{"id":3585,"date":"2010-12-18T04:54:29","date_gmt":"2010-12-18T09:54:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=3585"},"modified":"2010-12-18T04:54:29","modified_gmt":"2010-12-18T09:54:29","slug":"out-of-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/out-of-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Out of it"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Man, I feel like I&#8217;ve been so out of it recently.\u00a0 I&#8217;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.\u00a0 Life is good, and between plasma and phone book deliveries I&#8217;m earning enough to get by, but my days are very unstructured and that&#8217;s not good for my writing.<\/p>\n<p>So here&#8217;s what I need: a stable job that facilitates my writing.\u00a0 For the past year, I&#8217;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.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve got to find something else.<\/p>\n<p>Trouble is, I&#8217;m afraid that if I settle for a dead end job, it&#8217;ll put such a stigma on me that I won&#8217;t be able to get a better job later if the writing career doesn&#8217;t take off.\u00a0 I&#8217;m pretty confident that I&#8217;ll eventually be able to make a living off my writing, but I don&#8217;t know how late or how soon that&#8217;s going to happen.\u00a0 The last thing I want is to end up as a wage-slave without a future.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, despite the lack of daily structure, I really love the flexibility that this phone book delivery job is giving me.\u00a0 Pay is on a per route basis (like newspaper delivery), and the supervisor is really awesome and easy to work with.<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0 That&#8217;s basically what I&#8217;ve been doing these past three weeks.<\/p>\n<p>I really hate going to bed and waking up late, though.\u00a0 That&#8217;s not sustainable.\u00a0 If I come to my writing only at the very end of the day, it&#8217;s going to be a wash.\u00a0 I might get a thousand words in, but if I&#8217;m not consistently crossing the 2.5k threshold every day, my heart really just isn&#8217;t in to it.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, WAFH 2.0 is coming along fairly well.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve got a good idea where I want the story to go, and the characters seem to be working out.\u00a0 Also, I think I&#8217;ve found my big reason for wanting to write this story&#8211;I&#8217;ll write more about that in a later post.<\/p>\n<p>This next draft isn&#8217;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!).\u00a0 I suppose my goal at this point is to make it good enough to send out to my first readers.\u00a0 The rough draft is so full of crap, I wouldn&#8217;t let anyone read it if they paid me.\u00a0 Blegh!<\/p>\n<p>Also, I know it&#8217;s only been a month, but I think I&#8217;m going to do another cover to cover revision of <em>Mercenary Savior<\/em> in the next few weeks.\u00a0 I <strong>really<\/strong> want to get it polished enough to start sending it out&#8211;preferably by the end of the holidays&#8211;so that&#8217;s probably going to take priority. If it goes as fast as <em>Genesis Earth 5.0<\/em>, I should have the entire manuscript done in about three or four weeks.<\/p>\n<p>And another thing&#8211;I&#8217;m going to set a new goal: <strong>submit at least one thing to an agent\/editor every week<\/strong>.\u00a0 Right now, I tend to go on splurges where I&#8217;ll send out half a dozen queries, then sit around for a month without really doing much to try to break in.\u00a0 I feel like I need to be more consistent on that front, because submitting is definitely one of my greatest weaknesses.\u00a0 They say everything comes better with practice, so I might as well send stuff out more regularly.<\/p>\n<p>Anyhow, that&#8217;s how things are going right now&#8211;disjointed and all over the place, but somehow things still get done.\u00a0 I just wish I could get more done, but who doesn&#8217;t?\u00a0 Anyhow, there&#8217;s always next week&#8211;may it be better than the last.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Man, I feel like I&#8217;ve been so out of it recently.\u00a0 I&#8217;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.\u00a0 Life is good, and between plasma and&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/out-of-it\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Out of it<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[68,44,32],"tags":[89,120,88,42,46,147,156,155,312],"class_list":["post-3585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bsh","category-ds","category-ge","tag-career-decisions","tag-daily-routine","tag-doubts-and-fears","tag-frustrations","tag-goals-and-plans","tag-momentum","tag-revising","tag-rough-drafts","tag-work","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-VP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3585"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3593,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3585\/revisions\/3593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}