Category Archives: Me

Adaptation

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For the past seven years I’ve done nothing but write and write and write. I’ve been lucky enough to be in a position where all I have been called upon to do are household chores, supervising my offspring and writing. It’s been a good run, and I regret that I didn’t take better advantage of this privilege earlier on. Had I been writing at my current pace all along, I’d have dozens of completed novels to my credit, and possibly more sales.

Well, things are changing. Maybe they are, anyway. Over the past three weeks I’ve been interviewing (and interviewing) for a management position with a major company in my industry. The pay is surprisingly good, considering it’s not a higher-up management spot, and will do wonderful things to my family’s financial situation. The downside: I’ll be working at least forty hours a week outside the home. All of that free time for writing? Gone.

As it stands right now, I get up around six o’clock in the morning and fortify myself with caffeine and medication. Once that’s done, I see my son off at the bus stop, and then afterward say good-bye to my wife as she heads off to her day job. At this point it’s about seven-thirty and I have the whole day ahead of me.

I don’t rush into my writing. I generally put some laundry in the washer to get that started, and if it’s bill-paying day I’ll do that, too. Having completed those tasks, I sit down to hammer out my daily blog. If it’s a Tuesday or a Thursday, the blog entry is a review, or possibly two. If it’s a Monday, Wednesday or Friday, you get something more personal, like this.

Fridays are also the days I blog at Goodreads. You may have clicked over there once or twice to see what’s shaking. Why not head over to the site when you’re done reading this? My entries on Goodreads are always much shorter than the ones here, so you’re only going to spend a minute or two there. Perhaps a bit more if you decide to leave me a comment (most don’t).

With the blogging out of the way I turn my attention to various web sites. I read the news, I check Feedly for the latest in blog goodness and I stop by Amazon to see what the Daily Deal happens to be. My last stop are the social media sites, Facebook and Twitter, where I check out what people are saying and doing and occasionally toss some of own pearls of wisdom. I’ll actually tweet and read tweets throughout the day, and update Facebook, too, but I get the bulk of that done first thing.

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Dreamin’

It would interest me to know about other authors’ dreams. I sometimes wonder if those people involved in the creative arts, which aren’t just limited to writers, have more vivid dreams than people who have more ordinary preoccupations. From what I gather, horror writers don’t tend to have worse nightmares than non-horror writers, so at least that much of my curiosity is dispelled, but I remain eager to know.

This morning I’m writing my daily blog post at 4:21am. I’ve been awake for about an hour, having gone to bed between eight and nine the previous evening. If you do the math, you’ll note that I did not get a full eight hours of sleep, which is something I’m sure is going to become a hardship as the day progresses. I’m the sort of guy for whom eight hours is the minimum amount of sleep necessary to plow through the day, with nine or ten being optimal. Call me a lazy slob if you want, but it’s my body that makes these demands and it has nothing to do with my industry or lack thereof.

Anyway, I was wakened by a dream. This happens to me occasionally. I dream fairly vividly every night, so this is nothing totally out of the ordinary, but sometimes I’ll have a dream that’s so disturbing that I will wake from it and not be able to shake it enough that I can get back to sleep in a reasonable amount of time. After a half hour or so of trying, I simply give up and get up and start my day on this sour note.

This dream was like many bad dreams I have, and centered around a home invasion. Now let me be clear that we have an extremely low crime rate where I live, even if two of the most crime-ridden cities in the nation are within an hour’s drive of my front door. The point is that my family and I are not under any greater risk of a home invasion than anyone else. But for whatever reason, I’ve come to fear this happening the more years go by.

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Organizational issues

I am an extremely organized writer. I’ve discussed much of my method before in this space, but I think it’s worth talking about again in a new context like this one. Bear with me if you’ve heard it before.

The first thing I do is come up with an idea and (usually) a title. The idea can generally be expressed in a single sentence, or no more than two. At that point I create a simple, seven-line outline into which I plug the major developments of the book, breaking the plot into fourths and establishing major turning points and the climax.

Once this stuff is done, I open up a fresh document in Bean, my favorite word processor, and start writing a chapter-by-chapter outline. This outline essentially consists of a paragraph or two of text describing the action of the chapter in question, plus any particular dialogue that occurs to me early in the process.

Now that I have my outline in hand, I can start writing. I put out no less than 4,000 words per day, five days a week, which generally means I’m done with the whole shebang — assuming I don’t skip days for whatever reason, at least — in about four to five weeks. I could not work at this pace without all the careful organization that comes beforehand, as I’d be kicking around in the dark trying to discover during the writing process what I’ve already established in my outline. I don’t enjoy writing surprises, and this method keeps surprises to a minimum.

Given that I’m so fastidious about my writing, it might astonish you to learn that I am spectacularly disorganized in virtually every other area of my life. One look around my house and you’d think a schizophrenic lives here. Or three schizophrenics, seeing as how I don’t live alone.

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I’m too young to be so old.

As I write this, it’s just past four o’clock in the morning. I’m not required to get up until six, but I’ve been awake since a little after three and I decided it simply wasn’t worth fighting to get back to sleep when my body clearly has other things in mind for my day.

A part of it may have to do with my nightly schedule. Normally I head up for bed around eight, read until nine-ish and then put out the lights. Last night I went up an hour earlier, and by eight o’clock I was asleep. Earlier my wife joked that I was turning into an old man. She’s right about that.

I’m forty-two years old. I have often said that if I had known I was going to live so long, I would have taken better care of myself. When I think back to my twenties, I was sure then that I was never going to get old and that the limitations of age would never be set upon me. Or, failing that, that it was so far in the future that it would almost be like it’d never come. Yet somehow my thirties evaporated and here I am, chugging toward fifty with an engine that’s never felt more worn out than it feels right now.

I get tired. So very tired. Some blame can be put on my absolutely wretched physical condition. I don’t get any exercise to speak of and spend my entire day sitting down, both of which guarantee me an early death. I get winded walking the dog, for God’s sake, so it should come as no surprise to anyone that I’m exhausted by the demands of everyday living. If I were smarter or more ambitious, I’d actually use the gym membership I pay for every month and at least work on building my cardiovascular strength to some minimal level. But I don’t.

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