Long Term Planning - They're More Like Guidelines

Warning. Genre quotes whiplash ahead.

I approach Long Term Planning (tm) in the spirit of the Pirates of the Caribbean. You recall the scene. Elizabeth has been captured by the crew of the Black Pearl. She attempts to bargain with Barbossa, quoting the pirate code. It doesn't work out.

Long term planning is Elizabeth. I'm the undead pirate (some days deader than others.)

Yeah, yeah. I know. I handled data for a living. Damn it, Jim, I was a SQL DBA not a project manager! You might think I ought to give you screenshots of my exquisitely sorted (indexed, with prime and foreign keys!) data of my long term planning.

You'd be wrong. This is where I channel Barbossa and growl, "The code is more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules."

Long term planning spreadsheets, color-coded and cell-linked are enough like rules to make me want to gouge out my eyes with my pen. I am so glad several people posted shots of their planning spreadsheets for you, and I am honestly pleased those constructs work for them. For me, they're soul and creative impulse crushing. Don't know why. Don't much care why. I only care that they ARE. So I don't do 'em. Won't have 'em. I am apparently not wired to work in that fashion.

Instead, I stick to the guidelines. Of course, I still plan. I absolutely keep track of what I want and what I'm doing to move in that direction. Just - differently. Thus the really, really old school list you see above. Crappy photo on purpose. There are somethings that aren't yet ready for the light of day, even as half-baked ideas.

The handwritten lists mature into other formats and get attached to target dates and Bullet Journal short goals and long goals. No. I won't photograph a Bullet Journal page for anyone else's consumption. I practice NSFW Bullet Journaling and we run a marginally family-friendly blog here, so we'll all be happier without that image preserved for internet posterity. The cats get to see my pages, but they don't judge. Well. Not my Bullet Journal, anyway.

Here's the moral of my disjointed story - it's easy to get wrapped up in thinking there's a right way to do long term planning. And maybe there is a right way. The Right Way for YOU. If you are a linear, analytical thinker, detailed spreadsheets may give you all kinds of creative energy and drive. Yay! If you're a spatial, relational thinker, you're going to be driven to drink by those same spreadsheets simply because your brain works differently. Your tools for long term planning will be no less rigorous, no less valid. But they will likely be much harder to screen shot. Just remember to honor the system that turns on your lights. That's the right one.

Being the Yoda of Long-Term Planning

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is short term, mid-term and long-term planning. I assume as related to our careers as writers, though our topicnatrix KAK did not specify.

I suppose I'm a planner. After all, I am dubbed the Spreadsheet Queen for a reason. I have my writing schedule more or less blocked out through 2020 - though some of that is because I have traditional publishing contracts for books releasing in 2021. Traditional publishing really forces you into the long game, at least five-years out, which I know in many industries barely counts as mid-term planning. Also, because trad publishing is so slow and plans so far out, getting books in that pipeline requires looking ahead a couple of years on top of that. I wrote about this artful juggle back in April. I'd like to get better at this kind of planning with my self-published work, but so far that tends to be short-term to spontaneous.

All in all, I'd say I do a lot of short-term and mid-term (3-5 years out) planning. Longer than that? I don't so much.

Oh sure, I've learned how I'm supposed to. I used to work in corporate America and participated in those strategic planning sessions. I understand how the Japanese plan for centuries out, or however that saw goes.

It just doesn't really work for me. When I think about it, I just hear Yoda in my head.

When I look back, lo these twenty-plus years ago, when I decided to become a writer - and at those ambitious plans, dreams and expectations - I didn't predict very well. Things take longer than you hope, and play out differently than you dream. Also, when I started out I was really too inexperienced to know what would work well for me.

Some of the best things that have happened came out of the blue. I'm Taoist enough to be perfectly fine with the universe bestowing its blessings in its own time.

All that said, the very best thing I have done and continue to do for my mid- and long-term planning is to track how I work. I'm a believer in the concept that the structure of an hour becomes the structure of the day becomes the structure of the week, month, year, and lifetime.

Along those lines I recently initiated two efforts: tracking my individual writing sessions each day and using a tracker for different activities throughout the day.

Each of these is a one-hour writing session (though I track if it's shorter for some reason) and the average number of words for each session. The first tends to be lower because I often backtrack a bit to revise and ramp up, and the last is lower because I'm usually writing to a goal of 3800-4500/day and that 5th session is to pick up whatever remains - often ~500 words - if I have to do a 5th session at all. But it's interesting to me to see that the overall trend does drop off after than second session. This helps me understand what kind of speed and productivity I can reasonably expect from myself.

To track my activities through the day, I recently purchased a Timeular from Zei. That's it in the top photo above. I've only been using it for less than a week, so I'm holding out on the verdict, but so far I'm not in love. I'm not sure their definition of productivity matches mine. Also, I moved to using the app on my phone instead of the dongle on my laptop, because running the dongle/tracking program kept stalling my Word every few minutes. When I'm in the middle of a writing flow, getting that 30-second spinning wheel of NOT RESPONDING got to be infuriating. So, we'll see.

Overall that's more to illuminate how I spend my time outside of actual writing, to maybe pare down non-productive activities. To do that I might have to drill down to more than eight categories, however.

It will be interesting to see how the next twenty years play out!

What Not to Ask Me

So you know how you make some random blanket statement that your life is an open book and you have nothing to hide? And then, inevitably, out of nowhere, someone tosses out a question that makes you recoil while certain nether regions pucker?

Yeah. Who'd have thought something so innocent as 'how do you plan' would be my hill to die upon?

To make a long story short: Not answering the planning question.

Oh.

You're still here. Uhm. Okay. I, uh, look. How about why I don't like chatting about plans? It's superstition. I like to keep my plans, like my poker cards, close to my vest. Not that I play poker well. It's just that in any creative endeavor, I feel like the energy of beginning is fragile and easily dissipated. So I don't talk about my plans (for fiction or drawings or paintings or photography) with anyone. Not even crit partners. Once projects are well underway, they seem to withstand being discussed and dissected. At the point that I have the legs assembled and the brain and heart of a story plugged in, the skeleton can handle all kinds of challenges being tossed at it. Until then, I'm super susceptible to being utterly derailed by someone saying, "this bit here doesn't make sense." Stupid but true.

Do I wish my brain worked differently around this? You betcha. Instead, I have to be the weird little muppet in a Jim Henson skit who gasps and vanishes into her hole, pulling a rock in after her. Here. Have a cat.

The Artful Juggle: Planning Future Books While Keeping up with Current Deadlines

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven - the challenge of maintaining a writing schedule and trying to prepare for future business - is an apropos one for me right now.

Because, boy howdy, have I been wrestling this particular challenge lately.

I'm what we're calling a "hybrid" author these days, which means I publish both traditionally - with a publishing house - and I self-publish. I make my living this way and my income is roughly split between the two. In 2016 my income was 62% from self-publishing and 38% from traditional publishers. In 2017 it was 43%/57%. Pretty even at this point.

Obviously it's important to me to balance both sides of my writing career.

On the traditional side, that means meeting my deadlines. And not just the ones for drafting, though those are the big ones. Those are also the ones I know about from the time I see the contract. There are other deadlines - sometimes quite abrupt - for completing content revisions, line edits, copy edits and proofing. Sometimes those come in with a "We need it by the end of next week." That kind of thing can really impact the rest of my schedule, so I try to pad a bit, to allow for those things.

The traditional side also impacts my self-publishing schedule because many traditional contracts now include exclusionary clauses where I can't publish a novel in the same genre within a certain window on either side of a traditional book release.

On the self-publishing side, I have reader expectations to take into account. Because I don't have a legal contract with my readers - although I do take the author/reader contract very seriously - the self-publishing schedule tends to give way to the traditional schedule. Also, because I can't control the traditional publishing release schedule, I have to fit books in the same world into that timeline.

For example, people keep asking me if/when I'm going to finish the Sorcerous Moons series. That one has gotten seriously derailed. The main reason it has is because something had to give and that series isn't connected to anything else. But I WILL finish it! I'm planning to have books 5 and 6 out this fall, in quick succession. I had to keep up with the books in The Uncharted Realms series, to sync with the upcoming Chronicles of Dasnaria books.

(That's part of why I included the newly revealed cover of THE ARROWS OF THE HEART here. The cover is all ready, but the book is not. I ended up having to push it back some, to meet a traditional publishing deadline, alas. That's another part of the juggling act, getting all the pieces to come together at the same time, more or less.)

BUT, the trickiest part of this whole juggling act is the precise point of this week's topic: preparing for future business.

Because traditional publishing has such long lead times, I have to plan now for books that will come out two to three years from now. Another example: I began writing THE ORCHID THRONE last March. (March 15, 2017, to be exact.) By June 15, I'd written and polished just over a hundred pages of the book, plus proposal, working with Agent Sarah all that time to position the book in the market. By July we'd sold the book to St. Martins Press.

All that time, I was also writing on other projects. There's a lot of stopping and starting while working up a new series, waiting while Sarah read it, fitting it in around other deadlines, etc. Once we sold it, I could set it aside, because the completed book isn't due until July 15, 2018. A WHOLE YEAR after we sold it. And it won't come out until August of 2019, with Books 2 and 3 in 2020 and 2021.

All of this means that, to maintain the traditional publishing side of my career, I have to start thinking NOW about books and series I can sell that will start coming out in 2020 or so.

Talk about planning!

So, that's been my other thing - I've been working on a very exciting collaboration. A new series - new genre, even - and we're close to going on submission with it. It's a slower process, working with someone else, learning to write as part of a team, and also stretching me in good ways. That means, too, that it's taken creative energy away from my other writing projects, so that's part of the challenge.

And all good, too. Challenges make us grow, yes?