This should feel STRANGER.
I’ve been a full time writer a week now. My paperwork went through Monday, and now it’s Sunday. One week. This should feel strange, right? It shouldn’t just feel like a big fantastic staycation?
Truth is, I wasn’t really GOING to work, anyway. With the quarantine, I was working from home. I’d get up at seven, eat breakfast, and then sit in the study and work. Now… pretty much the same.
Only, now I’m working on slightly different projects. Instead of figuring out the cloud automation infrastructure for an advanced piece of medical research technology, I’m imagining what medical technology might look like a hundred years from now. A thousand. Plus, I’m writing motorcycle chase scenes through a city on a giant spinning space station. Gotta find a reason to use that med-tech, right?
Writing is work now, and that’s pretty cool. But… it’s also WORK. I’ve put together a schedule. I assign tasks for myself each day. Every day, I consider the age-old question, “How does someone make money writing?”
Teaching? One of my classes has started already, easily making the minimum student count. (It’s great, too, I’m really enjoying it.) My Sci-fi/Fantasy Book Club MIGHT NOT GET ENOUGH STUDENTS. So, I panic a little about that, especially since the first book we’re discussing, This is How You Lose the Time War just won a Locus award.
But, I don’t panic A LOT. There’s no time. I nudge my friends, family, and followers to bump my Patreon, and I add Patreon to my weekly list of work duties. I’d like to be far more interactive with the readers and writers on my Patreon, and now I can schedule time to do that. I continue writing my latest novel (wrote 8k last week. I’d like to get that up to 10k per week). Oh, and I’m starting to go through my backlist of unpublished material. There’s good stuff in there that I haven’t bothered to publish, and now’s probably the time.
The world of sci-fi/fantasy publishing is kind of a mess right now. Those who have suffered abuse at conventions and in the industry are speaking out. Many authors, some of whom I knew and respected, are being outed as abusers and it sickens me. This week I’ve felt like the action hero slow-motion running away from an explosion, except that I’m running the wrong way, and I’m not really an action hero.
I’m just a writer. Who knows what cons will look like when this is all done. Better, I hope. For everyone. Given my new financial situation, conventions won’t be a big part of my near-term writing career, anyway.
That’s something to consider on another day. Today, I have budgeted one hour to write a blog post, and that hour ended five minutes ago. It’s been a great week as a full time writer, and I have every expectation next week will be, too.