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December meme - An average day
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madripoor_rose asked me about an average day in my life.To start off with, I quit my job back in 2009. Up to that point, I ran the layout department of the local paper, and I was good at it. But my husband also had a good job, and we were in a very stable living situation with no kids or plans to have kids, so I thought this might be the best opportunity I'd ever have to pursue some of my non-job-related goals, such as finishing my college degree and trying to make a stab at making a living as an author.
So I quit my job. I got my degree, and I have spent the last few years writing, doing freelance graphic design, and generally sort of limping along towards my eventual published-novelist goal. This fall I decided to take some more classes at the university, because I get free tuition from my husband's job and there are some things I really wanted to take classes in. (I wanted to learn a foreign language, and I wanted to study archaeology.) Also, I unloaded most of my freelance clients with the idea of opening up more time for writing -- it's pointless to quit one job only to become so busy with another one that there's no time for what I really wanted to do -- except the writing is not proceeding at a particularly efficient pace so now I'm just kind of ... unemployed. :P
Anyway, due to all of this, my days really vary a lot. I tend to be a night owl, staying up 'til well after midnight in most cases and then sleeping 'til 9 or 10. (Or *cough* even later.) I still tend to get up before my husband, who is currently on sabbatical (it's a "staybatical") and is embracing HIS inner night owl as well. We are a terrible influence on each other.
In the winter, the first thing that needs doing when I get up is to go out and feed the boiler. Our house is heated by an outside boiler that burns coal and wood. The damn thing is an environmental disaster; it's messy, it's a pain in the butt, and in REALLY cold weather you have to get up and feed it in the middle of the night. Someday, when we can afford it, we plan to replace it. But in the meantime, it's the heating system we have, so generally this means dragging myself out of my warm bed to throw an old coat over my bathrobe, shove my bare feet into snow boots, look both ways for moose before crossing the yard (seriously!) and then go over to the boiler shed, rake out the ashes and throw a bucket or two of coal into the firebox so that we can get some heat.
What happens next depends on what I have to do that day. Most days I'll be tethered to my computer for most of the day. This morning, I got up, made myself a cup of tea, and launched straight into writing, because I had been plotting a short story in my head while I was waking up, so I just wrote (*checks*) about 1200 words or so. Now I am, as you can see, goofing off on the Internet for a while. Then I will have lunch, and then I will drive into town to pick up the few things that we still need for Christmas dinner. (It's a 10-mile drive on the highway to Fairbanks, so I don't go into town every day. Actually, when I wasn't going to school, I would go into town maybe once a week for errands. I try to occasionally get out and see people to keep from being a total shut-in -- lunch dates with friends in town; going over to visit with my cousin and her daughter -- but the vast majority of my time was, and is, spent at home.)
Oh, and because we've had some snow lately, we will need to warm up the plow truck today and plow our half mile of driveway. Last winter I did most of the plowing because I was home all the time (and I wanted to learn how). My husband is doing most of it now because he actually likes it. Once his sabbatical's over, it'll probably be back to me again. Whee.
... so basically, yeah, that's it. My days are a very self-directed blend of writing, socializing online, and working on whatever commitments I currently have in other areas (freelance or commissions if I have any; preparing for craft shows or signings for my self-published graphic novels if I have any of that; sending out short story submissions; and so forth). One of my goals for the upcoming year is to try to get a little more structure in my day, because I think I'd probably do better at achieving ALL of my goals if my days were more structured (and if I got up earlier, for pete's sake), but I am not an organized person by nature.
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(Also, if you're ever in the market for an accountability buddy, I'm just recently trying out this "working from home and opening up time to write" thing, as well. It's more complicated than it looks.)
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stealglean useful ideas!Thus far, I have found that for me, strict time-budgeting of the "you will get up at 8 a.m. and write for 2 hours" or "you cannot have lunch until you finish this project" variety doesn't work AT ALL, except maybe in the extreme short term for pressing deadlines. On the other hand, goal-oriented planning works pretty well for me -- that is, "I will write a story for X anthology this week" or "I will revise X novel by the end of this month". I make creative "to do" lists as locked posts in my LJ. They started as a way of keeping all my deadlines in one place, and used to be more or less at random intervals, but then I started doing one each month and have kept that up regularly for a couple of years. However, I found that I was carrying so many things forward from one "to do" list to the next that I ended up doing an "August to end of year" to-do list this fall and was pretty happy with the results, so I might do them quarterly next year. I usually have these broken down into fannish stuff (deadlines for ficathons, my h/c bingo card, etc), and several different categories of original stuff: anthologies to write for, stories to revise, etc.
... actually I just realized a picture is worth a thousand words, so I made my last to-do list accessible so you can see what they look like. The exact organization of the list depends on what I'm working on; sometimes there will be different headers for different things, but mostly it's a way of keeping my due dates accessible along with other little notes like where I might want to submit a particular story -- really just a braindump of "stuff to write, deadlines and associated notes" in convenient list form. :) There's always more stuff on there than I can do, but it helps with the times when I'm sitting around going "but what shall I wriiiiiite ...." (Not that I don't still have those times.)
As far as the publishing & promotion side of things, I am really struggling with that right now. Actually, one of the big items on my 2014 to-do list is "Make a business/online-marketing plan". I am flailing about where to focus my efforts. I'm also straddling the self-publishing/traditional publishing divide very awkwardly right now, with some self-published stuff and some small-press stuff and no real idea of how to tie it all together. If you get in a mood for tossing back and forth some ideas, I am always up for a conversation like that; I think what I really need to do is sit down and make a list of how other people do it, and how they make it work, and then figure out how I can apply that to myself. I think at least some of the problems I'm having right now are down not to lack of skill, but to poor organization and promotion.
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And yeah; something that I'm really fascinated by is the psychology of motivation/habits/discipline, because I really like the idea of being able to hack myself to get things done. There are a couple of bloggers who spend a lot of time going over it – Ramit Sethi at I Will Teach You To Be Rich started off doing a solid financial blog but has expanded more and more into psychology as time's gone by, and Luc Reid writes a lot on the topic specifically from a writer's perspective.
One of the most effective things I've found for myself is habit chaining – that is, if I can find something that I do every day anyway, building behaviors off of that provides me with this nice, easy framework. Frex, I'm in the process of building up a morning wakeup routine. (I actually had one in place, and then we had a houseguest over the Thanksgiving holiday and it go smashed all to hell, but oh well, I can re-establish it.) Basically, it started with:
* Every day, I know I'm going to wake up and get out of bed.
From there, I built on with:
* Every day, having woken up and gotten out of bed, I then make my bed.
(This is actually kinda huge for me, and something Unfuck Your Habitat really got me doing consistently. I never used to make my bed. Now, I do it pretty much without thinking about it.)
Once I had the bed-making in place, I added on with:
* Every day, having woken up, gotten out of bed, and made my bed, I then cook myself breakfast.
(Also kinda huge. For a long time, I just wouldn't eat breakfast because I was never hungry until sometime around noon.)
At its peak, my morning routine looked something like: [Get up => Make bed => Bathroom => Cook and eat breakfast => Wash dishes => Meditate for 5 minutes => Write for 25 minutes to an hour => Light exercise => Get dressed]. Right at the moment, it looks more like [Get up => Make bed => Bathroom => Cook and eat breakfast => Wash dishes => ...oh look the internet is here], but I've still got that [Get up] seed there that I can chain behaviors onto.
[On the other hand, goal-oriented planning works pretty well for me -- that is, "I will write a story for X anthology this week" or "I will revise X novel by the end of this month".]
Interesting! ...that sort of planning almost never works for me in the long term, for all that I really like to-do lists in the short term. (Sitting down every night before bed or every morning before I get to the main part of my day and writing a "Most Important Things To Get Done" list has been really helpful for me, in the past.) I like crossing things off, but I find that I... really don't like to-do lists that are cluttered with crossed-off things. To the point where I'll re-write to-do lists after a couple of days just to condense them down into yet-to-be-done lists. ...I'm not sure why that is.
Currently, my to-do lists are on a couple of whiteboards: a 8.5"x11" sticky whiteboard sheet that's on the door to my desk's cubby, where I track the things I want to do that day, and a wall-mounted whiteboard on the other side of my room (but still visible from my desk, if I turn and look) where I can put things that I Must Not Forget. (Like Yuletide.) I can also write the rough order of fiction projects that I want to focus on, on that one, and use the rest of the space to do brainstorming or rough outlining to get me through hard patches.
(I actually got that whiteboard so that I could practice coding by hand for tech interviews. Working out problems in Java or whatever language you're interviewing for on a freaking whiteboard is a pretty common practice in interviews, which is frustrating, because it's... very unnatural. And then I decided to take a break from interviewing and work on writing and skill development for a while, so the whiteboard got repurposed.)
[There's always more stuff on there than I can do, but it helps with the times when I'm sitting around going "but what shall I wriiiiiite ...."]
Hee! I have so many folders full of half-full everything; so far, my approach to the "what shall I write?" quandary has just been... poking through them. Which is not conducive to actually finishing any single work. I have started trying (on my big whiteboard) to prioritize projects so I can make sure to work on them at least a little bit on any given day, though; I was able to finish one fic recently just because I used my 25-minute habit-chain writing on it exclusively, and only let myself write other things outside of that space. Which seemed to be a workable strategy: I sat down, didn't have the internet or any other programs open, and focused on the work. If I didn't know what to write, I had to brainstorm what to write. But for those 25 minutes, I had to be engaged with the story.
[I am flailing about where to focus my efforts. I'm also straddling the self-publishing/traditional publishing divide very awkwardly right now, with some self-published stuff and some small-press stuff and no real idea of how to tie it all together.]
Man, I am always up for tossing ideas back and forth, just because publishing fascinates me.
I feel like I have a pretty good grounding on how to handle speculative short fiction, because I've been sending it out to magazines for long enough that I know how that goes. (I've also been published enough that occasionally editors will ask if I have any new work to show them, which makes me feel warm and fuzzy. And gives me a good kick in the rear as to getting stuff finished and sent out.) Venturing outside of short spec, though, things get interesting.
One of the things I really want to check out in the new year is Patreon, because it seems to be designed to support a different type of writing. Really, it reminds me of something you could use in a fandom-y sort of way: taking prompts from people, asking what people really want to see, and responding to needs on a very personal basis. I'm thinking it would be really cool to serialize longer fictions through the platform, or possibly use it as a place to put out fiction which might not be terribly polished but is more aimed toward Letting People Have Fun. ...it's not something I see as really replacing traditional publishing; more supplementing it.
One of the things I really like about (many/most) pro specfic markets and the platforms like Patreon is that it lets me keep fiction free-to-read online, which is a minor ideological crusade of mine. (Not so much that people shouldn't pay for fiction, but that if at all possible I would like to get paid for fiction and have it available for everyone to read. This can be accomplished in a bunch of different ways, and I like that that's the case.) Novels are a thing that I don't have a lot of experience with, but which seem like they'd... buck that pattern.
But yeah. There's that truism about how "It's hard to monetize fame, but it's impossible to monetize obscurity." I feel like the more fiction I have out to let people get a sense of my writing, the more likely I am to find people who enjoy it enough to voluntarily spend money on me.
How to actually engineer an audience, now, that's a different question.
</rambledanse>
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I've never heard of habit chaining, but it sounds really useful! I'm not sure how well it would work for me, because I find it a lot more effective to have an open-ended timeframe to do X number of things rather than scheduling stuff (it's so interesting how differently people's brains work ...), but on the other hand, I think it would be useful for me to develop more discipline at getting myself to do certain things in a timely fashion, so now I'm thinking there might be areas where I could usefully apply that idea. Particularly since there are certain things I want to fit into my schedule, like yoga or some form of exercise, and I haven't yet found a good way to apply myself to doing it every day. Tagging it onto something else that I do every day sounds like a possibility ... and it's one that I hadn't thought of; thank you for explaining the concept, because this sounds like something I might be able to use for certain things.
Publishing & promotion -- ooh, I'll have to check out Patreon! I think what I'm struggling with the most right now is the bewildering array of options out there. There are so many different directions to go, so many possibilities, so many blogging platforms and different modes of fiction delivery. While I'm just starting to get into traditional publishing (and struggling along an uphill road, since my crafting skills are not quite there yet) I actually have quite a lot of stuff out there, and a lot of blogs, and multiple pen names; I'm starting to feel like I'm spreading my effort too thin and would be better served by contracting, figuring out how to sync up everything I've got, and then focusing my efforts on just a few areas. But focus on what? Do I concentrate on Tumblr as my main platform and neglect my LJ? Create a central blog at Wordpress and crosspost? Focus on short fiction, on novels, on webcomics? It all feels so huge and overwhelming to me right now. I'm flittering around between different projects, and I think I'd do better if I could just focus on one or two specific projects and nurture them (a series of novels, a webcomic, an interactive/crowdfunded universe, etc), but how to choose?
Last year as a sort of experiment I created a new pen name for writing small-press romance, and it was so comparatively easy to plan all of this stuff when I didn't have to worry about the baggage of 12 years' worth of half-finished, half-posted projects! I set up a blog-based website for the alias, put in the small list of things I'd published under that name ... bam, done. And romance has its own platforms for cross-promotion, with experienced people who are happy to help walk you through it. Compared to the chaos that my SFF/comics/etc had turned into, it was so simple. But the down side is that I'm essentially starting from square one when I actually have a lot of online-for-free stuff out there that can be used to build a platform on which to launch projects I could get paid for ... if I could just figure out how to integrate all of it without creating chaos! (I'm not trying to keep the romance pen name separate -- I've been shameless about linking them, actually -- but I liked the elegant simplicity of not having a dozen projects all crosslinked with each other.)
There are a few people I've been following who are doing crowdfunded short fiction and seem to be doing okay at it. I'm really intrigued by that model, because it's similar to what you said about Patreon -- a very fannish sort of thing, with prompts and realtime interaction with readers and lots of fiction published online for free. I am very intrigued by the possibilities! But at the same time I'm not sure if I could do it, because I'm not very open about my process; I'm a very hermity kind of writer, and I don't like talking about projects while I'm working on them, which would make that kind of thing hard for me.
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Like I said, I am endlessly fascinated by this stuff. And I love that it's a thing becoming increasingly more backed-up by research. :D
[Publishing & promotion]
Ahhh, I know what you mean. There are so very, very many different models on how to do publishing, and since all this turmoil is relatively recent, there's not that much hard data. Even the standardized stuff hasn't really cleaned out the field much. Which, on the one hand, is great! And on the other hand, it's really overwhelming.
I think one of the best things to fall back on when looking at stuff like this is that getting something 50% or 80% right is a lot better than getting it 0% right by failing to make a decision and never doing it at all. <.< Which is something I'm still trying to ease myself past; making the decision to do something on Patreon was pretty big for me. I have a lot of choice paralysis.
(Actually doing something on Patreon is going to take a bit longer, heh. I have a launch plan, it just involves seeing where my next published short story ends up, and at the moment... I have nothing in submittable shape.)
[if I could just figure out how to integrate all of it without creating chaos!]
Ahahaa, I know this feeling, even though my situation isn't nearly as complicated as yours. That's part of the reason I'm trying to make my website a one-stop shop (or at least a central hub) for most anything; I'd like to be able to pull it all in and let people find whatever they need from one single spot. Because it does all seem disorganized, what with different platforms and markets and types of work.
My website is not very visually interesting, but by god, I will make it a wealth of information. Or something. I still consider it bare-bones at the moment, but my hope is that people will eventually be able to come to my site and find their way to whatever corner of my career they need to get to.
[But at the same time I'm not sure if I could do it, because I'm not very open about my process; I'm a very hermity kind of writer, and I don't like talking about projects while I'm working on them, which would make that kind of thing hard for me.]
Heh. I come for a different corner – I actually really enjoy babbling on about my projects, and then... often don't, at least not in public fora, partially because I want my fics to stand on their own without overmuch context/introduction, and partially because even though I know it's a bit ridiculous, I don't want people stealing my ideas. (Never mind the fact that ideas are, like, 15% of the substance of a piece; execution is so much more important. ...I still kinda want to become respected enough as an editor (and have enough time as an editor) that I can put together an anthology of stories all based on the same 1-3 pitches, just to show how many wildly-different stories can be spun off from a single idea.) (Come to think of it, that might be a really fun fandom fest. And given the inclusive nature of fandom, you wouldn't need an editor going through a slush pile.)
One of the things, though, that excites me about a more-engaged crowdfunding environment is that if you can get a core group of enthusiastic people, you can have an excitement engine that fuels a lot of work – both for yourself and others. I really want to release at least one series under a Creative Commons Commercial Attribution Share-Alike license, meaning that people could write their own stories and sell those if they wanted, so long as they allowed other people to write stories based on those and so on. Or, if I write a novel and people love it, and someone else sets up an Etsy shop full of artifacts from the novel and the clothes the characters wear, that is good for me! People get hyped about it, people get curious about it, and people may check my stuff out! –and at the same time, that's good for them! They get to engage with something they love, and make some money off of it as well!
And I think that sort of fandom interaction, and being able to write drabbles to prompts and make people's day, or being able to commission an artist to do prints or just support an artist who does prints, or just being able to listen to people who go "This is great, but I really wish there was more acknowledgement of this aspect, or this sexuality, or this psychological reality" and being able to write that into a work... those are all aspects of fandom that don't require discussing works in progress, but could still be really valuable to people.
Heck, even just being like some of the newer media sorts like the Night Vale Radio folk, who just put out their work and obviously appreciate their fandom, is a thing that's really valued.
...there was actually a really awesome article on the ways fannish enthusiasm works and doesn't work for content creators in NPR, a bit ago.
But. Yes. There are nine and sixty ways...