Category Archives: The Writing Life

A Guest Post by Kary English

2015 was one of the worst years of my life. As dramatic as it sounds when I type it now, the truth is that I lost six months of productivity because there was just too much to deal with and still be able to write. Let me give you a run down of the series of calamities I had to deal with.

I endured the wrath of the internet for six to eight months while the Hugo kerfuffle played out.

My best friend of more than 10 years succumbed to cancer. I had to leave a writing workshop mid-week because we’d been trying to squeeze in a final trip together and her doctors said “Go now.”

A family member slipped far enough into Alzheimer’s that she no longer knows us.

My son’s school was rocked by a shooting threat.

My husband had to take a pay cut, and then our landlord chose a major holiday to tell us that we had to leave our home of more than 10 years. Combined with the high rents in the town where we live, that meant uprooting my son from a school he loves, leaving all of our friends and travelling more than 200 miles to find a place we could afford.

Now that I’m through it, that I’ve survived it, it doesn’t seem as bad. But at the time it was completely overwhelming. Luckily, it taught me a lot and when Nathan asked me to guest post, I decided to share the lessons I’ve learned about how to keep your writing on track when your life goes off the rails.

1) Be gentle with yourself

Self-doubt, impostor anxiety, survivor guilt, perfectionism, procrastination, distraction, denial. I can usually make three-of-a-kind or better from that list, and that’s on a good day. Add in a major life upheaval like the ones I was facing and the result was overwhelming.

Be gentle with yourself. Feeling overwhelmed doesn’t mean you’re weak, lazy or a failure. Beating yourself up if your productivity suffers only makes you feel worse, so let me repeat this again: be gentle with yourself.

If you’re grieving, give yourself permission to grieve. If you’re exhausted, give yourself permission to rest and recover. If you’re stressed and overwhelmed, give yourself permission to relax, do nothing and take care of yourself first for awhile. If you need help with something, give yourself permission to ask for it and accept it when it’s offered.

2) Get outside

Many writers are introverts, so when life gets bumpy, it’s tempting to hide out from the world until things get better. Don’t pressure yourself to socialize if you’re not up to it, but try to get some fresh air and sunlight even if it’s just a walk by yourself. I’m lucky enough to have a beach and a nature preserve within walking distance, and regular visits are not only good for my mental state, they’re good for my productivity, too.

3) Compartmentalize as hard as you can

When life gets chaotic, I need two things to keep working: time and focus. That sounds easy, but when life goes off the rails it’s almost impossible to get both together. Your solution may be different, but I cope best through vicious compartmentalization. I block off a section of time, turn off my phone and my internet, and for the space of that time, even if it’s only half an hour, I focus on my writing.

Sometimes I can accomplish this in my own home and sometimes I can’t. When I’m at home, I’m a wife, mother, daughter, sister and friend in addition to being a writer, and sometimes those roles conflict. When I’m at home, my name isn’t Kary English; it’s “Mom-can-I” or “Honey-where-did-I-put.” If things have been chaotic, there’s probably a mountain of laundry and other tasks that beckon with whispers (or shouts) of guilt and procrastination. So sometimes the solution is to go elsewhere–a coffee shop, my car down at the beach, or even a week in a hotel when I can afford it.

When I’m not at home I can let those other roles drop away for a little while and be just a writer.

4) Take a break if you need it

Sometimes the words won’t come no matter what you do. If that happens, it’s OK to take a break from writing. If you have to take a break, plan it. Make it explicit by telling yourself that you’re taking a break, and it’s OK not to write. Set a date to re-evaluate your situation and mark it on your calendar whether it’s a week, two weeks, a month or longer.

If you’re like me, not writing makes you feel guilty even when you have a crisis to deal with, and taking time to write makes you feel guilty for not dealing with the crisis. Making the break official relieves the guilt and lets you focus your full attention on the crisis. The check-in date is there to remind you that you haven’t quit; this is just a break.

If you find yourself feeling guilty about taking a break, go back to #1: Be gentle with yourself.

5) This too shall pass

No matter how bad something seems, it will end, things will stabilize and your ability to produce will return. Believe that, and trust in it.

2015 was pretty awful, but 2016? 2016 is going to be an amazing year.

Kary English:

Kary English grew up in the snowy Midwest where she avoided siblings and frostbite by reading book after book in a warm corner behind a recliner chair. Today, Kary still spends most of her time with her head in the clouds and her nose in a book. To the great relief of her parents, she seems to be making a living at it.
Kary is a Hugo and Campbell nominee, Amazon bestseller and Writers of the Future winner whose work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Grantville Gazette’s Universe Annex, Writers of the Future, Vol. 31 and Galaxy’s Edge.

Et tu, social life?

March 14, 2016

Kevin Ikenberry

Author's Perspective Day Jobs Family Kevin Ikenberry Life Philosophies Making Progress as a Writer The Writing Life Work-Life Balance No Comments

Maintaining a work/life balance for me as an author is very different than a lot of folks. Up until recently, I served on active duty in the Army as a space operations officer. Military service is a 24/7/365 thing. Even when weekends and holidays arrive, there’s always the chance that something will happen and I would have to tug my boots on and get back to work. Now that I’m in the process of retiring, that constant pressure has lessened, but my work/life balance as a writer remains pretty much unchanged.

Why? Several years ago, when writing the book that became Runs In The Family, I established a pretty decent routine of writing 2,000 words a night after our only daughter (at the time) went to bed. I kept that up for about four years until our second little one came along. With two in the house, I found writing any amount of words difficult for about a year, but I still kept to a schedule of writing at night and getting 500-1,000 words down when I could. It was a struggle, but the novel than became Sleeper Protocol came from this routine, as did the rough drafts of two other books and a couple dozen short stories.

Routine matters. What has taken up the slack for my routine is that my social time is very limited. Granted, this happens with small children and probably won’t ease up until they are in high school or college, but the reality is that I still write at night and I’ve had to limit the evening social times I’ve enjoyed with writer friends a lot over the past year to get the writing done. I’ve eased off a bit on those limits recently, mainly because it’s important to get out and be social with fellow writers, but I still am writing every day.

My retirement situation has left me in the search for another full-time job, so I have considerable time during the week to get new words down. I’m taking that opportunity now and shifting my schedule around to compensate. When I get back into a work situation, I’ll likely go right back to tucking our kids in bed, sharing a glass of wine with my wife, and sitting down at the writing desk to knock out 2,000 words.

The routine of sitting down to write on a schedule is a critical part of a work/life balance. Everyone talks about the self-discipline needed to be a writer, but the true self-discipline is not writing the words. That comes pretty easy for most of us. The real challenge is getting those words in around work, kids, dirty laundry, yard work, and a host of other things that get in our way. By setting aside a time and getting the words down, you train yourself to be creative at that time and what starts as a difficult slog becomes easier as time goes by. I have a great many friends who get up extra early to write before going to their jobs – and they’ve done this for years. They’ve trained themselves to do it.

The simple reality here is that you can, too. Your writing time is as important as your job and your family and your social life. Most likely, you’re like me and cannot pass up the first two. Will I miss having a beer and super nachos with good friends every now and then? Absolutely! But, I also know that if I can get the words down, edited, and submitted, that’s a victory I can celebrate. One night out isn’t going to hurt me because I already have a plan for the next night, and the one following that one.

You should, too.

Stay Fit

March 13, 2016

fictorians

Author's Perspective Balancing Acts C Stuart Hardwick Fitness Self-Motivation The Writing Life Work-Life Balance Writers/Illustrators of the Future Writing Tools 1 Comment

A Guest Post by C Stuart Hardwick

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how infirm! In action how like a potato!

My first stories were played out in childhood, in the badlands and ghost towns of South Dakota, in tree forts and sandboxes, woods and bicycle trails, onto magnetic tape and 8mm movie film. We did not stop to create stories, we left them behind like breadcrumb trails leading back to alternate worlds.

Flash forward a few decades to when I finally decided to get serious about writing stories down. I was already married, with kids and a white-collar job. I was already suffering from a life of too much TV, too much office work, and too little sun. The last thing I needed was another few hours a week sitting in a chair, but that’s just what you need to do to be a writer. What to do?

First, I set up a standing desk. I figured, standing’s better than sitting, right? For two years, I did most of my writing at a laptop perched atop a high chest of drawers in my bedroom. I had to buy a rubber mat to keep from wearing holes through the carpet. I wrote half a million words that way. I went through my creative writing courses at Berkeley that way. I didn’t loose any weight, but at least I didn’t gain any.

Then in late 2012 several studies came out warning of the health effects of sitting. It turns out, not only do those cushy middle class office jobs make us fat, they cause potentially irreversible spinal curvature and stiffening, reduce hip flexibility, cause insulin overproduction, soften bones, obliterate posture, and cause deep vein thromboses and varicose veins. Oh, and they make us stupid.

See, humans didn’t evolve in office buildings. We evolved on the African savanna, where we were marathon hunters. Sure, it’s nice to have a comfy pad under our backside with a cup of jo and an air conditioner. It’s comfortable. But it’s not good for us. These studies were proposing something radical—we should get up and walk.

American’s should ditch the office chair and switch to a treadmill desk they said. We could loose a few pounds a week just by walking instead of sitting, and address all the other health impacts at the same time. We are not evolved to sit around, nor to stand around, but to hike.

So okay, I decided to give it a try. Treadmill desks are stupid expensive, though, so I made my own. I put a laptop and $10 worth of wire shelving on a $600 Horizon T101 treadmill. I learned to touch type while walking at 2.2 MPH on an incline—just enough to barely crack a sweat. I started loosing weight.

After two months, I was so impressed, I decided to splurge on an upgrade.

I bought a dedicated workstation and bolted it to the treadmill with a monitor arm and a theatrical clamp (I blogged about it here: https://cstuarthardwick.wordpress.com/2013/08/03/upgraded-treadmill-desk-2/). My weight kept falling. In addition to the treadmill, I also started spending time on the exercycle as well, and I used MyFitnessPal to track my net calories. In six months, I lost 45 pounds.

But? There is no but. I felt great. I looked great. I thought great. Walking on the treadmill takes a certain amount of brainpower and I usually stop when working on something really mentally taxing, but it’s highly conducive to writing, especially to finding and maintaining “the flow.”

And then I went and hurt my leg and had to take an extended break. Now that I’ve started back up, I’ve worn out the tread and broken a siderail (stepping off to drink coffee), but that’s okay. New parts are on order. While I wait, I’m taking advantage of the springtime weather, taking to the neighbor hood trails, and taking Kevin J Anderson’s advice and giving mobile dictation a fair chance.

And that’s good, because some new papers have come out suggesting that many of the ailments of modern Western society may stem from inadequate exposure to sunlight…

Take care of your body. The writing muscle can’t work if the other muscles keep flopping over. We only get one stab at this life thing.

C Stuart Hardwick:

C Stuart Hardwick is an L Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future winner and a Jim Baen Award finalist. He writes scifi and fantasy, lives in Houston, and is married to an Aquanaut. You can follow him at www.cStuartHardwick.com, or on Twitter, Quora, or Facebook.

SLICING THE CAKE

March 12, 2016

fictorians

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A Guest Post by David Heyman

“Honey, where are you?”

Physically I’m in the store with my wife, where she is asking my opinion of an item she’s seen. In my mind though – I’m on a far-off snowy plain, trying to get my heroine out of the scrape I’ve written her into. This is the world of the writer and their family, and it’s one I’m betting most of you are familiar with. Managing the scales between the time and energy we give to our writing and the time we give to other demands can be one of the more difficult challenges an aspiring writer can face.

It’s commonly called the work/life balance, but for us it is a more complex beast – one more properly named a work/work/life balance. We all have lives that include family, friends, pets and the many activities that make life worth living. These are all wonderful, but they rightfully expect an investment of your time. Then most of us have the job that pays the bills, taking care of that rewarding life and keeping the road ahead of us clear. That job also makes demands on your time, demands that can be harder to negotiate with than Fido.

Now you want to add writing, but for most of us writing no mere hobby. It doesn’t fall into the ‘pursuits’ section of that life category. No, writing for us is our second job – the one that might not be paying bills yet, but someday….

Something’s gotta give – somewhere a sacrifice must be made.

I always view my time as cake. I cut a piece of cake for my family, one for work and one for myself. If I want to write and that’s going to use some of that available time, then someone’s piece of cake is going to get smaller.

My advice: make sure you are the one making the sacrifice. Cut into your cake, not someone else’s.

Want to write on your lunch break? Sure. You can bang out that scene while you have your sandwich. Write during that boring dial-in meeting where they never call on you anyway? No, that time is committed to the job that pays the bills. Writing after play time with the kids and TV time with your spouse? Sure, but discuss it with them first.

You are the one who wants to be a writer, the big time sacrifice must come from you. Video game time, Game of Thrones watching time, Facebooking time.

Your time.

I would caution not to take all of your time, though. Don’t take away the sleep you need, or the time you exercise to stay healthy. Reserve some time for yourself to de-stress, to recharge and get the creative juices going again. Moderation is the key.

Each day is a cake that you choose where to make the cuts and choose the sizes. Your job, your friends and families all have their plates out, waiting to be serves a slice of your time.

How you distribute those slices will have a big impact on your support system going forward – and you will need that support to succeed.

David Heyman:

Dave writes both novels and short stories in the various genres of speculative fiction. His other passions include his family, gaming and reading about mountaineering. Sleep is added to the mix when needed. You can visit him at daveheyman.com