What Does a Writer's Day Look Like?

You maybe know that I took an unpaid, one-year leave of absence from my college teaching job to write full-time. You maybe even know that I am a ridiculously disciplined, motivated person who wrote 2-3 books a year while teaching full-time and raising two kids. Given this, I thought it'd be a breeze to transition from two jobs (teaching and writing) to one (writing). I'd write more books better! They'd roll off my fingertips, perfectly-formatted and deep, literary spackle filling holes we didn't even know were in the canon. Ta-da!

So who would have guessed that the opposite is true? Turns out that overscheduling myself worked like a personal trainer. While teaching, and particularly when my kids were younger, I knew I'd only have two hours a day to write (if I was lucky). I cherished those two hours, writing like a monkey, allowing no distractions. It's completely different now that I have the whole day to write.

I feel like a jelly roll that took its pants off. Bloop.

And this is high stakes because I need to make enough money from writing this year that I don't have to go back to my teaching job. My fear of returning to work for micro-managing speckinaries (the opposite of visionaries) actually wakes me from a dead sleep at least once a week, heart pounding. I calm myself by saying it's only October, I have ten more months to do this. I can do this.

But I can't do this, not if I don't get myself on a schedule. The first step will be to bookend my work day, which I've started this week by working out in the mornings (I've gained 15 pounds in the last year. Most people know that "muscle weighs more than fat"; an equally true but less popular saying is "fat weighs more than air"). I'll end my work day at 4:30, which is when X gets off the bus.

Once the bookends are in place, I need to make peace with the fact that outlining and revising novels both necessarily move at a glacial pace. Once my book is outlined, I have myself on a 2000-word a day diet, but getting the structure of a book ready to go and then sifting through the first draft in search of gold both take an incredible amount of brain time with most of the breakthroughs coming when I'm not even writing. Right now, I'm in the revision stage of my historical fiction, and trying to rush that is like running through jello. My workaround? I'm going to write a second book simultaneously, this one a comical thriller that is very nebulous right now and which will also piss me off for the next two weeks because the more I grab at the threads of the story to pull it into a solid outline, the more slippery they will get.

To recap, the cure for this writing ennui is to get on a tight schedule and to work on two projects at once, at least until one or the other is out of the outlining or revising stage. I also figured it wouldn't hurt to look at what some masters of the craft did/do. Here it is:

1. Ernest Hemingway wrote in the morning, standing up. He also hunted elephants using only his piercing glare and put out forest fires with his urine stream. Pretty sure.
2. Barbara Kingsolver wrote around her children's schedule. Now that her kids are old enough, she can write whenever she wants, and she loves it. She claims the hard part for her is turning off the computer. Curse words. I am doing this all wrong. She also writes a bunch of stuff she throws away. She intentionally wastes words!!! Sigh. I love her writing.
3. Haruki Murakami believes in repetition, basically writing for the same amount of time around the same time every day, broken up by physical exercise, to train his mind to go deep. I like it.
4. Benjamin Franklin started each day with an "air bath" (sat naked in a cold room and read or wrote for an hour) and then went on to tightly schedule each hour of his day in a manner that closely resembles the schedule I'm going to try below (I am Benjamin Franklin, minus the gout, air bath, and international appeal!).

So, putting it all together, here's my new daily Monday-Friday schedule, starting today:

• 5:50-6:40: Get X ready to go
• 6:40-7:15: Walk dog
• 7:15-10:00: Meditate, exercise, touch base with Z, social media/marketing (website updates, cover designer emails, publisher emails, fan email, Kickstarter updates, prep for panels and workshops, make travel plans for panels and workshops, blog, etc.)
• 10:00-1:00: Revise WSBO (25 pages a day; complete and to agent by Bouchercon; concrete goals like "25 pages a day" are crucial so I don't waste time)
• 1:00-3:00: Social media/marketing 
• 3:00-4:30: Outline comical thriller (one week to outline, then 2000 words a day)
• 4:30-8:30: Play, eat, work, and talk with kids
• 8:30-10:30: Refuel (ie, read)

If you have any other time-management suggestions, I'll take 'em below. And in the meanwhile, my Kickstarter campaign is at 76% with ten days to go. If it's not completely funded, it doesn't get funded at all. Take pity on a transitional writer, and check it out: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1675834533/the-catalain-book-of-secrets