Where and How to Weight Writing Time?

Sorry I’m a few days late on pressing publish here. I panic-typed this up before clocking in for the last shift of an eight day work week.

Among other things I’ve been consumed with ordinary problems such as:

-How to go about evicting a Venerable Monk (who happens to be an ex- supreme court judge) from a home rented by his followers. You know? Standard negotiations, where I had to explain to a group of people who have travelled internationally for this occasion, why I had to deny them the honor of feeding this man.

-I also stepped one foot into the twilight zone, after a man confessed to me that he’d stepped in dog “foul.” This triggered a series of surreal conversations with straight faced colleagues talking exclusively in corporate speak as to how best navigate clean up of a public street. Completely ignoring the obvious solution (and without the slightest glimmer of humor) that this man simply watch where he’s walking in the future... But no, this affliction happened to him. All fault was external. No other explanations are acceptable.

All of which is to say, I’ve been busy.

But this busyness is a great jumping off point for today’s topic:

How to weight your time?

For now and for the last seven years—outside of travel/socializing etc—my free time has been funneled into writing time whenever I could justify it. By now I’ve developed a fairly keen eye for when I am optimizing and when I’m just spinning my wheels and would be better off going for a walk instead.

Which is an important skill to have because, in the last month or so, I’ve cranked up the dials on this emphasis on productivity by another fifty or so degrees. (For those who do not have the privilege of peaking behind my pay wall, I’m amid a major restructure of my novel, which I’ve given myself till mid June to complete. This is where most of attention has been aimed lately.)

I’ve acknowledged in the past that I thrive on being busy. When I only have small windows within which to work, it allows me to lock in and make the most of every minute. But naturally, there are boundaries to this. If you can only find an hour in your day to get it done, you can optimize all you like, but an hour is an hour.

This is the tradeoff you’ve got to make when juggling a low percentage pursuit with a working life. You cannot afford to think fleetingly about where you place your energy.

For me, right now, the fiction is taking priority.

Sure all those growth mindset gurus out there will preach that you’ve got to maintain your public presence. If you’re not consistently coming up with “content”— I shuddered just typing that word—then your following will die away and it won’t matter how good your work is.
There may be some semblance of truth in that, but….I can’t do that AND put out quality work right now. So, the writing comes first.

So what’s there to debate about? Just write right?

The thing is, I’m focusing on more than just the novel right now.

The other element to throw in here is my recent run of submissions to literary journals. These journals have very narrow windows where they accept submissions (some which I’ve missed out on and am now kicking myself for because I have to wait another six months to submit)
Although the short stories I’m submitting are pre-written. The admin task of packaging them to each journal’s criteria is another time consuming activity.

I’m also developing a pitch to write for a paid serialized journal here on Substack— something that I’ve been kicking around for a while now anyway, but one that requires me to come up with an outline and a gripping opening chapter.

There are also a few debut novel awards coming up…. It seems this time of year is peak pitching season for whatever reason.

I’m out of breath just thinking about it it. Sure, in some ways this does all boil down to “just write,” But:

Is all time spent at the writing desk equal?

The other element in this equation is being able to maintain a frame of mind that’s capable of carrying out this work. I’m not one of these people who places all their chips in the mental side of things and tries to tell themselves that the state of their biology won’t have any affect on the quality of that mind.

For me, I need to strangle and try not to get strangled by grown adults for at least six hours a week to feel normal. That’s another element that eats into the equation of where to place the time.

That is the real killer of creative pursuits: finding the time to develop the craft at a pace that can be maintained long term. Anyone can do it in bursts. The real trick is running a triage on where and when to focus your energy, so that it doesn’t chip away at or get chipped away by your ordinary life.

So I was four days late on this. Sorry about that. For what it’s worth, in the recent survey I sent out to my subscribers— a high number of you expressed that two newsletters a month was the most desirable frequency as opposed to my four.
Perhaps I’m just working off too small a sample group to take this seriously, but if you agree please let me know.
You can contribute to the survey here.
It’s the first question on the survey, so I’ve made it easy for you. (The survey is also anonymous)

Alright now back to the novel.