Life, Writing, Weirdness

Average day? I don’t know why I want to try to think in those terms. While I do keep track of averages, there isn’t necessarily a true average writing day. Every day is just a little different. It’s summertime, which as a grad student means I get to confine my work week to only 35-40 hours. I do still have household responsibilities and family things to take care of, but most of the time I get to spend some of every day writing. Most of the time. Sometimes life requires additional attention, and I’ll miss a day or three. June was rough overall, and for July I’m running about two out of three, which apparently ain’t bad.

Most writing days, I can devote a solid hour plus odd moments for handwritten work. I try to push that to an hour and a half when I can, but it doesn’t usually work out. Some days, it’s less.

As far as keyboard work goes, I have three small goals for each writing day:

1. New fiction = time spent on the current primary project (right now this is a cheesy “the world suddenly has superpowered individuals” story)
2. Non-fiction = either a blog post or, more likely, work on the Memory Project.
3. Plotting or editing

New fiction is on whatever I consider to be the primary fiction project

Note that I haven’t attached any word count targets to any of these. Dividing that hopeful hour into thirds, 20 minutes is good for anywhere between 300 and 500 words of new fiction depending on any number of factors including whether I’m working to a plot, have figured out exactly what I want to happen in a given scene, have had enough sleep, am living through a heat wave. I expect a similar word count for non-fiction. The third piece has been more likely to be plotting than editing lately, but I’m very close to the end of the planned plot for a project I probably won’t even get to start this year and will be switching back over to editing shortly.

Actually, editing should probably be taking more of a front seat again for reasons I’ve discussed previously (currently 6 novels that have finished either a second or third draft plus 84 stories that are somewhere between first draft complete and final polish).

For days I can convince myself that there are at least two hours available for creative pursuits—this would be weekends, but not both days of every weekend—I have two stretch goals.

1. More new fiction = either on the primary project if that’s going well or on whatever I’ve designated as the secondary project. Usually, the primary is a novel and the secondary a short story, but sometimes they flip.
2. Story Submission. I rarely meet this stretch goal in the last couple of years, which is stupid because my records indicate that I average one acceptance for every eleven submissions. That’s reflective of the amount of research I put into each submission, really – I mostly only send things in to markets where I honestly think they’d be a good fit. So the reason I miss this goal most of the time is that it’s a lot of work.

On top of keyboard time, I tend to always have a notebook I’m scribbling in at odd moments. While for fiction I’m probably more comfortable with a keyboard for output (although I do still work on paper sometimes), poetry and lyrics almost certainly find their first expression with a pen or pencil and enter the keyboard later.

Since this month’s theme is all about lyrics, that lends itself to handwritten work, but I’ve tried to make the transcriptions happen quickly. There’s the odd poem here and there, too.

So, the average writing day? Who needs average? Variety is better.

Be well, everyone.