OK, I don’t know that my writing qualifies as dangerous, but it has been a year since I started this crazy experiment of being a full-time author. It’s been a while since I did a retrospective, so now seems like a good time!
When I quit my day job, my counselor warned me that for every year that I was in the old job, it could take a month to adjust to a new routine. Since I was in my old job for twelve years, that means I needed to give myself permission to take up to a year to get into a new groove. I’m happy to report that I have a pretty good groove going now, a year later. Of course, my routine has to be flexible because what I’m writing and the life around my writing is always changing (first kid started elementary school!), but overall I’m more confident now that I’ll get everything done if I stick to my plan.
Things I’ve learned in the past year:
- My addiction to tea has not diminished. The opposite, actually.
- Ergonomics are really important. Ignore at your peril. Back spasms and stiff necks will hamper my productivity.
- Rituals and routines are more important than I realized. As it turns out, it’s well-documented that creative people benefit greatly from habitual triggers that put them into the creative mood (e.g., a specific kind of pen or notebook; a specific playlist; a specific place to sit; or a ritual like starting with a hot cup of tea). At first, I did it subconsciously, but now I try to do it intentionally.
- I can’t actually write for eight hours a day. Besides the obvious necessary breaks, the concentration required to focus on my own writing is too intense to sustain all day; generally, I get only about four hours of really productive writing time. The good news is that knowing that helps me stress out less, because I can remind myself that if I don’t write a lot in the morning, I can still have a good afternoon, and conversely, if I do have a good morning, I shouldn’t feel bad when I run out of steam mid-afternoon.
- There’s still plenty I can do in my writing time besides writing: read work from critique partners; read published books; cultivate my social media presence (got to be careful not to let that become a black hole, though…); and take care of my physical and mental health (yoga, counseling, etc.). It’s surprising how hard it is to remember that those are furthering my career.
- That said, I am very deadline-motivated if it’s a real deadline. I can and will make a heroic effort to meet a deadline, including working way more than 8 hours a day, though I’ll need some recovery afterward to catch up with everything else. Fortunately, publishing has a lot of “hurry up and wait.” But it’s useful to know that about myself for the future!
- Seriously, all the tea.
