money comparable to those advances, but it does add up. And third, I have a husband who works in tech. For the last several years I’ve been bringing in enough money that if I lived somewhere cheap and didn’t mind a bit of financial uncertainty in my life I could probably survive on my income alone — but I live in California. So yes, like most full-time writers, I pull it off in large part thanks to the cushion of a spouse with a stable and lucrative job.
I don’t know how the numbers crunch for marginalized writers, except to repeat that I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that they don’t do as well on average. We won’t get properly analytical results from a Twitter hashtag — but even so, I think transparency is good. So here’s my share of it.
One of the things that makes a writing career difficult is that all your payoffs are deferred.
Let’s say you’re writing a novel. Each day, or whatever schedule you work on, you add some more to the pile of words. Go you! But if you’re not someone who lets people read the draft in progress (I’m usually not, though there have been exceptions), then you do that work in a void. And it’s a long, long road to having a completed draft, so you’re in that void for quite a while.
Then you finish your draft. Go you! Now maybe you let somebody read it. But you know, in your heart of hearts, that this isn’t the end of anything; it’s just an intermediate stage. There’s revision, and that’s before the novel even heads out into the wide wide world.
Ah, but surely you get payoff when you sell the novel, right? Go you! Except . . . what “selling a novel” actually looks like is generally that your agent sends you an email saying “here’s what they’re offering,” and you say “that sounds great, let’s do it!” Whereupon your agent haggles for a while, because that’s their job. Or maybe this is the next book in a multi-book contract you already signed, at which point this stage doesn’t even really happen, because it happened years ago.
Assuming it’s a new deal, eventually somebody sends you a contract to sign. This comes probably weeks after the offer you said yes to, if not months. Is this the payoff? It doesn’t feel much like a payoff. On the one hand, you kinda sorta sold the book a while ago; on the other hand, you haven’t been paid yet, much less seen your book in print.
Some number of days or weeks after you signed the contract, money shows up. This used to be in the form of an actual check, but these days lots of people use direct deposit instead. So instead of a Real Live Check, you get an email saying “hey, we’ve deposited this money in your account.” Is that the payoff? Literally, yes; emotionally, no.
Edits.
Copy-edits.
Page proofs.
Somewhere in here, you get a cover. Awesome! It mostly has nothing to do with you, since at best you got to offer some ideas that your publisher may or may not have listened to, but at least it’s shiny! Meanwhile you’re busy with something else.
And then, one day, FINALLY, months after you got paid, months after you sold it, months or maybe even years after you wrote the book . . . it’s on the shelves! Everybody is so excited!
Except for you. I mean, sure, you’re happy. I’m not trying to say that it isn’t cool to hold your very own book in your hands and see your name on the cover. But . . . as a payoff for the long marathon of writing the thing, it isn’t much, because it comes way too late. By the time it arrives, you’re already doing something else. You’re in the void of a different book, probably, and when people talk about “your new book,” you have to remind yourself which one they’re talking about. To them, the one that matters is the one they can buy. But that’s not the one eating your time and attention anymore. And psychologically speaking, a reward that’s massively deferred from the behavior that earned it is pretty much useless.
This is why I’m coming around to the opinion that it is hugely important to set up some kind of ritual for yourself — in whatever form works for you — that celebrates the milestones. Two years may go by between finishing the rough draft and seeing the result on a shelf, but if you’ve done something meaningful to mark the achievement of that draft, or the other landmarks along the way, then you won’t run as much risk of the job starting to feel meaningless. If the way the circumstances work isn’t going to reward you in a timely manner, then you’ve got to do it yourself.
The more time passes, the less patience I have with the notion that “a real writer writes every day.”
Try subbing in some other words there and see how that sentence sounds. “A real teacher teaches every day.” “A real programmer programs every day.” “A real surgeon performs surgery every day.” These are all patently absurd. The teacher, the programmer, and the surgeon are all better at their jobs for not going to work every day. For taking some days off.
I wonder if what’s going on here is a weird collision between the romanticization of ~art~ and the #@$*%! “Protestant work ethic.” On the one hand you have this sense that writing, or any art, is a ~calling~. And if it doesn’t call to you every day, why, then, you’re not a real writer, are you? On the other hand you’ve got Max Weber frowning over your shoulder and questioning whether what you’re doing is Real Work — so you have to silence him by keeping your nose to the grindstone every day, without respite, because otherwise clearly you’re just a good-for-nothing layabout.
(I’d like to pause and appreciate the value of the tilde for indicating a kind of vaporous awe around a word. Italics just don’t convey the same effect, and neither do quotation marks.)
Writing is Real Work. It may be fun work (a thought that would probably horrify the Calvinists Weber had in mind), but it requires effort, concentration, hours of your life. Some days it’s easier than others. But it’s also weird work, in that sometimes the most vitally useful thing you can do is go for a walk or wash some dishes, because while you’re not looking, your brain sneaks off and figures stuff out. When people ask me how many hours I work each day or week, my response is to give them a baffled shrug, because there aren’t clean boundaries around it; I’m definitely working while I’m drafting a story or answering emails or going over page proofs, but I also may be working while I’m vacuuming the rug or brushing my teeth or reading a book. Which means that days in which I’m not at the keyboard may still in some fashion be work days — but thinking of them that way is pernicious. If an idea comes to me, awesome, but in the meanwhile I’m going to have a life.
Because contrary to what corporate America wants us all to believe, we can have lives outside our jobs, and we should. We will not just be better employees for the time off; we’ll be better people, too. And that’s just as true of writers as it is of anybody else.
Continuing the post-WFC theme: I don’t exactly work with anybody, per se — writing being a fairly solitary task and all — but man, my fellow writers are pretty damn cool people.
Sure, not all of them; some are boring blowhards or unrepentant jerks. But the percentage of them with whom I can have cool conversations is remarkably high. It’s a function of the job, really: writers in general, and sf/f writers in particular, are prone to knowing random nifty things, and “random nifty things” is one of my favorite things to talk about. As mrissa and alecaustin and zellandyne and I were commenting at lunch on Sunday, we don’t do the small talk thing very well; introduce us to somebody new, and if we get our way, within five minutes we’ll be riffing on archaeology or exoplanets or historical methods of smallpox vaccination.
I may go months at a time without talking to any of them in person, but I look forward to those occasions when we all get together.
The mail brought lots of exciting stuff yesterday. First:
That’s right, I gots me a shiny, shiny ARC! A whole box of them, in fact, about which more anon. But before I get to that, the second thing that arrived is my new desk!
After some consideration, I did indeed go ahead and buy a GeekDesk. It comes with a little motor that will, within a few seconds, move the desk between sitting and standing height (the latter going high enough to be comfortable for kniedzw, who is 6’3″). I’ll deliver a review once I’ve had more time to settle in with it, but my initial impression is definitely positive. My one complaint off the bat is simply that it doesn’t come with a keyboard tray; the one you see in those photos is taken from my old desk and screwed onto the underside. (The drawers are also from the old desk, and will be replaced soonish, since without the old desktop there’s nothing to cover the upper drawer.)
Anyway, in celebration of both book and desk, I’m giving away an ARC! Tell me in comments what your ideal work environment is: coffee shop and a pad of paper? Lying in bed with a laptop? Floating on a raft in the middle of a swimming pool in the tropics, while well-muscled young men bring you grapes and cool drinks? (It doesn’t have to be your actual work environment, just one you like the sound of. So feel free to be creative.)
(Also, if I previously promised you an ARC (because you made me an icon or whatever), feel free to ping me with a reminder, marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com. I’ll be going through my records and making a list, but the notes are scattered and I don’t want to miss anybody.)
I was about ready to head off to bed at 3 a.m. last night (my usual time, for those not aware).
By the time I actually got there, it was nearly 5.
The reason? I was working on revising “And Blow Them at the Moon” last night, which requires at least two pieces of heavy lifting, completely replacing a pair of scenes. The first one was like pulling teeth, and I’m not sure what percentage of that was the difficulty of the scene, what percentage was me just not committing my brain to the task. But I finished it. And then, of all things, a Facebook application handed me some motivation: I was very close to regenerating enough stamina in this little monster-killing thing to go kill monsters one more time before going to bed, so I told myself that while I waited for that to be ready, I would poke at the second scene.
Then it was nearly 5 a.m. and I’d replaced both scenes.
And I think, more than anything, this is what I love about being a full-time writer. They say, and it’s true, that you can’t wait for the muse to strike if you want to have a career (full-time or otherwise) — but sometimes it does strike. When it does, having the freedom to say, “eh, I can just sleep in tomorrow” is a glorious thing. There was a point at which I knew I could kill monsters and go to bed, but I didn’t want to; I wanted to keep writing Magrat doing something very brave and rather stupid, and so I did. (Whoever knew Facebook could be good for productivity?)
Of course, that meant I slept until 1 p.m. today — which is still only eight hours, but some of them are at a time even I don’t consider to be reasonable for sleeping. So now I go eat something (god, I haven’t had food since about 9:30 last night), and trundle through the requisite 50 pages of my page proofs for Star, and then probably read more about the Underground.
And hope I can go to bed at a reasonable hour tonight.
I don’t have to report for jury duty today — yay! So here’s an update on where I stand work-wise, in the wake of the India trip and A Star Shall Fall.
1) I do, of course, have to deal with copy-edits and page proofs for Star. Not sure yet when those will show up, though, so for the time being that work is in limbo.
2) Next after that one is the Victorian book. Due to the vagaries of my last few years, this, the fourth Onyx Court novel, will be the first one where I’ve had more than a month or two of lead time in which to do my research before I put words on the page. You have no idea how wonderful that feels. In order to give myself more time for the actual drafting, I plan to start that at the beginning of April, but that still leaves me five months for a leisurely, low-pressure campaign of prep reading. Look for various “help me o internets” posts as I figure out what I want to pick up first.
3) Writing full-time means I need to hold myself to a higher standard of productivity than I did while teaching or taking classes. Ergo, I’m also starting work on a pure spec project. For those not familiar with the term, writing “on spec,” i.e. “on speculation,” means you’re doing it on your own time, without a contract promising money when you’re done. This project, code-named TLT, is a just-for-me novel; if I don’t finish it, or if I do finish it and then decide it isn’t really for publication, then that’s okay. I’m doing it because I want to, because I think it’ll be fun. And “having fun” is an important part of this job, for the preservation of sanity. Anyway, the plan for this is to aim for 5K a week, with weekends off, and if I don’t make my goal then I won’t beat myself up over it.
4) I also have another sekrit projekt on the back burner, code-named FY. No wordcount goals for this one; I just want to play around with it and see what happens.
5) Short stories. I’m beginning to accept that short stories aren’t likely to happen while I’m drafting Onyx Court books, but the result is that my pipeline of stories has gotten fairly empty at every stage — very few upcoming publications, because very few sales, because very few submissions, because very few stories prepared, because very few stories awaiting revision. Between now and April, I’d like to make some progress in fixing that. The tentative goal is to finish both Edward’s untitled story and “Serpent, Wolf, and Half-Dead Thing” before the end of the month; we’ll see if I can manage it or not.
Now I head up to the city for errands and the Borderlands signing tonight. India pictures later — hopefully tonight or tomorrow.
This is what a thousand bucks looks like:
Which, by my standards, is a grotesque amount of money to spend on a chair. But I’m trying to think of it less as “a chair,” more as “an investment in the future of my musculo-skeletal system.” (And probably some nerves, too.) Good office chairs are ‘spensive, and good office chairs with cervical support? I’m lucky the one I liked best turned out to be the cheapest one I was looking at.
I need to take care of my health, and that means putting an end to this chronic shoulder tension and increasing problem with lumbar stiffness. I should have made a purchase like this years ago, honestly — it isn’t like grad school doesn’t involve equally large amounts of time at the computer — but it was the full-time writer thing that made me finally bite the bullet. No more cheap chairs scrounged from used furniture stores. This is new, and well-made, and about the only thing it doesn’t do is give me a massage while I work*.
And man, you know you’re kind of a geek about your work life when the purchase of a new office chair is a really exciting event. <g>
*Though I do have one of those Homedics pads.
I’m dubious of the value in labeling everything a “syndrome” or a “disorder” or a “condition,” but it’s a pretty apt descriptor of my habits. I can wake up at earlier hours, if I have to. But going to sleep before midnight is hard, unless I’m truly exhausted. And that’s been true for years, now.
And I rather liked this Achewood comic, which (while not exactly my attitude) does to some extent encapsulate my irritation that society treats sleeping late as somehow morally weak — nevermind how many hours of sleep you’re actually getting.
(Diagnosis and comic from toddalcott and comments therein.)
Saturday night, I was feeling very cranky and unproductive and generally not desirous of working on the Still Untitled Novelette/a of Doom. And I was sitting at the computer trying to flagellate myself into getting started (at about one-thirty in the morning, naturally), and then it occurred to me:
It’s Saturday. I don’t have to write.
This was, after all, the plan I laid down when I started thinking about the full-time writerly life. When not noveling, I can have weekends off. Provided, of course, I’ve done at least 500 words a day during the week — which I had, several times over. I can write on the weekend, if I feel inspired to. But I don’t have to.
Mind you, that rule should probably break down if it’s getting to the end of the month and I haven’t finished the story I’m working on. Astute minds will notice that is the case here; I’m going to have to haul tail pretty fast these next few days to get it done. But in my fiction-writing life (as well as other things), I’m addicted to the opposite of the all-nighter: I tend to drive myself halfway into the ground in order to make sure I finish before deadline. This is a habit I could benefit from breaking. Let’s recharge for a couple of days, before charging onward.
It’s a nice theory. We’ll see how it works out for me this week.
So what do I do with myself all year?
(I figure this is the biggest scale on which I can usefully address the question of how I will be organizing my life. Once we start talking about multiple years at a time, too many of the variables are out of my hands.)
Historically, the answer has been that I write a novel every summer. I missed a couple in there, and sometimes I wrote one during the winter, but on the whole, novels have been summer things, because I’ve been in school.
This has also, to some extent, dictated my pace: it takes me about three to four months to complete a draft. At 1K a day, which is my standard pace, I get about 30K per month, so 3-4 months is enough to produce an average-size fantasy novel. In practice, that’s usually an under-estimate, though I miss days, I treat 1K as a daily minimum rather than an average, so over time I build up a margin of safety. I also tend to speed up as I get closer to the end of the book.
I think it’s fair, then, to divide the year into thirds: three four-month periods. It’ll do as a rough guideline, anyway.
Here’s where it gets fuzzier, because I don’t actually know what I’ll be doing for the next couple of years. In Ashes Lie is the second book of a two-book contract, so other than the revisions (which I’m working on right now) and the rest of its production process, I’m not under contract for anything at the moment. I have some educated guesses as to what I’ll be doing next, but no guarantees yet, and so I’m going to restrict myself to more general terms here.
I can certainly write a novel a year. I was able to do that even while in school full-time; I can do it now. So that’s one third of the year dedicated to writing a novel. What about the other two-thirds?
After years of having nothing much in the way of YA ideas in my head, I’m starting to grow some. So it’s entirely possible I’ll find myself publishing for both adults and teens in the future. Which works out well: a YA novel is maybe half the length of an adult one, depending. Can I write a novel and a half each year? I think so. (My average while in college was slightly better than that, in fact.) I even think I can handle prepping for an adult book — research and so on — while writing a YA. So my ideal yearly schedule would have me writing the YA in the four months preceding the block in which I’m working on the adult novel.
But of course we have to figure in deadlines, which will be dictated by my publisher’s schedule for putting things out. My own order and timing will have to shift to meet reality on the ground.
What about the last third of the year? Odds are high — one might even say certain — that I’ll be revising and copy-editing and page-proofing during that time, since it will follow on the delivery of one book or another. But that isn’t four months of daily work. And while I may be prepping for the next book, it’s hard to imagine that being a full workload, either.
And that’s fine, because I need some time to play. My hope is that the remaining portion of the year, the “vacation” in which I am not drafting a contracted novel, will be spent on playing with new ideas. It’s rare for me to produce a book from a dead halt; usually I’ve got anywhere from a few thousand to forty thousand words already squirreled away in a file by the time I officially sit down to write that book. (Okay, 40K has only happened once. But 10K, sure.) So the last third is for spec projects, things I’m not contracted for but am maybe interested in pitching, or even just stuff I want to do for the hell of it, with no certain expectation of what I’d do with that book if I had it. I’ll be a lot happier if I have a stable of such things, so that when a given contract ends and an editor says, “what would you like to do next?,” I have a bunch of little saplings ready to be turned into full-grown trees.
So the thirds are, in adjustable order: Write YA while prepping adult. Write adult while processing YA for publication. Write whatever I feel like while processing adult and prepping YA.
I think that could work. I like the sound of it, anyway, because it allows me to keep up a book-a-year schedule in both fields while still having some time for work-fun.
We’ll see what happens when I try to put this into practice.
I’m late posting this one because Project Get A Social Life involved going to my first karate class this evening, at the dojo where kniedzw has recently started attending and my future sister-in-law is a black belt/sensei.
So, my schedule on a larger scale. The next thing to talk about is the week. When I’m noveling, there is no “work week;” I write every single day, unless something prevents me from doing so, because if I don’t a) I lose momentum and b) it’ll take me even longer to finish the damn book. This is a schedule that functions pretty well, but it gets depressing on occasion: after two months of writing every single day, I know I have another month or two of that to look forward to before I can take a break. “No time off for good behavior” is how I usually start characterizing it, around about month #3. And that does suck a bit.
When not noveling, my schedule has heretofore been much more sporadic. Write every day, many advice-givers tell you, but the truth is that I don’t. I write a short story when one is sufficiently developed in my head to go, or play around with new novel ideas, but you need to put this all in the context of the academic year; novels were what I did during the summer, and the other nine months I at least tried to make other things my priority. (You may deduce my incomplete success, which is to say increasing failure, by my departure from graduate school.) But if this is my full-time job, then it makes sense to try and be more productive.
I figure, then, that I should make use of this concept of “work week.” Monday through Friday, with weekends off. If I’m not noveling under deadline, then how’s about some relaxation time? I may write on the weekend, of course; see the first F-TWL post for my refusal to apologize for that. But only if I feel like it. Other jobs give people time off, after all. I deserve some, too.
Monday through Friday, though, my goal is to put down at least some words. The daily novel quota is a thousand; I’d like to shoot for five hundred in the downtime, at least to start with. Five hundred a day for two weeks (with weekends off) would give me a decent-sized short story. Higher productivity would be great, but baby steps; I think I’d rather ease into my workload, rather than leaping headfirst for a big target and finding out the hard way that it’s too much. (That’s how I crashed and burned on the first novel I tried to finish, in high school. Not sure how much I was trying to write per day, but it was a lot more than a thousand. No great loss, mind you; that was an apprentice idea, cobbled together before I leveled up and started having ideas worth my time.)
I figure that goal is flexible. If I spend a day revising a story — real revision; not just rearranging the commas — that’s real work, too. So is world-building, if I get on a kick for that. Maybe I don’t need to put down words those days. But I should still try, because when all is said and done, the production of words is the baseline requirement for this job, without which none of the rest of it matters very much.
