For Creative People Who Have to Keep the Bills Paid
I’m not going to lie: 2023 was a rough year.
Though 2023 started off on an optimistic note, and the first half went really well, the second half took a major nosedive as my productivity, organization, and overall mood went WAY down.
So what happened? How did the year spiral downward, how did I handle it, and where does that leave me in 2024?
Let the 2023 reflections begin. Continue reading
I’ve had a rough couple of months because of something REALLY bad that happened back in the fall. At first I wasn’t sure how to talk about it online, or even if I wanted to reveal it because it involved my family. Fortunately, though, the problem’s cooled way down in the past month, and in thinking about what a crazy time it’s been, I decided I wanted to write about it frankly and honestly.
What happened is a long and complicated story, so please bear with me while I explain some intricate details, simplify others, and leave a handful of moments vague to protect some people’s anonymity.
In telling this story, though, I want to share that 1) Sometimes really bad things happen that make it incredibly difficult to do creative work, and 2) Dealing with those problems, and ultimately solving them, is a vital skill.
Here’s the story: Continue reading
June was a busy month for me: I got back into working on my Secret New Novel draft (which won’t be Secret for much longer!), I had a few editing jobs that needed finishing, and I’m *still* unpacking and organizing after my move back in April.
As a result, I realized that I needed a blogging break, and took the last two weeks of June off. For several years now, I’ve been blogging regularly every week with very few weeks missed, but during June, blogging felt less important than the other, more urgent matters demanding my attention.
Of course, the world didn’t come to an end because I didn’t blog for two weeks. Instead, I felt more in control of my workload, and felt like I was prioritizing based on what needed to be done.
Continue reading
Last week, things got pretty fucked.
Okay, to be fair, nothing actually got fucked—I was just REALLY busy juggling different deadlines, appointments, and other commitments that all seemed to fall to the end of April. To make matters worse, I still haven’t entirely unpacked at my new place, so my office and much of the rest of the apartment is still a mass of boxes and piles. This meant that when I needed to find something from those boxes or piles, instead of just reaching over and grabbing it, I needed to search for it, which meant I spent a lot of time searching that could have been been spent on other things (like actually unpacking…) Continue reading
Ever since the birth of this blog I’ve been grappling with how best to avoid electronic distractions, since it comes with the territory of managing a creative life.
In a damning scourge of anti-productivity, the same laptop, smartphone, browser window, and email account that we use to take care of productive work tasks also lead to horrible distractions. How many times have you gone on Facebook to check the spelling of someone’s name and ended up poring through old photos? How many Wikipedia rabbit holes have you wandered down when pausing for a quick fact check? And worst of all, how much time have you burned through watching YouTube videos during work time because the algorithm Continue reading
For the past few years I’ve found myself getting a nasty sinus cold around the first week of April—two years ago after a long day of exploring a cherry blossom park in Joetsu, Japan, and last year when I was preparing the pre-orders for MFA Thesis Novel. And this year, the same thing happened again.
I’d been getting a bit of a sore throat in the mornings and at night for a week or so, but it never lasted long. Last Wednesday, though, I found myself with a bad runny nose that got worse throughout the day, and after crashing hard that night, I woke up the next day too tired to do much of anything.
I write about this in detail not because I want to share a play-by-play of being sick (because not only is that gross, but it’s unnecessary storytelling-wise), but to emphasize that sickesses come up unexpectedly, often at bad times when we have other things going on, creating real repercussions for how we deal with them. Charging forward with your regular routine even when you’re sick is rarely if ever a good choice: not only will you not be at your best and likely make mistakes, Continue reading
I’m at an odd point in my work routine, and thought I’d reflect on why.
On Wednesday, March 1st, I finished Draft 3 of my Secret New Novel, which I started in January and have been working on four days a week (give or take) ever since. This development came after finishing Draft 1 in August and Draft 2 in December, which means I’ve been working continuously on this novel for almost a full year.
I want to let Draft 3 sit a bit before diving back in, so part of my work plan for March involves pausing active novel revisions so I can type up the revisions I’ve already made on to the computer, which I estimate to be a 30-35 hour job. Most of the heavy revisions were in the opening chapters (which thus take longer to retype), and now that those are over with, I’ve settled into a routine of typing out two chapters a day with the goal of finishing by March 17th.
However, typing is different from revising: I like to do it at the end of the workday while listening to music, and it requires a LOT less mental energy than sitting down to actively edit a draft. This means that while I still have a big typing project to work on (in addition to all the other things on my backlog list!), the type of work I’m doing has changed significantly Continue reading
The title says it all: last Wednesday at approximately 11:00am Eastern Standard time, I finished Draft 3 of my Secret New Novel.
This comes after several weeks of careful planning, when I counted out the number of writing days necessary to finish Draft 3 if I edited at the rate of one chapter per day. Though my initial plan was to be finished on Monday, February 27th, some extra difficulties with the final chapters put me behind, so I needed the extra two days to bring the ending up the level I wanted.
The February 27th deadline wasn’t a firm one by any means—it was more of a way to keep myself on track so I could plan the weeks leading up to finishing (which included mostly writing days) and the weeks after I finished (which will include mostly typing days). So, I made sure to build in a few extra days where I could write in the mornings if I needed to.
Draft 3 is REALLY important because it’s the draft I’m going to send to beta readers (basically, readers who’ll take a look at the full novel draft with an eye for giving feedback). It also represents the point where I’ll finally, at long last, reveal what the Secret New Novel is actually about on this blog, which is pretty exciting (stay tuned!). Continue reading
It’s been a while since I updated you on my Secret New Novel progress, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been hard at work.
Back in December I reached a crucial point with my novel: I finished the Second Draft that I started back in August. The Second Draft solved a LOT of the problems that were plaguing the First Draft, which was really rough and full of holes. The Second Draft, in contrast, eliminated some unnecessary scenes, fleshed out a lot of vague ideas, and ironed out some major issues that made the rough First Draft, well, rough.
After finishing the Second Draft I took a two-week break for Christmas and New Years, which I also spent getting caught up on miscellaneous projects, tasks, and cleaning. This was also important because it gave me some space away from the novel and helped me come back to it in January with a fresh perspective.
And that fresh perspective was incredibly helpful. Continue reading
I’m writing this post on Saturday (yeah, I tend to schedule these posts in advance, EPIC SHOCK), where I woke up at my usual time, made breakfast, wrote out a to-do list, and sat down to finish a lot of things I didn’t quite have time for this week, including drafting this post.
Now, just to be clear, I don’t normally work a standard day on the weekend. Usually I use my weekends for seeing friends, reading, doing physical chores, and in general, relaxing and de-stressing from my creative and editing work to put me in a refreshed state of mind for the week.
The problem is, though, that some weeks things get really busy, and taking an entire two days off for a weekend can be incredibly refreshing…but also leave me scrambling with a SUPER busy week where I’m rushing to not only finish the usual things I have to do, but all the things I wanted to do the previous week but didn’t.
And that SUCKS Continue reading
Yesterday was Daylight Savings Time, where everyone in the US turns back their clocks an hour and reverts to Standard Time. While recent bills passed by both the Senate and numerous states suggest it’s likely that our years of changing the clocks are numbered, the tradition is here to stay for at least a while longer. Meanwhile, changing the clocks has gotten me thinking about my sleep schedule, and what sleep habits are best for me as a creative person who makes his own work schedule.
Quick rewind: I spend kind of a lot of time talking about sleep on this blog. One of my most popular posts chronicles what happened when I went to work on two hours of sleep (Spoilers: It sucked), and more recently I’ve realized that spending the time it takes to get enough sleep is a great investment if it means I can use my remaining time productively.
More importantly, when I consider what kind of daily schedule I want to keep, first and foremost is the idea of when I’d like to be getting up and when I’d like to be going to bed Continue reading
When I was in middle school, every once in a while I found myself home on a weekend with too many things to do: I had homework to finish, a school project to start, chores to do, my own projects to organize, and probably a phone call or two to make and a letter to mail. I used to worry about getting all of these things done and would tackle them haphazardly, doing whichever one seemed most urgent, or that I felt like doing at a given moment.
Then I discovered To-Do lists, and everything changed.
Instead of dashing around throughout the day, I’d take a scrap of paper about 5½ inches by 4¼ inches (my family used to tear used pieces of paper into quarters, then use the blank side as notepads) and write down all the things I wanted to do that day, in the approximate order I wanted to do them in. I felt relieved getting all of those tasks out of my head so I didn’t have to think about them anymore, but more importantly, having the list in hand gave me a tangible plan for making my way through the maze of a day when I had so many varied things to do.
Now I’m an adult who also has a lot of varied things to do: some writing-related, some business-related, some housework-related, and some random things Continue reading