Books are practical magic

Hands down, my favorite quote about books or reading is this one from Steven Wright: "I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done." My second favorite is a quote from Doctor Who: "We're all stories in the end. Just make it a good one." (I have one of those inspirational cuff bracelets with this quote on it, cuz I am a hardcore fangirl like that.)

I bet you were hoping for something more profound, hmm?

Truth is, my lived experience is not all that profound. Books were sanctuary for me when I was growing up. I spent a lot of time in the public library, and then I went home and read some more. Books were instructional and safe and dependable. I guess you could say books raised me, so I think of them as a beloved granny maybe, not a magical portal or secret religion. Or, as Oprah Winfrey put it, "Books were my pass to personal freedom."

So in a sense, the truest truth would be to say that books are practical magic.

Fav Quote about Reading: There is Nothing...

I wish my search skills were strong enough to find the source of that quote. I remember it from posters in elementary school, one of those classroom signs at which you stare instead of paying attention to the lesson. There were various background illustrations and some were plain text on beige paper. My favorite was in the base library's children's section. It was a colored pencil sketch of a little brown-haired girl, sitting on the floor, huddled over a book, her face scrunched up in deep concentration.

Decades later, that quote (or some variation of it) has proved true, time and again. Recipes, foreign languages, home repair. Problem-solving, social skills, manners...empathy. That last one is where genre fiction really leads the way. The settings may be improbable, the characters simple or complex, but the interactions are relatable and in many ways prepare us for how to cope/handle/respond to a real-world situation we've never encountered. Books take us out of the echo chamber of our insulated lives and make us think, make us wonder, make us imagine what it's like to not be us.

Reading: To Enter a World

Some exciting news! Book three in the Forgotten Empires has a title!
THE ORCHID THRONE, THE FIERY CROWN (out May 26), will be followed by...

THE PROMISED QUEEN.

 I really love it, don't you? I recall as a kid being captivated by the title "THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING," the Arthurian retelling by T.H. White. It was one of the first times a title really piqued my interest. I feel like I'm evoking a tiny piece of that magic.

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is our favorite quote about books and reading, and why.

For some odd reason, I can never think of my favorite quotes when asked the question directly. If I'm babbling on about other things, the quotes just fly into my head. But when I have to think of one out of the blue?

Nothing.

I blame my brain's filing system, frankly.

I know there's a quote on books and reading that I've loved for a very long time - and I was certain I could search for it and get the exact phrasing. I got out my Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. I Googled. I looked in a few other books.

Nada.

I asked on Twitter and Facebook, and got lots of great suggestions that came close to the same sentiment, but the exact one nudging my memory?

Nope.

The one I'm thinking of I could swear I even had on a bookplate or bookmark, once upon a time. Maybe in the late 70s or early 80s. With flowers on it? It's an interesting thing about Googling stuff - certain things have made it onto the internet in thousands of instances, sometimes with near infinite variations. Other things from BI (Before Internet) molder away on hard copy, never to be found again.

What's also amusing - and what a few people offering suggestions also noted - is that many quotes that came close were by other writers, attributed to themselves. So, I decided, what the hell? I'm going to try to recreate this quote. And if anyone knows the one I'm trying to remember, please say so!

To open a book is to open a door into another world - a very real magic spell that allows us to live as someone other than ourselves. 

~ Jeffe Kennedy, author and reader

My Writing Schedule or Lack Thereof

Schedule! DepositPhoto

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week involves our writing schedules – what’s our most productive time of day, when do we actually write, how much time each day, week, month, etc.

When I left the day job five years ago to be a fulltime author, one of my personal vows was to never set an alarm clock again unless I had to be at an airport or in an operating room that morning. No more scheduled meetings! No more scheduled reports! Freedom! All those years of rising way early in the day to commute to the office, with a week chockfull of meetings and tasks assigned to me by other people, OVER and done. WOOT!

DepositPhoto

Now having said that, I do have a personal routine I follow. I actually am a super annoying morning person with or without a job outside the home and somewhat to my surprise I find I still tend to get up around 4:30AM. I like having the day ahead of me, I love the feeling of being one jump ahead because I’m awake and bustling around before most of the still-sleeping world (well, still sleeping in California anyway) rises…there’s also the not unimportant fact Jake the Cat was used to having his breakfast around 4:30AM. He was quite resistant to having his food-in-the-bowl time shifted to later, although now after five years he’s a bit more mellow.

Or possibly resigned to the fact…

After breakfast I start my ‘work day’ in much the same fashion I used to follow at the old day job. I check my e mail and then I go to the internet and read certain news sites, catch up on my social media (I did not do the social media loop at the old office let me hasten to add)…and then I dive into the work. I blog on various platforms and I also do my weekly New Releases report every Wednesday, so I have tasks not related to the current creative work in progress (WIP). Most days I take care of those items before going to the WIP because they hang over my head and distract me.

When I first transitioned to this career versus the old day job, I had a hard time getting myself to see that these other tasks weren’t the actual work. They had deadlines, I owed them to people (even if only in the sense of not letting down my fellow bloggers)…so they looked more like ‘work’ to me in some sense than writing my novels did. Some of this was the lifelong fact that writing my stories was done in between everything else or after work or after the children went to bed or on a lunch hour or in study hall. So I had to overcome this unconscious perception I was carrying that the writing had to be fitted in around the other tasks.

Jake the Cat

There were a lot of things to deal with when I transitioned to fulltime author that did surprise me besides the issue of the affronted cat with an empty food dish! (Hey, he always has dry food available…)

Sometimes I prompt myself to switch my focus by reminding myself the books pay the rent. None of the other activities I might find myself doing directly contribute to paying the bills or buying the cat food. That usually helps clarify for me what I ought to be working on!

I’m organized in my own fashion – NO spreadsheets here though. Shudder. If I had to track anything to do with my writing in the form of a spreadsheet I. Would. Not. Write. That level of detail is so not me. Kudos to Jeffe, the queen of spreadsheets – I’m always in awe of her methodology but I think the idea of too much structure or tracking mechanisms applied to my own writing sends the rebel in me up the wall.

I do keep a weekly To Do list, which helps me focus on the most important non-writing tasks for the week but never when it comes to the writing. The closest I ever come to letting the To Do list touch my writing is if I need to request a new cover from the wonderful Fiona Jayde for example and I keep forgetting to search the stock photo databases for inspiration. Then I might add that as a bullet point on the messy list.

DepositPhoto

So, to circle back around to the topic at hand, the writing schedule, usually around 8:00AM I’m ready to dive into the current book. I might make a cup of tea to signal the change of pace to myself, I sit down here at the keyboard and I type.  I write until the Muse is tired, however long that may be in any given session. Sometimes it’s a few hundred words and other times it’s a few thousand. I use a timer to remind myself to take breaks because of the physical toll sitting here and typing for hours takes if I don’t.

Some days I only work on the book once. Other days I might go off and return two or three times. Some days I don’t get to the writing until the evening, if for instance I’ve gone to babysit my toddler grandson or if I had a day full of appointments or errands. Despite being a morning person to the core and winding down as the sun moves across the sky and sinks, taking my energy with it, I can do a burst of creative writing in the evening. I have to be firm with myself, come in here and sit, open the manuscript file and start typing on whatever scene comes next in the narrative, but I can do it.

The one rule I did make for myself was that I must do either one 25 minute timed session or 1000 words (which usually takes me about that much time). Last year at one point I found myself skipping days as a result of some family and health issues and I can’t afford to do that, hence the rule. Twenty five minutes slides by really fast if I’m caught up in writing and I usually end up doing more words but at least with a solid 1000 a day I’ll finish a first draft of a book in 5-7 weeks, depending on the length.

If I’m in the editing and revision phase, then obviously I don’t log too many new words, but I will enforce upon myself the 25 minute session rule to be sure I’ve made some progress for the day.

I only work on one book at a time. I may be thinking ahead a bit to the plot of the next one but I haven’t found it productive for me to try to divide my creative attention.

It’s my method, it works for me and I think it serves to illustrate that there’s no one rule for every author to follow! My output for last year was nine new novels, two re-releases and a box set, so I feel overall my system has proven itself for me.

6 of the 9 New Books I Released in 2019

Scheduling Issues

It occurs to me that I come here to the blog and say, "I don't want to be THAT person." and then I go right on ahead and make myself THAT person.

Gonna again. My Writing Schedule:
ANY DAMNED TIME I CAN

Look. I care for aging parents, cope with chronic pain issues-though I think we finally found something that might be working, praise the gods and pass the Depakote!-but when there's both the family I was born into and the family I made when I married that need managing, writing often gets slipped into the cracks. Some days there just aren't any more energy packets to be doled out. I've still discovered ways to get the Jaws of Life into those cracks and pry them open enough for me to breathe more easily.

For example, if I say, "Hey, I have an online meeting every morning at x o'clock. I'm going into my room, shutting, and locking (because one of the damned cats figured out how to open) the door." Nobody bugs me for that hour. I can concentrate. It's not actually a lie. I DO meet people online at x hour each morning. We get into a Zoom room and we all write. It's based on the personal trainer philosophy. If you know someone is waiting on you, you're more likely to get up out of bed and go work out.

The other thing that started working for me was to fling rotting word salad at 4thewords.com before I go to bed every night. I gave myself permission to just play around in the game, learn the system and pursue some of the simpler quests. The writing was total junk. Pure mind dump stream of consciousness stuff. Until about the middle of the second week when suddenly my hero walked into the middle of my mind dump and suddenly, I was mind dumping about the WIP, the plot, the characters and what I thought needed to happen. That went on for another few days. Then suddenly, the pair of them were talking to one another and to me. The words are still ugly. I mean it's all dialogue and there aren't even any tags. I hope to all the gods I can parse it when I try to edit the MS. But in that time after everyone else in the house has settled down and the time I tip over from exhaustion, I can get 1200 words if a scene is really going. Some days it's just more rotting word salad. But it's less often. And I feel like I know more about how this book wants to flow. So I'm counting a success.

I have goals to expand writing time and to expand daily word count to at least 2k again. But for right now, I'm writing daily. Even if it's just 500 words. Something flows. And for me, it breaks the surface tension and keeps my well from stagnating. Man. I don't even want to count the mixed metaphors.

Moral of the story: Who cares what your schedule is so long as it does the job you need it to do. So long as you're happy and reasonably healthy. Some people write a book like lightening striking. It's not wrong. And then some people, like me, write a book like they're extracting the most delicate of artifacts from the depths of the earth. One itty bitty brush stroke at a time. I just start plying that brush at 8AM every morning before the cats start bouncing off the walls wanting to play.

A schedule for writing?

Sunrise in Custer St Park

photo courtesy of @wyomingflygirl

Way back before I was a starry-eyed writer I thought…well, I thought writing a book was impossible, but I also thought that authors wrote and wrote until the book was done. Oh, what sweet innocence. 

Once I decided to attempt the impossible and write a novel I quickly found out that the book didn’t just pour out in one long chunk. There was a ton of research needed and an even more exorbitant amount of staring off into space required. But the best piece of advice I garnered was Jeffe’s advice to track your writing time. 

And so….spreadsheets! 

If you’re a new writer, or you have writing-time flexibility but struggle to get words down when you do sit down, I suggest trying out the Jeffe-writing-spreadsheet-method. When I did my first writing-time tracking I was still working full time and alone time with my computer was sporadic, which actually came in handy because I was able to compare all times of the day and night. 

My results: 

Creative brain power peaks between 7-11 AM. 

Editing capabilities are sustainable throughout the afternoon.

Writing after 5 PM…forget about it.  

Who out there is struggling to finish that book while holding down the 9-5? The problem with knowing that I was a morning writer was that I still had the day job M-F. To those authors working full time, I salute you and will send you all the good vibes! It’s hard, but it’s not impossible. Keep going and when you do have opportunities to shut yourself away during your peak writing-times, do it and don’t think twice! There’ll be guilt about taking the time and you’ll miss out on events and family/friends, but it’s part of the sacrifice to the end goal. 

Fast-forward a few years and now I’m blessed to have a spouse that can support our family while I’m a stay-at-home author. He’s incredible and the only reason I’m able to write during my peak hours. And it’s made a huge difference in my daily word counts and consistencies, which veers into writing routine territory. For those who have a flexible writing-schedule, once you know when your brain works best then you can move towards a writing routine. And that, that’s a whole other writing post.

Schedules aren’t for everyone

There’s really only one cardinal rule in professional writing: make decisions that are kind to you. That’s it. I mean, it’s great if you can write 2,000 words a day or keep to an intricately washi-taped planner. It’s also great if you can write seven books per year. And also it is similarly great if you can’t do either of those things.

Expert-type folks have told me that prime time for a creative brain begins at roughly 11 in the morning. Others swear by pre-dawn writing, and still others claim that the only way they can get a book done is to lock themselves in a hotel room and write for four days straight. In other words, advice for optimal scheduling of writing time is all over the place.

Which, considering that we are all different individual humans, is kind of how it should be, eh?

Me, I’m a study in chaos. If I have a deadline, I will make it happen. If I don’t... well, let’s just say that I’m easily distractible by things like taking care of my family, feeding my dogs, bathing on the regular. I know: so self-indulgent. Guess what else? My lack of discipline for Writing Every Day At The Appropriate Time bothers me not at all.

I guess someday if I am able to make a career out of this writing gig, I will attempt to create office hours and do the thing at a specific time of day. But right now, no. It isn’t feasible, and beating myself up about it changes nothing.

Writing does not rule me. I tell it when it needs to happen, and by cracky, it will obey!

Narrator: It did not, in fact, obey...

Writing Schedule: When, How Often, How Many Lives Ended for Interrupting...

Oh, okay, maybe not that last one.

My writing schedule is "whenever my mind can settle," which is first-ish thing in the morning and again in the late afternoon/evening. There's a ritual involving dog care and coffee that has to happen before writing or I end up with 60lbs of wriggling fur all up in my personal space. I don't do late night writing sprints because my brain is pudding by then. If real-world stuff has to happen, then it has to happen before noon so I can hit the mental pocket in the second window of productivity.

I like to get my analytical stuff done in the morning (that includes editing, reviewing marketing, budgeting, etc). I do my best creative stuff in the evening (drafting, ad development, social media, etc.). I take a break every two hours at the dog's insistence (plus, it's good for that whole "don't be too sedentary lest pulmonary embolisms" thing). I do this 7-days a week, 10 months a year. Twice a year, I schedule 30-day no-writing vacations (except for this blog, obvi.).

I am a hardcore creature of habit, so anything that interrupts THE PLAN OF THE DAY will have me shifting from Smeagol to Gollum in a nanosecond.

My motto: Spontinantiy is fine, as long as it's planned.