If there's already a thread like this, then feel free to merge this into it. I'm just curious how a typical day might go for some of the authors who post here. Would anyone care to share what their days are like? @Christopher, @Greg Cox.
If I had a "typical" working schedule, I'd probably be a lot more productive. I tend to work in fits and starts -- sometimes it comes easily and the words just pour out, while at other times (the majority, really) I struggle to get anything out. I started drinking coffee a while back, partly in hopes that it would increase the ratio of productive days, and it seemed to work wonders at first, but it hasn't been as effective since then, so maybe that was just a coincidental "up" period.
I would love to have a routine, but real life tends to get in the way. Plus, at any given time, I may be juggling two or three projects. I may be working on an outline for one book, actually writing another, and making revisions and corrections to a third. Meanwhile, there may also be business-related emails to answer and various editorial projects to oversee. I'm constantly trying to strike the perfect balance between writing and editing, but this remains elusive and ever-changing. . . . Today's goal is to add at least two to three thousand words to the current Work-in-Progress, but I haven't checked in with Tor yet to see if there are any fires I need to put out first. For example: I spent part of last week approaching various authors about possibly providing a quote for an upcoming book I edited, while rescheduling another author's book to avoid a conflict with possibly competitive title. And, oh yes, another author and his agent and I finally settled on the title of his next book after many, many emails . ... EDIT: Just checked my email. There were a couple of quick queries from Tor regarding some weird westerns I'm editing, and a nice note from my editor regarding the second LIBRARIANS novel, but I breezed through them pretty quickly. Back to writing!
Just a guess, maybe spending so much time and energy on here each day doesn't help towards your productivity.
And did I imply anything different? It was a friendly comment given what @Christopher said regarding his problems with productivity. As for his, mine or your right to be here, it like any other forum, it's a privilege to post and be here and far from being a "right."
Procrastination is also an important part of any writer's schedule. Which reminds me, I think I need to feed the cat before writing that next scene . ...
Since I went from moonlighting to writing full-time a decade ago, I've never been able to shake my previous pattern, which meant that my most productive writing hours are in the evenings. I've added afternoon sessions to that, since; mornings are either for handling business or proofreading. If I'm on a novel, I'm on it seven days a week until it's done. I might skip the afternoon sessions on the weekend but I still fight to get my chapters in. Over the last few years I've found my chapters getting shorter, to a length of around six to nine pages; that neatly fits into what I can do in a single two-or-three hour session. It's also had the happy consequence of improving story flow (though sequences may still run multiple chapters). Totally know what Greg's talking about when it comes to having to drop everything to deal with editing; one of the nice things about writing the Prey novels for monthly release was that it shifted several of the usual proofreading rounds on books 1 and 2 into the period after the third book was written. It also helped continuity, as it's easier to make a global change on a place name or something when you have all three books on your desk at once.
I work a five-day week most of the time. My weekend is usually Sunday–Monday, because of my wife's work schedule. I sleep late. Rise in the afternoon. Putter around, make food. Waste time on the Internet. Like JJM, my old habit of writing late at night back in the years when I had a day job formed a template I seem unable to shake. Most of my work is done at night, with some supplemental effort in the late afternoons. My average workday runs from 3pm–1am, with a dinner break in the middle so that I can spend some time with my wife. I go to bed most nights around 3am–4am. Drag myself back to consciousness around 1pm.
A day in the life: Managed to get in two thousand plus words today. Time to call it a day and reward myself with a pizza and an old kung-fu vampire movie from the seventies. Assuming the cat ever gets off my lap . ...
Biggest problem I've found with working so late is it pushes all my unwinding time into the dead of night. I keep the Hallmark channel on while I'm gaming, so once all the Frasier characters turn into Cheers characters, I know it's 3 a.m. and time to knock off!
Oh, what a great thread! We have so many authors in the forum so why not 'take advantage'? Please keep it up!
Exactly, if I had spent more time focused in the last three years on my studies and not watching Netflix and generally pissing around on and offline, my degree classification might be a bit higher than it was.
I typically work a 5 or 6-day week, depending on deadlines. Start the day at 8am, faff around with emails & internet. Spend the morning editing and revising the previous day's work, break for lunch around 1pm, then writing in the afternoon until around 6pm (again, this varies according to workload & deadlines). Depending on the project, I set a minimum daily figure and a target for wordcount/script pages/whatever. I do my best to meet the former and exceed the latter.
I've always had this romantic notion that authors go in a journey or vacation whenever they want to write a novel. Somewhere secluded like a small motel in southern France, a small town in Scotland or a small fishing village in a Greek island. Maybe it's because that's what I want to do in my retirement!
A little known fact is that every time KRAD writes a Klingon book he meditates a few years on Boreth. He isn't often on Boreth these days... Or maybe he's still meditating and there'll be a new Klingon Empire novel in 2016. One can only hope.
On his podcast, John August has talked about doing that when he writes scripts (usually for the beginning part, outlining and doing the first draft, just so he can get the skeleton down without any distractions or excuses). I think he's mentioned going to a cabin, but the one I remember most clearly is the he or someone he knew would take these super-cheap cruises that didn't actually go anywhere. The ship just left, puttered around for three or five days, then came back. He'd just lock himself in his cabin and write.
I went to a different location to write the 23rd-Century sections of Prey; it helped me to get into a different headspace when I was working in more than one part of the timeline. But it was nothing exotic -- just to office space at the library in town where I could spread out with my resource materials. Years ago I figured out that the "writing retreat" only worked so long as the place where I was going was less interesting than home. Otherwise the temptation to leave the keyboard and explore was too great! As it is, where I live -- a farmhouse at the end of a dead-end road in rural Wisconsin -- is pretty conducive to uninterrupted writing, especially during the winters. I'll see the FedEx guy but that's about it.
A day in the life: Logged in another two thousand words today, although I got off to a late start due to various errands consuming the morning: grocery shopping, the bank, the library, the farmer's market, etc. Ended up writing from about 3 pm to 9 pm, while answering the occasional email as well. Might do a bit more research later on, depending.
Deadlines are a powerful motivator . . . not to mention the desire to make a living. And, oh yeah, inspiration and all that.