daily routine – Page 2 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Summer recap and new goals

So back in June I made a to do list of things I wanted to accomplish this summer. I’ve only got a week left before I go overseas again, and I’m happy to say I’m on track to finish most of them. A couple of them (such as doing a blog tour and submitting aggressively to book bloggers) I decided weren’t worth my time, and dropped them, but these are the major things I’ve accomplished:

Release print-on-demand editions of Genesis Earth, Bringing Stella Home, and Desert Stars through CreateSpace.
Redo cover art for Bringing Stella Home.
Redo blurb/description for all titles.
Put proper copyright page in all titles.
Publish all titles on Kobo Writing Life.
Find a better way to build an ebook and reformat all titles.
Finish the second draft of Stars of Blood and Glory.
Finish and publish parts I and II of Star Wanderers.

The only major thing I haven’t accomplished is figuring out how to sell ebooks directly from my website. I figure I can set that up later, though, when I’ve got a large enough readership to justify it. If it’s all online, I can probably do it from anywhere.

While I was vacationing with my family on Cape Cod, I had a chance to step back and take a long look at what I’m doing with my life, which helped me to set some new goals and get a renewed sense of direction. I stopped tracking my daily writing word counts in July, which threw off my productivity a lot more than I thought it would. After setting some long-term goals, though, I think I can find a better way to structure my writing.

In ten years (2022), I want to…

have 25+ published novels.
earn a solid middle-class income through my writing.
be married and have kids.
own a house.
live in the United States.

My lifetime goal is to publish 100+ novels, which is actually a lot more doable than it sounds. It means writing a minimum of two novels a year, though, so I’m going to have to follow Heinlein’s rules a lot closer than I have been in the past. That’s the trouble with keeping a daily word count: it made me look a lot more productive when I was in revisions, so I spent more time doing that than writing new work.

In three years (2015), I want to…

have at least 10 published novels.
make enough with my writing not to need another job.
be married or engaged.
have lived for at least three months in 3+ countries (not including USA).

I want to settle back down in the States eventually, but before that I want to get around and see the world a bit. The absolute coolest thing would be to marry another world traveler and make enough on the writing to have a bunch of adventures together. I’m not sure if I’ll find her in Georgia, but I’ll be sure to keep my eyes open.

As for short-term goals, I’m still trying to work them out. Here’s what I have so far:

Quarterly Goals:

Start at least 2 new projects.
Finish at least 2 first drafts.
Publish at least 2 titles (print and ebook counts as two).

I think this is enough to stretch me while still being doable. By my count, in the first quarter of this year I did 2-2-1, in the second quarter I did 2-2-0, and in the current quarter, I’m at 2-0-5 so far. Of course, this includes all the Star Wanderers novelettes and novellas, which I hope to expand in the future.

I’m not going to count revisions as progress, except as part of the publishing stage. Some stuff needs a lot of revision, other stuff, not so much. What I really want to do is train myself to produce high quality work on the first or second write-through. Of course, I’ll still use test readers to gauge my work before publishing anything.

Monthly Goals:

Finish at least 2 projects (first draft or revision).
Write at least 15k words of new material.

I can write a lot more than 15k words in a month, of course, but I figure this is a good starting point. The key is that this is for new material. When I looked back at my word counts, I found that months of revision would go by before I actually worked on something new. I want to change that, but I still need to allow for longer projects that might require several weeks of revision (while emphasizing the need to produce new material, of course).

Weekly/Daily Goals:

Keep all project deadlines.
Start each day with writing.

I’ve found that if I don’t start off each day with writing, I keep putting it off until I’ve spent more time and energy angsting about it than actually doing it. For a short period of time this summer, I put my butt in the chair and my hands on the keyboard first thing after waking up (even before getting dressed). It was amazing how much of a difference that made.

Beyond that, I’m not really sure what other goals to set. I want to plan things out on a project to project basis, but beyond that I haven’t yet figured out what kind of a daily structure I need to build.

It’s probably a good idea to keep things flexible at this point, though, since I have no idea what my schedule is going to be like once I’m in Georgia. I do know a little bit about my next placement–more on that later–but for the first half of September, I’m going to be all over the place. Ani, Tusheti, Kars, Akhaltsikhe, Tbilisi, Baghdati, and Istanbul–it’s going to be crazy!

For this next week, my goal is to finish the revisions for Star Wanderers: Sacrifice (Part III) and send that out to my beta readers. I’ve been struggling with it all month, but I think I’ve got a pretty good idea of where I need to go with it. I’m going to finish chapter 3 tomorrow, then rewrite chapters 4 and 5 from scratch.

After that…another Caucasian adventure! 🙂

Managing time and mental space in a foreign country

Some of you asked for a writing update, so I figure I might as well do a quick post on my current projects and where they are. I’ve also been experimenting with my daily schedule a bit, so it would probably be good to blog about that as well.

Right now, the main project taking up all of my attention is the 3.0 draft of Heart of the Nebula. It’s a direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home, and continues the story from James McCoy’s point of view, five years later. I’m making a lot of changes, toning down the romantic subplot and emphasizing the more interesting social and ethical issues. When I’m through, I think it will be completely different from the first couple of drafts, but in a way that’s truer to the spirit of the first book.

I’ve only been managing about 500 to 1,500 words per day, though, which is abysmally low compared to my usual word count. Part of that is because I’m throwing out entire sections and drafting new ones from scratch, but the more significant part is that I don’t have as much mental space for writing as I did back in the States.

Basically, moving to a foreign country and starting a new career has taken a lot more out of me than I thought it would. I teach 18 lessons per week, some with as many as 30 or 35 kids, across grades 1 through 12. Culturally, everything is completely different too. So far, the shock hasn’t been too bad–I really love it out here in Georgia–but it’s made the writing a little bit more difficult than I’d expected.

I have a lot of free time, though, so that’s not a problem: the problem is clearing my mind and keeping the creative juices fresh. Here’s how I’m going to do it:

Limit internet time. As tempting as it is to turn to the familiarity of the internet, it’s a huge time-suck and doesn’t really do anything for the culture shock. A much better thing for that would be to spend more time reading. From now on, I’m going to limit myself to one internet session per day, no longer than 2 hours (more if there’s something I actually need to do).
Get out more. I get cabin fever very easily, and it’s only gotten worse now that I’m in a foreign culture. Fortunately, there are tons of places to explore, and in my local neighborhood I’m kind of a celebrity (hey look, it’s the American! Let’s chase him and shout ‘hello’!). The prime time for this is the late afternoon, when everyone’s out and things are still open. If I check the internet right after school and get out immediately after, I think that will help me better to focus.
Get up early to write in the morning. I tried this last week, and it was a great way to get focused and build more momentum. Even if I only manage a couple hundred word, it gets me thinking about the story for the rest of the day, which makes it easier to pick up in the afternoon and evening.

So that’s the plan for now. My goal is to finish Heart of the Nebula before the end of May, which is going to require a significant change of pace. It should be pretty straightforward, though, and after this draft it shouldn’t need too many more revisions before it’s ready to publish. If all goes well, I foresee a publishing date sometime in the fall or winter.

Do you have any other ideas for ways to manage creativity in a totally foreign culture? If so, I’d love to hear it–that’s my biggest struggle right now.

Writing log results

For the last month or so, I’ve been keeping track of my daily writing habits to look for patterns that might give me some insight on how to improve my creative process. I’ve amassed somewhere around 65 data points, and I think the results are clear enough to notice some trends.

Just some preliminary background information: for most of this time, I’ve either been on vacation or at my parents’ house, waiting to start an English teaching job in another country. I haven’t had school or a full-time job, so my schedule has been pretty open and flexible. Also, the numbers track progress on the first drafts for Star Wanderers and Stars of Blood and Glory, and do not count revisions of any kind.

Here are the results:

The first graph plots word count by duration spent writing. As you can see, there’s a definite trend: the longer I write, the more I tend to write. No surprises there. Most writing sessions are somewhere between 45 and 90 minutes, or 500 and 1,500 words.

The second graph plots the average writing rate (in words per hour) per session by hours spent writing, and it’s a little bit murkier. In writing sessions of less than 45 minutes, I tend to average a little over 1000 words/hour, but things get murkier between 45 and 90 minutes, and after 90 minutes, I tend to be around 600 and 800 words/hour.

The overall trend appears to be down–that is, the longer I write, the slower I tend to write–but there appears to be a counter-trend, too, where if I start off slow I can increase the pace by writing for a longer amount of time. Is that true, or is that simply a sharper downward trend line?

I think it’s a genuine counter-trend, and here’s why:

This graph shows writing rate plotted against word count, and it pretty clearly shows two trend lines: one starting at 1,000 to 1,200 words/hour and going slightly down, the other starting at 400 to 600 words and going up. At about 1,500 total words, they converge at around 800 words/hour and appear to remain flat, though there isn’t really enough data to be able to say.

What I think this shows is that I have two different writing styles. The first is to start off slow and gradually write my way into the story, picking up the pace but never really going over 800 words/hour. The other is to start off at a sprint of 1,200 words/hour or so, but to slowly drop off to 800 words/hour at around 90 minutes or 1,500 words.

The next graph plots the total word count of each writing session by the time of day in which I started the session. Interestingly, there is no trend; the points are all over the map. This tells me that there is no “best time” for me to write. Other time-related factors might influence how much I can write, but time of day itself does not.

A quick glance at the next graph confirms this. It plots writing rate by time of day, and the results are much the same as the graph for word count. I tend to write at a more consistent pace in the afternoon–around 1,000 words/hour–but really, there is no consistent trend.

This tells me that my first session of the day tends to be slow and gradual, but that once I’ve written myself into the story, the writing comes a lot faster. In other words, if I wake up early and hit the ground running, I tend to write more and write faster throughout the day. If I get lazy and sleep in, the whole day tends to be shot.

The last two graphs plot word count and writing rate by date. Before January 3rd or so, I was either spending time with family or on the road / traveling cross-country by train. Even so, there wasn’t a whole lot of variation, though my writing rate converged around 800-1,000 words/hour for a while before fluctuating again.

What this tells me is that stability and momentum tend to lead to more consistency in my writing habits. If I’m constantly on the road, it becomes more challenging to keep up the pace. Even so, as long as I can ~~find~~ make at least 45 to 90 minutes to write, I can pound out about the same number of words per session.

So in conclusion, it seems that the best way to improve my writing habits and streamline my creative process would be to:

Get up early and start the day writing.
Write in short, condensed sessions of 45 to 90 minutes each, with periodic breaks in between.
Don’t worry about time of day when planning time to write; just do it whenever time can be made available.

However, unless I can get to the point where I’m regularly averaging +1,000 words after two hours, it’s going to be really hard to put in 10k words or more per day. At 800 words/hour, it takes 12.5 hours to hit 10k, and after about four or five sessions at 1,000 words/hour, the well starts to dry up.

A much more practical goal, for now at least, would be to shoot for a consistent 5k words per day. The week before last, I hit about 5.5k on Monday, a little less than 4k on Tuesday and Wednesday, and back around 2.5k for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. My running 7-day total for the entire week was above 20k, which is pretty good, but if I could get to stay between 25k and 30k for some time, that would be an accomplishment.

I haven’t totally given up on hitting a 10k/day average, but at this point, it seems that I need to set some stepping stones first. 5k/day seems like a much better goal for now–especially since I don’t know how things are going to change once I’m traveling again. But at least I have a better idea of how my own process works. I expect I’ll be writing a lot more in the weeks and months to come!

Writing Resolutions for 2012

As I write this post, I’m riding on the California Zephyr through western Colorado, going to my parents’ house in Massachusetts before heading out overseas on an adventure that I have no idea where it will take me before the end of the year. It’s an interesting time to make New Year’s resolutions, because so much is up in the air at this point, but two things are for certain: I will continue to write, and I will continue to publish.

A lot has changed for me since 2010. Around this time last year, I was still in query-writing mode, looking for an agent, and getting a little desperate for work. I eventually found work at an alarm company, which lasted through the summer until I realized it wasn’t helping me advance towards my long-term goals. And as for the query-go-round, I made the tremendous paradigm shift into indie publishing around the same time, eventually publishing three novels, three short stories, and one novella. Sales haven’t been spectacular, but they have been earning me a trickle of money that amounts to a few hundred dollars by now. Not quite a living yet, but if I keep at it, it might just become that.

My dream since 2009 has been to make a full-time living telling stories that I love. With all the opportunities made possible through ebooks and indie publishing, I have great hopes of accomplishing that within the next few years. However, I do think it’s going to take time, which is why I’ve decided to go abroad to teach English for a while. It’s the perfect kind of career for young people going through a transitional time in their lives, and I think I’ll find it a lot more enriching than bouncing around dead-end warehouse jobs until the writing starts to take off.

I can’t foresee exactly where this path will take me, but I can take accountability for the things within my control. So with that in mind, here are my resolutions:

1: Independently Publish At Least Two Books in 2012.

This shouldn’t be too hard. Journey to Jordan is already in the queue; all I have to do is make a final self-editing pass and figure out how to insert the photos. Besides that, I have the direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home, Heart of the Nebula, which I should be able to revise, polish, and publish before the end of the year, perhaps as early as summer.

Besides these projects, though, the queue is conspicuously empty, which is why I’ve come up with the following resolution:

2: Constantly Work on Producing New Material.

This is a big one–in the past, I’ve taken time off from new projects to work on major revisions, and as I mentioned in this post, it’s slowed me down a lot more than I would like. I’ve never been able to juggle two projects for more than a week, but this is a skill I should probably learn if I’m going to do this professionally.

I hesitate to put a concrete number like “four completed novel drafts before 2013” because this is an aspect of my writing process that I still need to explore. If I peg myself to a number, I could as easily find that I’ve set it too low as that I’ve set it too high. The important thing at this point is to learn the self-discipline.

3: Read and Review a New Book Every Week.

This is a tricky goal that I’ve tried and failed at before, but I really feel that reading voraciously is going to help my writing more at this point than working on craft or attending conventions. Those are good too, of course, but there’s something about reading and analyzing other works, both inside and outside of your chosen genre. I’ve been slacking off on this a lot lately, and if I’m not careful, my writing will get worse because of it.

With my Kindle ereader and low-priced ebooks, I have a lot of reason to be optimistic about this goal, even though I’ll be on the go for most of the year. It’s like having an iPod for books–and with the sampling system, I don’t have to worry so much about whether or not it’s worth buying the book. Simply download the free sample, and if I’m still interested by the end, click and continue.

4: Experience at Least Three 10k Days.

This ambitious resolution comes from a post I wrote earlier in reaction to this post here. Basically, I want to boost my productivity and break through some mental barriers that have been in place for the past few years, and pushing myself to do a couple 10k sprints will hopefully help to reset my stride at a much higher rate.

At first, I was going to say “three consecutive 10k days,” but with all the uncertainty accompanying my travels and new TEFL career, that doesn’t seem like a good idea at this point. If/when I’ve saved up enough money to take a few months off from everything else, then I’ll set a goal like that.

5: Attempt to Write a Novel in a Week.

This is more of something I want to do for fun, just to see if I can. Apparently, Michael Moorcock used to write novels in three days, and while I’d like to try that too, a week seems like a more realistic goal. At 40,000 to 50,000 words minimum, I don’t even have to break 10k/day to do it. 🙂

So those are my writing resolutions for the next year. As always, I’ll continue to write for this blog, hopefully with a lot more book reviews in the coming months. In the meantime, though, this post is getting long, and I’d better get back to writing.

Happy New Year everyone! Here’s to 2012 and all the possibility it brings!

Am I swamped, or am I lazy?

This post might get a little emo, so I apologize in advance.

I feel like I have so much on my plate right now, and yet when I look back at what I’ve accomplished each day, I wonder if I couldn’t have been more productive. I’m moving out of my apartment on the 21st, so that’s the deadline for pretty much everything, and here’s what I’ve got to do before then:

Run through the copy edits for Desert Stars and rewrite the epilogue.
Get the cover art and publish Desert Stars.
Write the epilogue for Journey to Jordan and publish it.
Finish Star Wanderers and submit to Writers of the Future.
Do a guest post for Slava Heretz.
Finish the application for the TLG program.
Get rid of all my remaining books.
Figure out electronic W2 and other forms for taxes (before leaving in January).
Write up the “About My Books” page on blog.
Do a couple of recap posts on the travel blog.
Pack and ship my desktop computer.
Pack all my remaining stuff.
Get post office to forward all mail to home address.
Clean apartment for move-out inspection.
Find suitable traveler’s insurance.
Go clothes shopping.
Half a dozen other things that I’m sure I’ve forgotten.

In other words, this is not the time to be playing minecraft.

And yet, taken individually, most of these tasks are not all that difficult. A lot of them are just mindless chores associated with moving, and the other ones, while requiring hard work, are pretty straightforward. So am I really swamped, or am I just disorganized and lazy?

This is something I’ve struggled with since graduating last year. When I was in school, I was constantly busy, but I was also constantly producing. Even though my writing suffered a bit when I was swamped, I still found time to write three novels (Ashes of the Starry Sea, Genesis Earth, and Bringing Stella Home) and hold down a student job. For the last year, I haven’t had any school and most of the time I haven’t had a job, and yet my productivity doesn’t seem to have improved.

Part of it has to do with structuring time and organizing myself. In the past year, I’ve learned that a routine isn’t something you should hang onto doggedly, but something you need to constantly reinvent. And yet, when I’m staying up until 2am-3am and not getting up until 8am-9am, I can’t help but feel that something’s off. The whole moving limbo thing certainly doesn’t help, but hey, the work’s still got to be done.

Maybe it’s just deer in the headlights syndrome. I’ll try making a checklist of everything I want to accomplish in the next two weeks and go for it. In the meantime, I’m going to get out of this apartment and take a walk, because if I don’t, I’m going to go insane.

Also, as a token of gratitude for putting up with my babbling, here’s something cool I made the other day:

See you around!

Still alive

This post is just to let you know that I’m still alive, that I haven’t gone anywhere, and that I’m still writing.

I’ve been a little disorganized recently, with job obligations (this is my last week), a TEFL course to finish, and other stuff…can’t quite remember what other stuff, but I’m sure there was something.

Anyhow.

Point is, things have been upside down recently, but I plan on posting more frequently once I fall back into a routine. Here’s what I hope to blog about:

Blog awards: I recently got tagged by two of my blogging friends, so I’ll be passing those on.
My solo hike up Y Mountain last Saturday. Expect to see this soon, with some pictures.
Thoughts on dreams and dream interpretation. I had a really interesting experience with this recently.
Update on Star Wanderers; I hope to finish draft 2 in a couple days and send it out to alpha readers.
“Does it ever bother you to do bad things to your characters?” A question I got recently, which is a blog post just begging to be written.

Also, I’m putting together a blog tour right now for Bringing Stella Home and Sholpan, so if you’d like to have me on as a guest blogger, feel free to shoot me an email at joseph dot vasicek at gmail dot com.

In the meantime, this might interest you: I wrote a poem Sunday based on a first line I got from work. My coworkers were talking about dating, saying how they were going through a drought, and I replied with “my life is a drought, and my soul is a desert.” Great first line, huh? 🙂 If you want to read the poem, you can find it on my deviant art page here.

Other than that, there’s not much else to say. My daily routine is all shot to @#$! right now, but that’s what happens when you’re a freelancer; you’re productive for a while, until projects and schedules change, then you go through a period of chaos until you fall back into a productive routine. All a part of the lifestyle.

And now, in order to promote a more healthy lifestyle, I’m going to go to bed. G’night, interwebs. Be good.

Craving another retreat

Last night, I got together with an old friend from last year and went camping down in Sanpete county, in the Manti-Lasal National Forest. Even though I didn’t get a whole lot of writing done, it was a much needed change of scenery.

Man, southern Utah is so different from the Salt Lake and Utah valleys. More rural, more laid back, more of a back-country attitude but not in a California kind of way…I don’t know if that makes any sense, but I like it out there. It feels like the kind of place you’d pass through on a road trip, that mystic old-time Americana that always feels like it’s just out of reach. Part of me wants to settle down in a place like that someday, while the other part doesn’t want to settle down ever.

Spending time away like that gives you a renewed perspective. I wouldn’t say that I feel more “centered” now, but getting out in the wilderness certainly made me see the daily grind here in Provo a little differently. It’s so easy to get caught up in a routine, where the weeks and months go by until suddenly it’s summer again and you don’t know where the last year went. Unless you take the time to step back, you can never get perspective.

Unfortunately, in order to save up for Worldcon this August, I’m going to need to work 40 hours per week almost right up to the convention weekend itself. I’m not complaining; I feel blessed to have a steady source of income right now, especially in this economy. But as a writer, it’s hard when your job takes so much time and energy away from your writing time.

Lately, I’ve only been spending two or three hours a day writing, and a lot of that time is filled with interruptions. Part of it is just procrastination, but another part is that my day is so split up that the only periods of unbroken free time are from 9 pm to 8 am. That’s tough, because I need a big chunk of writing time to do my best work.

Even though I’ve been making decent progress on Desert Stars, I feel like I could be doing so much more. If I could take a week off for a retreat where I did nothing but focused on my writing, I could probably finish this draft in a matter of days, with time to start a bunch of new projects. In fact, I already have about a half dozen stories in embryo, with scenes and characters just begging to be written. Once this latest project is finished, I don’t quite know what I’ll be starting next.

Since I should be writing right now instead of posting to this blog, I’ll wrap up by saying that I really wish I could take some time off for another retreat, this time to focus solely on my writing. But since I can’t, I’ll do my best to carve away large periods of unbroken time for writing, and unplugging myself from distractions both online and off in order to make the most of it.

It’s a difficult balance, one that’s a constant struggle to maintain. Right now, I feel like I’m on the losing side of the battle, which means it’s time for a change of routine. Thankfully, taking some time off in the wilderness has helped me to better see what I need to do. I only hope I can maintain that perspective in order to break out of this stifling routine.

<sigh> One of these days, when writing is my primary source of income, this will not be nearly so difficult of a problem. You have no idea how much I want to make that happen. In the meantime, back to work.

The blog tour rolls on

I’m writing this post from Leading Edge (the internet is down at my apartment), so I don’t have much time, but I did want to take care of a few items of housekeeping.

First, my next guest post in the Genesis Earth blog tour is up, this one at Charles Millhouse’s blog. Charles is a fellow sf writer whom I met on the Kindleboards, and the post basically explains my writing routine since last year. Of course, since I’ve technically been unemployed since graduation, my routine is a little wacky, but I think you’ll find the post interesting. Check it out!

Desert Stars is coming along. I took yesterday off to finish drafting the revision notes, but I’ve still got the last three chapters to go. It’s going to be awesome, though–I’ve got so many ideas for how to improve the story. Many thanks to all my first readers for your feedback! It’s been immensely helpful.

Also, I decided to take down “From the Ice Incarnate” from Amazon. I still think it’s a good story, but I don’t want someone to buy Genesis Earth, love it, then buy the story and feel ripped off. Also, I think I might have more luck with my short stories if I send them out to print markets instead. I’ve submitted “Decision LZ1527” to Escape Pod; if it sells, hopefully that will drive readers to my ebooks.

And on that note, if you’ve read Genesis Earth and enjoyed it, I would like to ask you to please post a review on Amazon. I don’t want to be one of those guys who secretly boosts his stats by coercing people to write fake reviews, but if you did enjoy the novel, I would appreciate it a ton if you would take the time and share your experience. At this point in my career, that’s probably the thing that would help me out the most.

So anyways, that’s what’s going on here. Hopefully, the internet will be back before the weekend. See you around!

Spinning out

Just a quick post before I go to bed…and I really should, because it’s freaking late.

I feel like I’ve been getting more and more busy, yet less and less productive. It’s @%$! frustrating. In the last two weeks, I’ve had numerous job applications and interviews (though not as many interviews as I’d like), tons of complicated paperwork for the EPIK job in Korea I’m hoping to take come September, the only TEFL course I’m taking (in which I feel I am constantly behind), and all sorts of other random crap.

Oh, and then there’s writing. I’ve been averaging only about 1.5k words per day, which is kind of pathetic when you realize that I don’t have regular work.

I wish I could say that I’ve been spending a lot of this extra time socializing, but sadly that isn’t the case. I haven’t gone out on a date in months, and with each passing week I drift further and further from the people in my ward. I’ve been pretty active with Quark, though, so that sort of makes up for things, but not enough.

One of the good things, though, is that I’ve been getting up relatively early all week–and by “relatively,” I mean before 9:00 am. Next week’s goal: go to bed by 1:00, and get up before 8:00. The timestamp on this post can probably tell you how much of a head start I’ve got.

Oh, and I have been exercising regularly. That’s a good thing, I suppose. Haven’t seen many results of that, except perhaps a slightly more active lifestyle, but it’s fun and I’ll keep it up. Running is where I catch up on old podcasts, and I subscribe to quite a few.

I don’t know if this late night rant is useful in any way, except maybe to empathize with what it’s like when you’re busy all the time but never feel like you’re getting enough done. I guess most people feel like that at one point or another, but it’s good to look back and see what you accomplished, like I did here. For all the spinning out, I suppose it wasn’t a total wash. And really, it almost never is.

But yeah, the main thing that makes me angsty is that I never feel that I’m writing enough. I hear from everyone that with the way the publishing world is changing, fast writers have a huge advantage over slow ones. And I know I have the ability to write fast, it’s just that I never really do it consistently.

Fast, in my mind, is 4k words or more per day. I can hit it when I’m on, but that’s fairly rare. Most of the time, I average between 2k and 2.5k, and my personal deadlines reflect that.

At least with ITND, however, I’ve been writing consistently every day…except today, when I took time off to revamp a short story (“From the Ice Incarnate”). But my wordcount graph hasn’t had any huge spikes or valleys, which is good I suppose. The novel is coming along, if slowly, and that’s a good sign.

Anyhow, enough of this rant. Time for bed.

Out of it

Man, I feel like I’ve been so out of it recently. I’ve been getting up around 9 am or 10 am every day, going to bed every night around 2 am or 3 am, and running around so much that I hardly seem to have time to write. Life is good, and between plasma and phone book deliveries I’m earning enough to get by, but my days are very unstructured and that’s not good for my writing.

So here’s what I need: a stable job that facilitates my writing. For the past year, I’ve been working random odd jobs and temporary jobs, and while they pay enough to get by (just barely), the variability and lack of long-term security is just too much to juggle on top of writing. I’ve got to find something else.

Trouble is, I’m afraid that if I settle for a dead end job, it’ll put such a stigma on me that I won’t be able to get a better job later if the writing career doesn’t take off. I’m pretty confident that I’ll eventually be able to make a living off my writing, but I don’t know how late or how soon that’s going to happen. The last thing I want is to end up as a wage-slave without a future.

Anyway, despite the lack of daily structure, I really love the flexibility that this phone book delivery job is giving me. Pay is on a per route basis (like newspaper delivery), and the supervisor is really awesome and easy to work with.

If I want, I can take the mornings easy, do personal chores for a while, deliver a couple hundred phone books and write in the evenings. That’s basically what I’ve been doing these past three weeks.

I really hate going to bed and waking up late, though. That’s not sustainable. If I come to my writing only at the very end of the day, it’s going to be a wash. I might get a thousand words in, but if I’m not consistently crossing the 2.5k threshold every day, my heart really just isn’t in to it.

In any case, WAFH 2.0 is coming along fairly well. I’ve got a good idea where I want the story to go, and the characters seem to be working out. Also, I think I’ve found my big reason for wanting to write this story–I’ll write more about that in a later post.

This next draft isn’t going to be perfect, but hopefully I can get rid of all the major story problems (and there are a TON of major story problems!). I suppose my goal at this point is to make it good enough to send out to my first readers. The rough draft is so full of crap, I wouldn’t let anyone read it if they paid me. Blegh!

Also, I know it’s only been a month, but I think I’m going to do another cover to cover revision of Mercenary Savior in the next few weeks. I really want to get it polished enough to start sending it out–preferably by the end of the holidays–so that’s probably going to take priority. If it goes as fast as Genesis Earth 5.0, I should have the entire manuscript done in about three or four weeks.

And another thing–I’m going to set a new goal: submit at least one thing to an agent/editor every week. Right now, I tend to go on splurges where I’ll send out half a dozen queries, then sit around for a month without really doing much to try to break in. I feel like I need to be more consistent on that front, because submitting is definitely one of my greatest weaknesses. They say everything comes better with practice, so I might as well send stuff out more regularly.

Anyhow, that’s how things are going right now–disjointed and all over the place, but somehow things still get done. I just wish I could get more done, but who doesn’t? Anyhow, there’s always next week–may it be better than the last.