My schedule

I was talking about this with Evy the other day when I was reading Brandon Sanderson's blog on his writing schedule. For those of you who don't know, he was the writer brought on board to finish the final book in the Wheel of Time series after Robert Jordan passed away. What was initially supposed to be one simple book...was split into three by the publisher and Jordan's widow. Apparently when Sanderson was brought on board he thought he could do it in 200-250k words. Now, 2 years later (almost 3 now) he's 500 thousand words in and estimates the final word count around 750-800 thousand words. As a result, the publisher broke it up into three volumes, with the first coming out this November, and then (theoretically) another one next fall, and then a third, making three separate 250-275k novels encompassing the final outline.

Now...on top of his work for the Wheel of Time book, he is also under contract to various publishers for his other projects as an author. He was talking about working 14-16 hours a day to meet all his deadlines, and I got to thinking....

I'm a lazy slacker.

Seriously. I get up at 7 in the morning. I work out, take my shower, have my breakfast, check my e-mails, read the news, and I generally start work between 9:30 and 10 a.m. I rarely work past 3 p.m., and when you throw in a lunch break and various other little pee breaks and such I'm only working realistically for about 4 hours a day.

Now, I'm fine with that. I've covered our living expenses and my income more than enough times in other blog posts and, suffice to say, working 4 hours a day freelance means we are putting quite a bit into the savings accounts, and affording a lot of nice toys and vacations. This is on top of Evy's income, which is continuing to increase at her job.

What do I do when I get done at 3? I generally wait around for 15-20 minutes until Evy calls me that she's off work, then I go meet her for our daily walk to the park. We usually get ice cream and a beer (she the former, I the latter) and our walk usually takes 2 hours or so. We generally get home around 5:30 or 6. We browse shops, tuck into side alleys, walk around the parks, and enjoy the weather. Sadly, that will come to an end when winter hits, but still.

Back in the house around 6. I don't go to bed until 11 or midnight. That means I've generally got 5-6 hours of "free time" after we get home. We watch movies, play MMORPGs together, or we read books and other things. This is when I have "free time" to work on my fiction work which, sadly, I have completely been slacking on in the past few months.

I finally started working on the book again this week, after months of not doing so. Chapter 11 got edited this morning while I was eating breakfast and sipping coffee, and I've begun putting down a few words every night. The hard part is getting back into the saddle again after so many months of not working on the fiction work.

Almost every professional author aims for 1,000 words a day, minimum. That's not that hard. It's around 2-3 hours worth of work if you take your time, longer if you type slow, faster if you aren't too hard on your first draft edits. I tend to just vomit on paper and come back and clean it up later.

In any case...I can't imagine sitting in front of the computer writing for 14-16 hours a day. The guy was talking about taking a few months off and I kind of nodded my head and went, um, yeah...some breathing space is needed from time to time. Why burn yourself out on a career that is supposed to be fun and enjoyable?

On that note...it's getting close to my beer-and-a-walk portion of the day. See you on the flip side.