It’s been fairly quiet around here recently. As it turns out, when you’re 6 weeks out from the publication of one book, copyediting another book, actively writing a third book, doing a Patreon story every month or so, and contemplating the projects you’d like to pitch next, you run out of time for non-essential writing things like blogging (remember that I STILL have a day job on top of all this!). Understandably, I’ve also been less interested in wading into the screaming mire that is every internet meltdown. Even the act of muting keywords and accounts takes away from time I could be spending writing new work. I do miss waxing on here, but I find that I need to save my spoons for coping with comments/responses/meltdowns to my work during set times. I’ve been seeing a lot more writers step back from the internet this year, especially Twitter, and for good reason. No matter what you say on the internet, it’s going to piss off somebody. Sometimes you need to save up the points you spend on deflecting the piss.
Time management has been high on my list of things to fix this year, and if I was going to get all the work done that I needed to get done, something had to go. That something was engaging with the internet. When people pop into my Twitter mentions now with a passive-aggressive response or angry point of disagreement, I just mute them. Folks forget that they are talking to a Real Human Being here, with a shitbrick of work to do and no time for their nonsense. I’ve reminded myself over and over this year that the purpose of most abuse you get online for speaking your mind (especially if you don’t present as a Generic White Dude), is done to steal your time. People want to wear you down, to break you, to silence you. And in order to keep working, I’ve had to make some changes to how I interact (or not) in online spaces. Most of the bloviating circle-jerking stuff is just not worth my time. I engage when it matters, not just in reaction to somebody being dumb and wanting me to waste my time bloviating a “response” to something patently ridiculous like “women shouldn’t vote” or “periods make women dumb.” I’m too fucking busy getting shit done over here.
While our dog is finally on the mend, he’s still got another 4-6 weeks of rehab left to be a Real Dog again, and a lot of physical, mental and financial resources have gone toward helping him get better the last five or six months. What this also meant is that we went from being in a free-wheeling place with money earlier this year where we were looking at how to prioritize house maintenance projects to biting our nails waiting on royalty checks, which is sort of depressing.
In the meantime I’ve been consuming a lot of media whenever I’m not writing. Since the only traveling we do these days is for conventions or writing retreats, I binged a bunch of Parts Unknown to get my travel fix, and since it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to afford a writing shed or a 500 square foot cabin somewhere anytime soon, I watched Tiny House Hunters and Tiny House Builders and Beach Bargain Lake Property Hunters or whatever they’re called because I’m too lazy to Google. I finished reading a couple of novellas, as they are perfectly sized for my busy brain: Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire, which wasn’t my usual bag but captured an emotion that I really grokked. I also read and blurbed Cassandra Khaw’s Hammers on Bone, which dealt with some triggery abuse themes, but which uses such great language that it turned a contemporary setting into Lovecraftian Weird, and I love that. I’ve been working my way through Robert J. Bennett’s City of Blades slowly but surely, too. It’s a much more politic-y book than the last one, with fewer divine wonder moments than the first one to pull me through. Still solid, though. Also slowly reading Kai Ashante Wilson’s Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, which, though the language and worldbuilding is great, is 100% male characters so far, and has been a bit of a slog to get to the through-line. Still, I am persevering. YMMV.
Exercise has been high on my list of getting my shit together, so I invested in some gardening work. Hauling bags of mulch and rocks and three hours of weeding have served to highlight 1) how much I need to get into shape 2) how deplorable my garden got last year. If we can scrape some pennies together here after taxes are paid (we got an extension. Long story), I’d like to plant some more trees around the yard, too. Though our house is cheap, which is great, the problem is that it’s about a mile from downtown, in a residential area that borders an industrial area, which makes it very noisy. Big trucks, a warehouse nearby, trains, people yelling, kids playing… noise. As an introvert, I want to be able to walk around in my yard or sit by the fire with a drink and just have… quiet. I don’t like feeling on display for the neighborhood. Even if we do put some pennies together for a fence at some point, it doesn’t solve the problem of the noise. But finding a house that has the privacy I need to work most efficiently and relax that’s still close enough for my spouse to have his gaming nights with friends in town has been an epic and impossible undertaking. The closest we got was a house that was nearly 40 minutes from town, overpriced, and which still needed some work. Hence the cabin idea, as if you add up what we owe on our current cheap house with a cheap cabin, you still get a price that’s about half what the average mortgage is for other folks. The only reason to live in Ohio, folks, is that it’s cheap cheap cheap.
And efficiency is very much on my mind these days, with so much going on. I squirreled myself up away in a frontier cabin from, like, 1848 or something in the Hocking Hills the weekend before last to give myself time away from the grind to finish a more plot-y draft of THE STARS ARE LEGION. It was a long slog – I cut 3,000 words and added 15,000 – in perfect silence in a place where I could only get enough signal to check email if I stood on the porch and waved my phone around. It was lovely, and made me miss the woods. The older I get, the less patience I have for people and noise and the constant interruptions that bombard us every day. I work in marketing and advertising, so I get that I contribute to the noise problem, too. I generate a massive amount of content every week for brands. The reality is that the goal of all this modern technology is not to make us more productive and achieve our life goals. Quite the opposite. The purpose of this technology is to give you more “free” time that you’ll spend gorging on content in places where they can sell ad space. To put it another way, “The world is not designed to help you achieve long-term goals.” The world wants your attention to be confused and fragmented, because confused people make stupid decisions. They click on dumb ads. They give their emails to spammers. They respond to spam email. They accidentally sign up for junk. The less focus we have, the easier we are to manipulate and control. And yeah, I feel this a lot when I’m overtaxed and stressed out. I spend more time on dumb junk media because it can be picked up and put down far more easily than truly engaging work. But I need that engaging work, that deep focus, to achieve the things that matter to me. Unfortunately, deep focus and stuff like Twitter just don’t go hand-in-hand. So, once again, we circle back to the necessity of spending less time on social media.
Time has become especially dear here to me as I contemplate life on the other side of 35. At 36, I’m pushing toward forty faster than I expected, and frankly, I’m kind of a mess. Yes, I’ve achieved many of the things I set out to achieve. I always wanted to have one of those Interesting Writer bios, full of weird places I’d traveled, and odd jobs and awards and swanky publications, and you know, I have the cool bio now. My books may not be uber-bestsellers (yet!) but they’re building an audience, and I’m proud of having written nearly 8 books since 2011, all of which were the sorts of books I wanted to read, the sorts of books that nobody else could have written. But more and more, I’m looking at what I’ve had to sacrifice to get here – health being a big one – and seeing that even after all those sacrifices, I’m not in the Writer 1%. Funny that I think about that, because honestly, being in the Writer 1% was never a goal of mine. But being in the Writer 1% is, alas, the only way to make a comfortable living as full-time fiction writer these days (unless you want to write 3-6 books a year and go insane, which I did last year, and which was… yes, insane, and unsustainable). So many full-time writers I know are actually making half or more of their income from freelancing, or they have a spouse with a solid day job. You’d be surprised.
So here I find myself, writing like I’m running out of time (ha!) because I’m well aware that I am. I continue to work on projects that I’m passionate about, projects that I choose because I want to level up, and it’s been nice to see the market shifting a little more toward what I write. I feel less like I’m on the fringes now, which is great for selling things, but an interesting place to find myself after twenty years of raging against the machine. At some point in the grind you look up, and you’re there on the mountain, and you don’t take time to see the view because you are so fixed on the top, the summit, the peak that keeps stretching on and on ahead of you, shifting further and further away with every step you take.
Writing for a living is not a get rich quick scheme. It’s not something you knock out on the beach in an hour (unless you have a rich spouse or a trust fund that can support that). It’s great to do what you love, but let’s not pretend there isn’t a cost. Everything has a cost. You just have to make sure that the price you’re paying is worth what you want in return. What I want is worth it, but that doesn’t mean every day is a rose garden. Most days are a slog on the mountain.
