Swan Tower

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."

( Read more... )

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.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/EcrRRS)

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. :-P

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/63RY3g)

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.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/C2I2Vk)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.