Since I did this at the begining of the year, I might as well update you all. Many authors have been posting their schedules online. I think it started with the hardest new weird working writer Jeff VanderMeer, canned heat Tobias Buckell, Mr. Mainspring himself Jay Lake, and the woman we all need Elizabeth Bear.
Here's my basic workweek schedule
5:10am Alarm goes off.
5:30am Steve drags his butt out of bed
6:15am (or so) Steve is on his way to the day job
7:00am (ish) Steve starts workin' for the man
(no lunch, union negotiated it away, eat around 11:30ish, shoveling food in while working)
3:00pm (ish) Steve hears standard eight-hour workday go whooshing by
(this is where the variable stuff starts kicking in)
4:30pm-6:30pm (or on Thursdays 8:30pm) Steve logs out, prints out time sheet, writes down overtime, and starts home
4:30pm-7:30pm Depending on night, running errands
5:30pm-8:30pm Steve arrives back in Orwell Village
6:00pm-9:30pm Depending on night, has meetings
6:15pm-9:30pm Depending on night, Steve sits on couch, eats dinner with wife, catches up on life, watches some TV
7:00pm-10:00pm Chores, freelance design, blog catching up, emails, editing and writing
10:00pm-11:00pm Writing, editing, reading, going to bed (hopefully around 10:00pm)
Sometimes things go horribly wrong and I'm awake until 1:00am, fewer times things go very right and I'm home by 4:30 and finished with everything else by 7:00pm.
4 comments:
Reading your blog post thinking, yeah, uh-huh, word, that's right brother.
Reading other blogs trying really, really, really, really, really, really, hard not to think:
so freakin' jealous
Todd, yep, it's the hard working life for us, I fear. I think out of the others Jay Lake is the only other writer that has a day job, the rest are full time with the writing. Me so jealous too. Also with those writers in their 20s making a go of it.
The more I look back on my life, the more I see that I've been telling stories and interested in being a story teller since the beginning. It just took me 35 years to realize that this is what I really wanted to do. So now in my early 40s I'm finally getting good at it.
I don't begrudge them their success, nor think they've got it easy just because they've got book contracts.
We could be there; we could be them (well, not them, we'd be us being them ... you know what I mean). The question is, are we willing to do what it takes to get there.
Oh sure, Todd, I don't begrudge their success. I'm just really jealous of it. Not in the "I need to do something bad to make myself feel better" kind of green-eyed bogan, but in the "man, wish I could have some" kind of way. Yes, that's a Dire Straights reference.
Many of them work incredibly hard at what they do, and most have made some sacrifice I've not been willing to make. I remember when Tobias lost his day job and his anxiety. I've been through such and wouldn't want to relive it. I like that my day job is earning me so much, and until the writing could sustain 3/4 of that pay, I probably wouldn't leave my day job (I don't want to go back to eating raman noodles all the time). Heck, if I was making some decent money from writing it would be easier to carve out more time.
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