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Writing Excuses 17.44: Bodies, Why? (Part II: Working Through Disability)
 
 
Key Points: Working through pain, through marginalization, through it all. Scheduling craft around illness. Physical and mental aspects. What is normal? Pushing yourself is a choice. A diagnosis may help you tap into a community and borrow tools. What are your coping mechanisms? 
 
[Season 17, Episode 44]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Bodies, Why? (Part II: Working Through Disability).
[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.
[Fran] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea.
[Fran] I'm Fran.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, this week, we're going to be talking about writing through disability. Fran, tell us what that means.
[Fran] Well. One of the conversations that has been happening of late is writing while disabled and what that means, particularly for writers who have either previously not talked about disability because they did not want to meet the terrible fate of being told that they shouldn't or couldn't do something that they really wanted to do. But also, people are talking a lot more about what it means to be creative and to work through pain, to work through being marginalized, to work through the… All of the attendant… Even just the medical appointments and how do you schedule your craft around doctors, or not doctors, as sometimes the case is, how do you schedule craft around illness. In this day and age of post-pandemic, we are… A lot of us learning more and more about how to operate in the world using different methodologies and different schedules. I think that it's really important to talk about writing and health in general, but writing and disability in specific, because it can impact both creativity and how your work is scheduled within the profession. So it's worthwhile talking about that. It's also important to talk about how, in some cases, different kinds of disabilities can impact how you perceive different things at different times. So we're going to talk a little bit about pain. We're going to talk about mental aspects as well. And we're going to talk about agency, because a disability and autonomy and agency are sort of the same topic a lot of the time.
[Mary Robinette] For our listeners who are thinking but what does it… How is this episode going to be useful to me, I am not disabled. There's two things that I want to say. One is you are not disabled currently. The second thing is you know someone who is. This will give you a better frame for being a better friend to that person. So…
 
[Howard] Can I open with an anecdote from… Gosh, I think it was just the day before yesterday. At Gen Con, I drew eight hours a day for four days straight, and cramps, exhausted, bruised, whatever, the interstitial tissues in my hand to the point that I couldn't hold a pen anymore. This is not the first time I've done this, because I'm an idiot. But we decided we're going to take a week off. Took a week off, it wasn't getting better.
[Fran] I'm going to… Actually, Howard, I'm going to walk you back on I'm an idiot because you did this because this is your job and this was a choice that you made for what you wanted to do. Which is a legitimate choice.
[Howard] Oh. Yeah. It is. And it's… I was being humorously self-deprecatory, not genuinely self-deprecatory. If that helps at all. The point is, I went to the hand clinic. Okay? There's a specialist for hands and elbows and shoulders. I check in on my phone, I get to the front desk, and they say, "Oh, new patient. Here." They had to be a clipboard with a page full of checkboxes and little fine lines to… "Can you fill this out, please?" I held my hand up and said, "I can't currently write. No." She said, "Well. Just do it left-handed." Now, the rest of the story is me showering myself with praise for not unloading there at the counter. Because I had big thoughts. I did, however, unload on Twitter. But, circling back around, I'm at the hand clinic and they have a clipboard that they expect people to write on. All patients! Hey, if it's shoulder pain, maybe you're fine. But if it's hand pain, it's not. How was I supposed to work through this? What the nurse said was, "Well, can you just do it left-handed?" So I did it left-handed with a Sharpie and definitely made an enormous mess of it so that they'd have to cope. But me discovering that I needed to get medical care, I was up against a thing, up against a hurdle that was difficult to clear because of the very thing I was trying to get care for. Ouch.
[Mary Robinette] Yep. It sounds like me trying to get ADHD medication. So, Chelsea…
[Chelsea] I had a thing that I wanted to say. That was… It's to both. Like, this doesn't apply to the not disabled, and then the idea of the cram where you do a lot of work in a short time, which is not bad. It's not bad. I'm not going to say that anybody was bad for doing it. But what I want to point out is you don't know, a lot of people don't know what low mobility is. Because our culture pushes us to work to exhaustion and calls that normal, and it should not be. Basically, we are always talking about how if you aren't pushing yourself 110% every day, you're kind of a chump. No. Let's do a… Let's do a [garbled second-degree?] kind of job for a little while and see if this actually balances our lives a little bit better. Because if you are maximum thrust all of the time, you're going to need a break. If you don't schedule that leisure, your body will do it for you.
[Mary Robinette] This is why we have supply line, is because…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Of things running at maximum capacity with no room for anything to go wrong. When that happens, when your body is the supply line, supply chain, things, you have some follow-through issues. Yes. Fran?
 
[Fran] I'd like… I'm like dutifully raising my hand. I really want to second and echo Chelsea's point about people not knowing what normal really is. This is something that disabled people and able-bodied people can share that experience. In some cases, quite literally. My anecdotal story, lots of people see the braces that I wear on my hands and their silver rings. I am one of those people that firmly believes that accommodations and devices should be allowed to be beautiful. We shouldn't be trapped in the ugly medical world of gray and plastic. But I wear braces on my fingers. They're made by Charlottesville Ring Splint Company. They're outstanding devices for people with rheumatoid arthritis as well as EDS, which is what I have. But when I was being treated for two dislocated shoulders, and I had pinched a nerve in one, I was seeing an occupational therapist. She noticed that I was bracing oddly with my hands, and suggested these rings splints for me. I tried them. I tried a basic model first, and came back in a couple weeks later, and said something is wrong with my hands. She looked at me and she broke out the pins, and she started checking to make sure that I… My nerves weren't damaged. I said, "No, I can feel that just fine." She said, "Well, what do you mean? Something's wrong with your hands?" I said, "Well, I just can't… They don't feel right." She looked at me, and she looked at me again, and she said, "You mean you're not in pain. Because these braces are supporting your fingers and keeping them from dislocating." I hadn't realized that. I hadn't realized that I had been navigating my entire life, most of my life, especially when I had started drawing and been practicing art, by sensing where my hands were in space by where the pain was. Once I started using the braces, I actually had to teach myself how to draw again because I couldn't figure out where my hand was related to the page without that pain. So that was one of the things that I… One thing that I considered absolutely normal that turns out was not. At all. That was pretty amazing. The other thing that Chelsea said that Mary Robinette seconded was that aspect of pushing yourself 110%, and something to go with what Howard was saying about working all weekend. We talk about the crunch, we talk about fitting in work. I want to reiterate something that I started to say before, which is that pushing yourself is a choice. A choice that you make. It's not something that someone can say to a disabled person, "You shouldn't be doing this because X." I mean, that's a conversation between you and your doctor. But in many cases, I will choose to push myself for a goal, knowing that I will then have to rest later. That's something that I really feel very strongly is a decision that is given to able-bodied people all the time and should not be taken away from disabled people for the same reason.
[Mary Robinette] 100%.
 
[Mary Robinette] We're going to pause, having said that…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I am going to ask you to pause…
[Chelsea] [garbled] collapsible [garbled] box right there. Just…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Wait. Do I get a nap now? This sounds awesome.
[Mary Robinette] No. No. No. We're going to pause for book of the week. So no one gets to stop working. We're just going to work on something else. So, Fran, actually, you have the book of the week this week.
[Fran] I do. It is a fantastic gender bent retelling of the Three Musketeers, called One for All. It is by Lillie Lainhoff. It came out this past spring. It is an NPR favorite book, it has Junior Library Guild's recommendation. It's got starred reviews all over the place. This is a disabled author, Lillie Lainhoff, who rewrote and retold the Three Musketeers from the point of view of Tania de Batz, who is 16 and trying to sort through a world while experiencing chronic dizziness, vertigo, and fainting spells that can incapacitate her at inopportune times. Meanwhile, she's an amazing sword fighter and wants to take her father's place as a musketeer. So this is just action scenes, great fight scenes, without eliding or erasing disability from an author who is herself disabled. I just think it's fantastic.
[Mary Robinette] Ah. I'm very excited about this book. I want to read it.
 
[Mary Robinette] Something that you said before I forced us to go to break was about the idea of trade-offs. So one thing that I have is… And I've talked about this some… Is I have an essential tremor. It's pretty mild. Most of my day-to-day life, it… The way it affects me is that thumb typing on my phone is a disaster. But otherwise, it's largely invisible. However, I'm also a professional puppeteer. There are styles of puppets that I can no longer do, and I didn't want to talk about it at all. About having this, because I knew that people were going to write me out of all roles and not trust me to turn things down on my own. But, in addition to that, there's a medication that I can take that knocks the tremor out. But when I take that medication, my asthma medication doesn't work. So I have to make a choice.
[Chelsea] Do you want to breathe or move?
[Mary Robinette] Right. Right. Fortunately, I am at a place where I can make that choice and still be functional. But… And still do my job. But that's not the case for everybody. So when we're talking about working through disability, there are going to be days where that trade-off between which thing are you going to do, which choice are you going to make, are you going to make kicking your deadline or being able to go and do a thing. Are you going to… What trade-off are you going to make? Also, what trade-offs are people going to make for you?
[Fran] Part and parcel of that is that there is an assumption when you are disabled, especially as a creative, that you have one disability. When many of us work through multiple disabilities. And work with multiple disabilities. I think that's an important preposition, with. We have found our own ways to make this work for us. This is one of those big your mileage may vary situations where certain things work for us, but might not work for you in the exact way that we're describing, but it may work for you modified. That's totally legitimate. 
 
[Fran] But one of the things that I want to talk about is that there are… We've talked a lot about physical disabilities, but I do want to talk about mental aspects as well. So I'm going to kick that first back to Mary Robinette, asking if you can talk about both depression and ADHD. Then Chelsea, if you'll pick up from there, if you would be willing to talk a little bit about anxiety.
[Mary Robinette] So, this starts with what Chelsea was talking and Fran was talking about, is that we have no idea of what normal is. So, I was 45 when I was diagnosed with depression. In hindsight, I'd had it my entire life. But there were so many things that I just thought was… Like, of course, you work really hard and then you… I thought burnout was what was happening to me. Turns out that is not the case. It was in hindsight, it's like, "Oh, I have always had depression." So learning how to deal with that as an adult has been fascinating. I realized it by listening, because I was hearing other people talk about it. The other one is ADHD, which I was just diagnosed when I was 50. I am, for those keeping track, I am 53 now. Again, in hindsight, it has always been there. But it also, one of the reasons that I didn't realize that I had it, is that my dad has it, and has never been diagnosed. My brother has it. My niece, my nephews, all, to varying degrees. Actually, I think my niece does not. But my two nephews do. I just thought that that was the way brains worked and didn't realize that all of my problems with time management, all of my problems with five different thoughts colliding into my head at the same time, all of my problems with just… Where I cannot work on a thing for unknown reasons, were all tied into the way my brain was built. So, for me, but having a diagnosis is done is that it's allowed me to tap into a community and borrow other people's tools. I've built my own coping mechanisms over the course of my life. It's also very clear… It's like, "Oh, this is why theater works really well for me." Because you've got a short time span, you've got urgency. But a lot of what I have been having to learn to do now is figure out ways in which to work with my brain instead of against my brain. Because most of my life has been trying to make my brain fit into the boxes that society has put around it. This is how a brain is supposed to work. What I'm trying to do now is work with my brain. It's like this is what my brain is good at, this is what my brain is really not good at, learn to maximize that. It's tricky. But the first part of it is acknowledging that it exists and then [garbled] deeply about it. Sometimes I do hyperfocus on research about that, I'm just going to say.
[Fran] Thank you so much for sharing that, and talking about it in terms of working with, because I think that's really… It's helpful to me to hear that from you. So thank you.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Fran] Chelsea!
[Chelsea] Hi. Okay. So I'm going to talk a little bit about my [garbled] in the Venn diagram because I also have ADHD. But my big thing now is anxiety. So I have all of the ADHD toolbox things. A lot of the reason why I can do [garbled] is because I accept that this is how I do it and there's nothing wrong with that and I don't need to fix that. I just need to do it the way that I naturally already do it, and that's fine. The modifier is that my first impulse for just about everything is fear and the worst case scenario. This is fantastic when I'm writing a plot of the book, but it's not so great when I need to go to the grocery store.
[Laughter]
[Fran] Were we in a conversation once where you had to give someone, not an editor, explicit instructions not to ask you what the worst possible thing could possibly be?
[Chelsea] Yes. Yes.
[Fran] I think about that all the time.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have to…
[Chelsea] If you asked me what is the worst thing that could possibly happen, I will be like, "I will be walking down the street minding my own business when I am suddenly hit by a bus."
[Laughter]
[Fran] I'm not laughing at you, I'm laughing with you, because that was…
[Chelsea] I know. I mean, I said it to be funny.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. I have to tell people, don't tell me that I can get to this whenever. It's like, "No. You have to give me a specific deadline. If you tell me get to it whenever you have time, I will never have time. It will not ever happen."
[Chelsea] Never. Never.
 
[Fran] Howard, I want to get back to you. Because you are dealing with something right now that is impacting your ability to not only work, but to fill out those important medical forms, and probably hold a very important cup of coffee, and all of these things are not necessarily new, you said you have done this before, but it's impacting your life right now.
[Howard] It's… The thing to recognize is that since early 2020, I contracted Covid, and developed what I call LCCFS. It is the chronic fatigue syndrome set of symptoms that some people get with long Covid. It is possible… I'm going to leave the medical explanation as to why for another day. It is possible that that has impacted the healing process in my hand. Because when I push myself too hard at Gen Con, I knew this is going to hurt, I'm going to be miserable, and I'm not going to be able to get any work done until Wednesday, and then I'm going to force myself to rest all the way until next Monday. That is how hard I am pushing myself. Then I came out of Gen Con and realized this hurts a lot more than I was expecting it to hurt. Then I took a week off and realized this isn't getting better. So the conversation that we have about our coping mechanisms and about our choices, push, but then plan to rest… I got ambushed. I pushed, I planned to rest, and realized, "No. I did some serious damage." I have a large litany of coping mechanisms. My very favorite one has been a guest on this podcast before. Sandra.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Chelsea, when you talk about anxiety, there are things that will trigger anxiety for me. Things coming in via email. Sandra screens my email. She doles out tasks to me based on her understanding of when I'm ready to hear about it.
 
[Fran] Actually, Howard, that's a really good segue into the homework this week.
[Howard] Then let's segue. Because I could talk about Sandra for an entire three episodes, and [garbled] everybody would love it except Sandra.
[Laughter]
[Fran] We'd love to hear you. But I'm going to do the homework.
[Howard] Okay.
[Mary Robinette] Good.
[Fran] All right. So today's homework is not writing homework specifically. This is about exploring your writing space and schedule. This is about process, not product. So, for this week, I want you to look at, we want you to look at what tools do you have in place to take care of your physical needs and your physical self while you are writing or being creative. Just as you set up your workspace with a laptop or a pen or a pencil and paper, think about where you work. Is this chair supportive to your posture? Is this a place that has good lighting? Think about how often you stretch. You see a lot of writers shaking their hands out after a couple of hours. This is a good idea for lots of different reasons. But think about how often you stretch. How much you hydrate. Do you have check in points or times or people that you can check in with to see if you might be in physical or emotional pain and not know it? Just take stock of what you have and then take stock of what you would like to have. I know several of us, Chelsea in particular, they run an amazing occasional reminder on Twitter if you want to follow them. You will get regular reminders to hydrate, which is hugely useful to all kinds of writers. But just make a list this week of what you have in your writing process that supports you physically and emotionally and what you wish to have. In part, because this is about finding ways to work with what you have to keep working for the long-term.
[Mary Robinette] Great advice. And good homework. So, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go study your workspace.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.37: Writing Under Deadlines
 
 
Key Points: Writing to contracted deadlines is hard. Sophomore slump! Writing in a bubble. It gets worse! New level, new devil. Train yourself to write against deadlines. Train your good habits. Build sustainability. Watch out for the year and a half deadline -- you need to work consistently at the start, to avoid crunch time at the end. Remember you won't have a boss. Pay attention to your own nuances. Make time to have a flat tire. Watch out for the other cooks in the kitchen! As your career grows, more things take time away. Learn to juggle early! Build a trunk full of pieces to use. Being good at deadlines, able to juggle multiple projects, means you will always have work. Learn to make your own schedule. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 37.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing under Deadlines.
[Victoria] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're in a hurry, too.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Victoria] I'm Victoria.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I've gotta go. I've got writing to do.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] I'm not sure if we ever even talked about this before. Maybe briefly. But I don't think we've ever had an entire episode on writing to deadline. Which is something we should totally do, because, I don't know about the rest of you, but the first time I had a contract, I was surprised by how much harder it was to write under someone else's deadline than my own goals.
[Victoria] Yes. I think this is called the sophomore slump for a reason. The first book you write usually is not under contract. If you're lucky enough to get a contract, and the contract extends for more than that book, the next book you write will be the first book that you write under contract. I say that it's like going from riding in a cave to going into writing in a bubble. Where all of a sudden, everyone can see you, and everyone has a stake in it, and everyone's watching you, and you no longer have unlimited time, you have give or take six months. It is one of the most trial-by-fire processes. It's one of the reasons that second book hits so many people so hard. Because second book… All books are difficult, but the first book you write under contract is an eye-opener.
[Brandon] For me, I had two big distinct moments like this. The first was writing my first book under deadline. The second was when I had The Wheel of Time. Suddenly, a lot more eyes were on me. I'm glad I was able to step into that. That I… My early books were not as… I was a brand-new author. They did fine, but it was when I suddenly had everyone at the company, at the publisher, focused all of their attention on me, that suddenly writing under that deadline was a very different experience.
[Victoria] Well, that's the horrifying thing, right? If any of you out there are writing your first book under deadline, it's only going to get so much worse…
[Chuckles]
[Victoria] Because you're still a new author. That first book you write under deadline feels like… Much like when you're a teenager and everything feels like a 10 or like the end of the world. That first book you write under deadline, you feel like it's never going to be this hard again. Until something else… My agent would say, "New level, new devil." The idea that every time you step up a level or into a new spot, you have that same sophomore horror reaction again at a new hurdle.
 
[Brandon] I think a lot of our listeners will, again… I say this a lot… Will be thinking, "Wow…"
[Howard] Luxury!
[Brandon] I know, wouldn't it be so nice?
[Dan] Wish I had that problem.
[Brandon] but I do think training yourself to write under deadline can be very helpful for preparing for a career in writing.
[Victoria] Absolutely
[Brandon] I've had many friends as writers hit this in it be really hard for them. A lot of times you'll find someone whose first book comes out and then there's a long gap to their second book. I'm not even talking about the famous examples that you might point to. A lot of my writer friends, one book came out, and then it's like four or five years til their next book. That's a really bad time to be making a big gap between books. Really bad time.
[Dan] So, when… Brandon and I were in writing groups together forever until he finally got published, and he got published a year, year and a half, two years before I did. So I watched this happen to you. I thought, "Okay, well, this is what I need to be ready for." Because as soon as you had a contract, then your time was not your own, and you were under all these other pressures. So I was trying to teach myself how to write. So I started setting my own deadlines. Because I knew this was coming. So that was, I guess, the first step, if we're going to give people advice. Give yourself an artificial deadline that you know is going to push you, that you know is going to be much harder than you want to deal with, and see what you can do with it.
[Brandon] This is part of why we like Nanowrimo and why… I did it years before I broke in. It was really helpful. For doing that first time I actually had a deadline to have practiced having deadlines.
[Howard] In the world of web cartooning, I made my entire career out of this deadline thing. Because I went 20 years without missing a daily update. There's this rolling deadline which says there will be a comic strip up every day. As we are recording this episode, that deadline, the inked buffer is only seven days out. Which is a terrible place for me to be, but I know, after 19 years of practice, I know exactly how long it takes to get out of this hole. Do I know exactly what I am going to write for the two weeks of scripts that I want to write and pencil and ink next week? No. But I've done this enough times that I am confident that if I focus myself on Monday and I look at my outline and I fall back on craft… Mary Robinette has talked about this a little bit, there are times when we just fall back on craft. It's not about inspiration, it's not about the Muses, it's chopping wood and carrying water. I know that I can do that. I just have to knuckle down and make it happen.
 
[Victoria] Part of this is a matter of training yourself into good habits. Because, as I said, it's only going to get harder. The better habits you can devise, the better habits that you can really start… Not perfecting, but creating for yourself early on, are really going to come in handy if you move farther into a career and you have multiple deadlines or multiple publishers or multiple anything. Really, like, they also come in handy if at any point you move from writing as hobby to writing part time or writing full-time. Every one of these habits about enforcing your own deadlines, finding accountabili-buddies, like finding a generational buddy, like finding anybody that you can really look to as support system and people to keep you accountable, these are key things for more sustainability of deadline.
[Dan] You have to decide at what point you want to add this. Because if you don't know how yet to write a book at all, you don't necessarily need to step up to this hard mode. Play easy mode first, because that's what it's for. But if you look at your own career, your own writing that you have done thus far, and you think that you are ready to add a new skill on top of it. Even if you maybe haven't even finished a first book, this is something to start building early.
[Brandon] The difficulty with being a writer… I mean, you may be sitting there thinking, I've dealt with deadlines, I've had schoolwork. We all have. This is a familiar thing to all of us. That's good. You have some practice. But there is something very dangerous about having a year and a half to do something, that if you don't do it consistently every week for the first eight months of that, your life is going to fall apart trying to do it for the last whatever, eight months of that. So, learning to be able to when it's not a pressure, keep to your deadline, that's a key skill. The other thing you've got to remember is you won't have a boss telling you to. Even if you have an editor, most of the time, your editor's not checking in that often. There assuming the book is working fine. They will go four or five months for checking in, and seeing how things are going, sometimes, if they're busy with other projects. If you have let yourself spend these five months being like, "Oh, I can get to it," or "I'm feeling really stressed right now, I'll play Xbox," and then… You're just setting yourself up to crash.
[Dan] My grandmother grew up on a ranch. She had all these awesome aphorisms. One thing that she always told us as kids was, "If you don't have time to do it right, you definitely don't have time to do it twice." Which is a principle that I apply to this. That it is about not just setting a deadline, but making a plan that is going to work now. So that you are using your time well now while it's not crunch time, because you don't want to get to crunch time, you want to avoid that as much as possible.
[Victoria] Also, especially early on in your deadline-written career, when you don't quite know all of your own nuances yet… All of your own… Like, I know that the first third of a book takes me roughly three times the amount of time to write that the last two thirds do. I cannot allot the same amount of time for every act in my book. So… You really only learn these things, because whatever works is what works for you, you only learn these things by doing. You need to make sure that you don't lean into procrastination techniques early on, or else you might find out the hard way that you don't work like that.
[Howard] Back in May, we talked about mental wellness. Just how to take care of yourself, and how sometimes you need to take days off. I mentioned the Munchkin deck project that I was involved in, and how incredibly educational that was. Crunch mode is definitely a thing that many of us, a lot of us, can do. But it's not something that you can maintain. It's never something that you should build into the project plan. The… When I have… It happens all the time. People will say, "I can't believe, how did you do this without missing a day? How is that…" Well, you do it, not missing a day, by having a huge buffer. My dad used to say, "You don't leave for the airport unless you've got enough time to change a flat tire." Which is not something I've ever had to do on my way to the airport, but that was just the way he built the plan. You have time to change a flat tire. I have time in my buffer, except this week, to get sick. To have the sewer line rupture. To have whatever.
 
[Victoria] Well, there's something else that I do want to bring up, which is once those deadlines become contractually inputted instead of personally inputted… The reason that it's so important that you stay on top of your side is because you're not the only cook in this kitchen. You can hit every one of your deadlines, but if you're the only person that you're planning on, something at another point in the pipeline can go wrong. An editor becomes late, a publisher becomes late, and all of a sudden, your very carefully orchestrated machine falls apart.
[Dan] And once you have multiple projects going, and you've made your perfect plan and you think this book is working great, then the other project that you've already handed off to the editor, they throw it back and say, "Hey, sorry this took me an extra month. I need you to turn around these edits by the end of the week." You're like, "But… That ruins everything!"
[Brandon] Well, I mean, this even happens with… This year it happened to me with, I got beta reads back on a book and there were some responses to the book that I was not expecting. Where I'm like, "Oh. I need to do another revision. I can see now why these are happening. But it means I need to take an extra month on this book." Although I was going to say, when Victoria was talking about editors being late, Dan and I know nothing about that.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Oh, no.
 
[Brandon] Let's do our book of the week, which is actually a YouTube channel that I really like. This isn't to give you excuses to not write. But, Overly Sarcastic Productions is a delightful YouTube channel where they do summaries of history, summaries of mythology, or look at various writing and storytelling tropes, and present them in a funny way. Just explaining to you what they were, give you the Cliff Notes version of the history of Herodotus or the Cliff Notes version of what it is, the amnesia plot, and how it's used in various books. They are funny writers, they are funny deliverers. The woman who runs… Who is part of it does sketches for all these things and her art is a lot of fun. I just highly recommend it as 15 minute, 10 minute beats that you'll probably like because you like this podcast, that are focusing more on tools that can help you be a better storyteller. So, give them a look, Overly Sarcastic Productions.
 
[Brandon] Now, coming back around on this idea of deadlines. One thing that I wanted to bring up is it actually gets harder and harder the better your career goes. This is not something I was prepared for. You usually do get, when you first go full-time, a nice breathing room dump. Where you're like, "Oh. I have extra time. I have more time than I thought, than I ever had for my writing before." That's the most time you'll ever have. That year while you're writing before your first book comes out. My experience has been that once a book is sold, agents tend to be really good at getting you another project if you want one. It's generally a good idea to get a second project and be working on that. Once the book comes out, suddenly there's publicity to do and promotion. The more popular you become, the more successful you become, the more this takes a bite out of your time. To the point that I have less time to write now than I did when I was full-time working a job. Now, granted, I had a weird job where I could write at work. But I have less time than I did then. You would think, "Oh, Brandon, you're full-time as a writer. You would obviously have more time now."
[Dan] Just to give our listeners an idea, arranging this recording session with both Brandon and Victoria took us almost a year of planning.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] To find the right holes in the schedules. Because they're so busy.
[Victoria] I will say I'm definitely one of those that… I'm very grateful for how my career is going right now, but between… I have four publishers and I've been in 16 countries so far this year. If you don't think that takes a bite out of writing… And I know, I can hear people saying, like, "Oh, but you're so lucky." I am, but if I don't also find time to write more books, that luck is going to run out very quickly when I run out of products.
[Brandon] This is a good time in your lives, before you're published, to practice being able to juggle all of these things and know that you can work to a deadline even if other things are interfering. I wish I'd practiced it a little more during my unpublished days.
[Howard] It's… Boy. It may seem hard as a new writer to take the novel you've been working on and that you've revised and to say it's really just not ready yet and put it in the trunk. But… Boy, I gotta tell you, late career, having a trunk full of things that you know exactly how you put them together and you know exactly how to fix them and you've got a pretty good idea of how quickly that would go. That means that when an opportunity comes up where, hey, maybe I could file all the serial numbers off of this and turn it into some money, you can do exactly that.
[Victoria] Related to that, as well, I just want to say, do not undervalue the time between when you sell your first book and when that book hits shelves. That is the most beautiful time you will ever have. It is the clearest, free-est mental time you will ever have or reviews start coming in and before your monologue becomes a dialogue when it comes to your creative energy. But, like, cache anything you can, ideas, balance, learn good work life balance. Also, my favorite productive… Like, procrastinatory technique is the idea that social media is absolutely part of my job. I can do a whole lot of not writing being on social media and justify it as marketing. Really start to analyze, figure out what your best times of day for writing are, figure out when you can do this, figure out what's going to be anything sustainable. Because it's only going to get more complicated as you go down that path. So any… I know I've already said good habits, but any good habits that you can build early will serve you later.
 
[Brandon] If you can become one of the people that is really good at deadlines, that is worth gold in the industry. Because so many writers are… I won't say bad at this…
[Victoria] I'll say bad at it.
[Brandon] I would say…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] There are a lot of professional writers that the best they can do is keep up to date on the one thing they're working on, and that's a struggle. People who can juggle multiple things become very in demand. Even if you're not ending up as a bestseller, if you are a mid lister, but you are someone who can deliver something on time, there'll be work waiting for you at every corner. You'll never go hungry if you can turn in things on a deadline that is good quality work.
[Howard] My friend Jake Black has said on several occasions, be… You can be on time every time. You can be the absolute best in the industry. You can be awesome and fun and enjoyable to work with. If you can only pick two, you'll probably find work. Pick easy to work with and always on time, because being the absolute best at everything in the industry… Boy, that one's hard. The other two are so easy.
[Dan] Well, I wanted to say, that this is extra valuable, especially if you are mid list or even low list. Because you're going to need multiple revenue streams to pay the bills and feed your children. My kids want to eat every day. I don't know…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Where they get off. But you have to have so many different projects and so many different irons in so many different fires that being able to come up with a good schedule is really valuable. I literally will take a print calendar, old caveman style, and I will mark on it every time that I can't write. Then I will start reverse engineering. Well, I've got this project that needs to be done by this day. Build into that how much do I think I can write in a day. How much… Give myself some extra days when I know I screw up, so that I am not immediately behind on the treadmill. Give myself some self-care time. Then, see how much I can compress that. That's how I do it.
 
[Brandon] Let's go to our homework, which hopefully will help you with this.
[Victoria] So. This homework theme of the day is, writing friends, not surprisingly, trying to get you to put some structure into that free-form of writing. I use a very particular app called the Forest app, it leans into the Pomadera method, essentially a timed writing sprint. The thing I like about the Forest app, it's only a couple of dollars. It is gamifying the entire process. You essentially pick a tree. You earn different kinds of trees to go in your forest. You grow different kinds of trees or certain amounts of time, while the Forest app is going. You cannot touch your phone and exit the app, or else the tree will die. The tree dies, and at the end of the day, you have a sad little dead defecated tree in your forest. The only thing I think could make it better would be if it were kittens or puppies instead. But, in the meantime, the Forest app is a nice way to keep track of writing sprints and find a way to just add a little bit of structure.
[Dan] You heard it here first, Victoria wishes she could kill kittens and puppies.
[Victoria] No one wants… I would never kill kittens and puppies.
[Chuckles]
[Victoria] I would never miss a writing sprint.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
NaNoWriMo Pep-Talk from Dan

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/11/23/nanowrimo-pep-talk-from-dan/

[Dan] Hi. This is Dan Wells from Writing Excuses. It is the third week of NaNoWriMo. You have exactly 7 days left to finish your novel. You should be at around 38,000 today. If you're not, that's okay. You've got Thanksgiving tomorrow, which will either eat up a bunch of your time or it will give you a bunch of extra, because you don't have to go to work. Either way...

So, what I want to tell you today is the impact that Nano has had on my career. It took me about a year and a half each to write my first three books. My fourth book was the first one I did for NaNoWriMo. From that point on, I've been doing one or two books a year. It accelerated my pace significantly because it taught me how to write, how to keep to a schedule, how to stop self editing, and more importantly, it taught me how to go back and revise and fix it and make it good later once you've written it.

Fantastic skills. Incredibly valuable skills that have helped me get published.

So. You're doing a good thing. You're doing it well. Keep it up. You're awesome.

And we'll see you at the finish line.
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 32: What Dan Learned Last Year

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/05/17/writing-excuses-season-2-episode-32-the-most-important-thing-dan-learned-in-the-last-year/

Key points: being a full-time author is a lot of work. Self-employment means you are a small business owner, taking care of finances, taxes, publicity -- everything. Forums and websites and fans, oh my! Beware editors bearing changes -- that we need tomorrow. Learn to deal with long-term task switching. Get used to working on a schedule, with deadlines.
dreams of Dan in pajamas? )
[Brandon] Let's wrap this up with a writing prompt from Mister Wells.
[Dan] A writing prompt? All right. I want you to write the first page of a story. Then stop and write the first page of a different story. Then go back and finish the first story.
[Brandon] Part of the fun of these podcasts is listening to us make each other struggle to come up with a writing prompt. This has been Writing Excuses. Join us next week for the last episode of the season.

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