Leaving the Clockyard

Today is the first day of my do-as-much-writing-as-possible-in-ten-months thing. Here I am, ready to leave the clockyard. It’s a bit exciting and a bit concerning all at once. I don’t think I should stress about it, because at the very least I have ten months off to just write and do whatever else I want, which is awesome. On the other hand, my brain being the way it is–what, with all the depression and anxiety and such–sometimes it’s hard to convince myself that it doesn’t actually really matter if I don’t manage to wrangle an actual liveable income from writing. I’ve got a huge pile of savings as a safety net and a secure job to go back to at the end of things. Intellectually, I know I should relax and just do what I can. Emotionally, it’s a hard thing to do.

Sitting here, it occurs to me that I really should clean up my computer desk. It’s a bit of an absolute mess. Maybe I’ll shuffle some of it off this afternoon when I have some spare time.

I took last week off so I had some time to relax after the stress of my regular job, but even then I still wrote and submitted an entry to the NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge 2017. Forget it Liu, it’s Lung Town is now available on here for free (check the Freebies section), if you missed me posting it last week. It’s one of my first attempts at writing any sort of comedy–I’m mostly happy with it, but I can see definite room for improvement. I learnt quite a bit while writing it.

Even though I’d been firmly determined to do the absolute minimum when it came to being productive during my week off, I still ended up doing a heap of work on Blackened Hearts (the pirate LARP I’m working on) and I even wrote the first draft of another short story. It’s been to my editor who tore it apart, so when I get some time I’ll go back over it. Once it’s finished, it’ll be uploaded onto here for free as well. Its working title is Morning Routine.

Speaking of routines, I’ve mentioned before that I tend to work far more efficiently if I tightly regiment my time. In the lead-up to today, I worked out a daily schedule that I’m going to stick to as much as possible during the next ten months. I’ve put a copy of it below, for those of you that are interested.

Yeah, I wasn’t joking when I said tightly regimented–the only thing that’s not on there are scheduled bathroom breaks. I’ve got a series of alarms set up on my phone to ping each segment as it begins, to keep me on track, and as you can guess, it’s just past 10am this morning so I am currently in the middle of my morning social media bit.

There are only four hours worth of solid writing in the schedule. This is because I’ve got a lot of other stuff to take care of (planning/outlining, editing, social media/marketing, etc, etc) and I’ve planned my weekly goals accordingly. I’ve tried to be as conservative and realistic in my goals as I can:

I can generally easily write between 500 and 1,000 good-quality words in an hour’s session, so in four hours, provided I know what I’m writing when I’m going in, I should be able to write at least 2,000 words a day without any severe difficulty. This translates to (with Wednesday working on other projects) about 8,000 a week. One of my novella-length stories is generally somewhere in the vicinity of 45,000 to 55,000 words. So I should easily be able to finish a draft of a story in less than eight weeks. Even if I literally get nothing else done, this means (with my 42 weeks off) that I should be able to fully draft up five novellas.

Still, my actual goal is only four. Considering that it took me three and a half years to put out two while also working full time, I think four in ten months is pretty damn good.

My initial half-hour writing session went well this morning–I wrote a hair under 800 words, so well over what I needed to. At the end of the day, I should easily have the 2,000 words I need to stick to my goals, and I should have plenty planned out so that tomorrow I can do the same. Wish me luck.