I didn’t really expect it to happen like this. If I’m honest, I never really expected it to happen at all. It has always been my ambition to be a full-time writer, but it always seemed just out of reach. Something that I was always working towards but never seeming to get closer to. Then one day it happened but, like I said, not the way I expected it to.
At the end of May I was made redundant from my day job. It was a shock. I had been with the company for something like 14 years. There’s no hard feelings though. I don’t think it was ever the right fit for me. It was something to do while I waited for my writing career to take off. It was convenient because I could work from home and it paid reasonably well.
Then it was gone and I had to figure out what to do next. I considered various options but none of them was right. I didn’t want to have to go into an office. I didn’t want to have to get another “job”. And all the while I was thinking and looking into what I was going to do to make money, I was continuing to write fiction, as I have always done.
One day, I was talking to Tamzin and she asked me if I thought I could make money from fiction. I’m already making money, I told her, just nowhere near enough. But, if I could focus on that and start doing the “business” side of things as well, there was a pretty good chance that I could make more. So she told me to do it. And here I am.
I’m not starting from scratch. I have a decent back catalogue to work with. I have been publishing for more than ten years. The main problem is that I haven’t actually told anyone about it. There are people who don’t even know I am a writer.
Since that conversation I have spent a while learning more about the business side of publishing and working out what I need to do. This is an ongoing process. Nothing is set in stone. But I have ideas and I am starting to build up the things that I need. You will be hearing a lot more from me.
Cat Update
Pixel and Cody are doing well and getting more confident. Pixel has let us stroke her and was really interested in the smells on my trainers when I came back from running.
There are some things that we never “get over”. They are things that we carry with us our whole lives. Things that become part of who we are.
That is not what this blog post is about.
At some point I will write about what that thing is for me, but I can’t do it right now. I can’t climb that wall yet and, if I don’t go around it to write this, then I guess I will stand there looking at it forever.
Just because I am not talking about it now, doesn’t mean that it’s not still important. It doesn’t mean that I am not thinking about it constantly. It only means that I can’t write about it. Yet.
As long as we understand each other on that front, I can carry on.
The Cats
Yesterday we picked up two new kittens. They are a brother and sister. Oscar named the boy Cody after a character in Total Dramarama, and the girl Pixel after a character in Ninjago.
PixelCody
Pixel was the first one out of the crate we brought them home in, immediatly marking her out as the brave one. She was also the first one to use the litter tray. When Cody gets scared he runs over and hides behind her, so I guess he thinks she’s the brave one as well.
Cody was the first one to eat. We gave them some wet food as a treat last night and he was the only one to eat it. I guess that makes him the hungry one?
This morning I found myself starting to doubt the story I’m working on. I began asking myself whether it was really the best thing I could be doing, whether I wanted to spend so much time writing it.
Resistance is part of any project worth taking on and I am used to coming up against it. Sometimes I win the battle and sometimes I lose. Quite often, the battles that I lose, end up being projects that I look back on and wish I had finished.
“Resistance in my experience always kicks in when you’re trying to move from a lower level to a higher level or to identify with a braver part of yourself or your higher nature. So it’s that negative repelling force. It’s kind of the dragon that we have to slay every day if we’re artists or entrepreneurs.” – Steven Pressfield
Even now there are stories sitting half-finished that I think I might return to one day but that I wish I had never abandoned. They are stories that I think would have been really good. Perhaps they were stories which could have pushed my skill to a new level.
So the question becomes; how is it best to handle resistance?
“Don’t prepare. Begin. Our enemy is not lack of preparation. The enemy is resistance, our chattering brain producing excuses. Start before you are ready.” – Steven Pressfield
Which is where I find myself now.
There is always the possibility that what I am working on isn’t worth persevering with, but I won’t know that until I have some perspective. The only thing I know for sure right now is that most of the projects I have abandoned would have been woth persevering with.
I don’t know if I’m ready to start yet, but maybe I should take the resistance I’m feeling as a sign that I should. There are reasons to wait, good one’s, but there might be better ones to start.
When I’m writing I like to have a list of names that I can pick and choose from as I’m going. It saves me having to stop and think of them while I’m in the flow. It also means that I don’t have to type “XX” or whatever to remind myself to add it in later.
I already have the names of the main characters in my upcoming story, but I needed some extras to choose from for characters that I don’t know about yet. This morning I put together a couple of lists, one for surnames, the other for first names.
A couple of invaluable resources for this process are:
I am planning to add more “quick tips” like this. There are a lot of good resources out there and I am always interested to find out what other people use.
When you encode an analogue music file to MP3, some loss of quality is unavoidable.* I believe that the same is true when you pick digital tools over analogue ones.
You may have picked up on my preference for notebooks and pens over computers and phones. In my mind this is more than a choice over which is more fun to use. I believe that using analogue tools leads to a better output.
There are, of course, benefits to using digital notebooks, but as I considered this over the weekend (writing into my pocket notebook) just because there are some benefits, doesn’t mean they make up for the disadvantages.
I want to be able to leave my phone behind for days at a time and that won’t feel possible if I’m using it for notes. So, despite the many advantages of using my phone as a notebooks, that one disadvantage is enough to make it a no go.
There are other disadvantages, but that was the big one at the weekend. And it’s an important one. Being able to leave my phone behind makes up for the occasional inconvenience of taking out a paper notebook, for those times when it’s not possible so I miss something. It makes up for a hell of a lot and when you add it to the other advantages (quality, peace of mind, memory improvements) then it just doesn’t make sense for me to switch.
The problem with a lot of digital technologies is that by using them I would be encoding for loss. I know from the start that they aren’t as good as analogue equivalents, so by using them I am saying that quality is less important that convenience. As I mention in Compromises that is occasionally a compromise that I am willing to make, but not always, in fact, not even often.
*Yes, I understand that there are “lossless” formats such as FLAAC, but I would argue that even when using those formats a certain amount of loss happens by not having a physical representation on the music such as a CD or record. In my experience, listening to music goes beyond the sounds that you hear when you press play. At its best it is a tactile experience.
I try to stay away from networked devices. It isn’t always possible. I work for a big technology company and that means that all the tools I use are connected. In my spare time I do copy writing and that often means I have to go online to do research. So what I really mean is that I try to manage my online use.
I have social media accounts but I don’t use them. Someone tried to contact me on Facebook Messenger and I didn’t find out about it until they messaged Tamzin to ask why I wasn’t responding. The responsible thing to do would be to close my account so that no one expects me to respond to anything they send there.
I subscribe to 22 RSS feeds but only a few of them post daily. Only one of them posts more than once a day and they are very short. None of them are technology related and none of them are “news”.
The internet is a powerful tool, but something feels broken about the way we use it. I don’t think that we should live there the way we do. Maybe that’s just an issue of nomenclature; maybe referring to a home page is what bothers me. But then I see reports about screen time and I ask myself is any time reasonable to spend online every day? Should the internet even be an every day thing?
I don’t have any answers. I’m trying to work it out. I think everyone should work it out for themselves because any answers I come up with will only apply to me.
I used to have a room to write in. The spare room in our little two-up, two-down terrace. I had a big desk and plenty of space. Most importantly, I had a door that I could close. After my son Jude was born, it continued to be my office, although sometimes when he had a difficult night I had to share it with him in the morning. When he was six months old my office became his bedroom. That was five years ago now.
Since then I’ve worked in a variety of places. At the dining room table, in coffee shops, on my lap. It wasn’t a problem.
When we bought our new house the plan was to use one of the bedrooms as a laundry room / office. But as we tore down walls and built them up again, as we decorated and furnished, the spare room was never a priority. Again, this wasn’t a problem. I was used to working wherever I could open a notebook.
I have written previously about the number of meetings I have at my day job. It is an hours drive away and I’ve been getting frustrated with doing that journey just to sit at my desk and sit on conference calls. So over the weekend I bought and built a small desk and wedged it into the spare room. The walls are unfinished, the carpet isn’t laid. There is no light in the ceiling and it still smells a bit like plaster. I’m sitting there now and I could not be happier.
It wasn’t until I got the space back that I realised how much I’ve missed having a room of my own. Or, in this case, the corner of a room. There is a door that I can close and that makes all the difference. Finally I have a place where I can go to write, or to work, and feel comfortable.
I’ve been brainstorming the first book of my fantasy series for almost two months now. The old me could have planned, written and published a book in that amount of time. I was starting to wonder whether I’d made a mistake, and potentially wasted two months of productivity. I was losing the excitement that had been pushing me on.
Then last night as I was working through the plot for what felt like the hundredth time, something happened. It clicked. Suddenly a dozen disconnected fragments came together and turned into story.
This is one of the things that I love most about writing. When everything seems to come together out of nowhere.
Now I think about how close I came to giving up on the project and wonder if there are other stories that I gave up once which would eventually have come together in the same way.
There is still a long way to go before I’m ready to start writing in earnest, but now I know that I will get there eventually. I just have to keep working on it and not stop.
Time. Where does it go? It seems there’s never enough of it.
I seem to have a hundred projects on the go at the moment; at work, at home and writing. Everything is getting very busy.
I’m not sure that I’m keeping on top of it but I’m trying. It’s a real challenge to my analogue productivity philosophy.
Things could get even busier. Now is the time to make sure I have a robust set of tools and workflows to make sure I can handle it.
This was not supposed to be a post about the tools I am using, but here we go.
The primary tool I have is habits and routines. These are things that I have been building over the past few months (and will continue to build) that mean the day to day things are taken care of. I have time to work on fiction, I am eating well, I am exercising and I am spending time with my family. These are the bedrocks that I build upon for everything else.
My task management needs work. I am floating somewhere between several systems and have different systems depending on whether it is work, personal or writing. Ideally I would like to consolidate these things, probably using Todoist. Then I have about twenty different calendars in Google. The process I follow is to visit each of those sources every day and create an analogue day plan. This goes in a dot-grid medium Moleskine – although I will be changing that to a LEUCHTTURM1917 shortly because I carry around so many Moleskine notebooks that I can’t tell which one I need at any given time. My day plan includes all of the habits, meetings, and tasks that I plan to accomplish. Generally I split the page in four so that I have two scheduled breaks and a lunch. This only covers my day at work, my mornings and evenings are essentially habit focused with little variation.
One place where I think this can be improved is by also scheduling my weekends. It is something that I plan to look into.
Notes are another big part of my workflow. I use a pocket Moleskine for when I am out and about and Standard Notes for at a computer. This is an evolving system.
Then I have a series of notebooks for specific purposes, a “general writing” book which is where most of my writing starts off, fiction and non-fiction. A logbook which I use as a kind of diary to keep track of the things that I do each day.
Most of these ideas are from other people and a lot of the tension I’m feeling right now is probably a result of not having moulded them into a coherent “system” of my own. It feels like a process that I can’t rush, or I’ll end up skipping from system to system and never settle. It’s a cycle that I’ve gotten into before.
I have dabbled in writing fantasy in the past. The Girl Who Dreamed The World and Son of the Sea are two of the most relevant examples, although most of my stories have fantasy elements. They were both a lot of fun to write, but also a lot of work and at the time, my focus was on publishing as much as I could, so I decided not to pursue the interest. Recently though my focus has changed.
At some point, no doubt, I’ll write about the tools I use, but suffice it to say that they are mostly analogue now and that already means that everything takes longer. I’m fine with that, I enjoy the process much more this way, and it has caused me to re-evaluate my stance on publishing speed. At the same time I have started reading a lot more fantasy and remembered how much I enjoy it. So it was only natural that I would want to play in that world.
When I think back to the earliest stories I wrote (as a child, so nothing to link to here) they were mostly fantasy. I enjoyed the slow process of building a new world from the ground up and that is what I am enjoying again now. It’s a very similar process actually. I’m filling up notebooks with thoughts and plans and everything feels very fluid. Most of it won’t even be included in the series, but it is important that I know it.
All of this means, that I’m not sure I will release any more (new) books this year. There may be a few short stories, and I am targeting December to release the first book in the series, but I haven’t worked this way before, so it’s difficult to judge how long it will take. I will write more about the project here so you know where I’m up to. I think it will be worth the wait. In the meantime, there are plenty of other fantasy stories for you to read.
