Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 9

Editing a Blank Page

WordPress is giving me the prompt “What skills or lessons have your learned lately?” I suppose that’s appropriate.

I’ve been struggling to get out of the beginning of my novel. Basically, I sit down and write a few thousand words. But when I return to it, it isn’t gelling enough for me to move on, so I redraft (which is to toss out what I’ve written and start over).

The lack of progress has been frustrating. A lot of people say, “Sit down and write. It’s that simple.” and I want to say, “No, it isn’t.”

And I don’t think it’s critical voice (at least not all the time).

Then I ran across this book, Dear Writer, You Need to Quit. It’s not about quitting writing. It’s about quitting assumptions and biases.

One is that just because everyone says, “Sit down and write. It’s that simple,” doesn’t mean it actually is for everyone.

It’s probably close to writing heresy.

The whole idea is that you should use your strengths to help you write, not battle against them trying to do what everyone else is recommending. Because what they’re recommending works for them, not necessarily for you.

And the strengths can be identified by the ClintonStrengths by Gallup. They charge about $50 for it, and then give recommendations of how to leverage.

My top strength is Intellection, which means I have to spend time thinking about it. It’s much more of a battle for me to sit down and simply start writing without doing that first.

It explains why, after 200 words, I’m jumping up to clean up in the kitchen. I sometimes use that to think, along with putting things away, walking or driving. I haven’t done as much walking lately because it’s been pretty cold. And none of that was a conscious decision to think about what I was going to do in the opening.

So I tried that. I spent three days walking around or driving and deliberately playing around with the ideas for the first few scenes. I even played Spider because that’s pretty mindless for me.

And I was able to write more in one sitting than before, though I had to stop for more thinking when my creative side surprised me with something.

When I returned to it after the second day, it felt more right than the other versions I’d tried.

So I’m experimenting with this, and it’s become my learning point for this book.

Year of the Puppy

This week was a rough week for my writing. Something changed in the weather—can’t really tell what it was. But I’ve had sinus headaches all week.

Still, I managed to wrap up the end of the month—from when I started tracking the totals—at 9,100 words. I’m using a tracker I discovered at 20 Books from www.svenjaliv.com. It’s not like the normal trackers. The writer is an artist and there are some beautiful images to select from. But it also has a column for notes (most of which this week were “sinus headache.” Ugh).

I also had to tackle some admin issues. Norton Utilities kept warning me that my hard drive was low on resources, so I used the time to start migrating files to the D drive.

This has been more complicated than it sounded. Just like if you’re moving from one house to another, I didn’t want to move something I no longer needed. I reviewed my writing workshops and deleted two that really didn’t fit where I am now and one that I had bad associations with.

Though PARA greatly simplified my digital filing, I still discovered I’d put files in two different places. The biggest thing I needed to keep in mind was that if I’m not updating the file, it should go into the archives.

I also hit the unfinished projects. Any novels (a mystery, two fantasy, and one science fiction), I put into Atticus so I could work on them, rather than have them hide in a folder.

Finally, I attended Year of the Puppy from Smithsonian Associates. This was a fun lecture by a woman who studied how puppies developed from birth. She got with a woman fostering a mutt that had 11 puppies and visited once a week. That gave her opportunities to see the evolution of the puppies. At about three weeks was when their eyes opened and their personalities developed.

She also adopted one of the puppies and reported that it took her six months to like the dog. I thought this was fascinating from the writerly perspective. The addition of the dog disrupted every relationship in the house because it changed the dynamics.

Alas, no puppy pictures though. I do have some horse pictures though…

On Writing More Words

I both like to travel and don’t. It’s going on an adventure and having fun. But it’s also pretty disruptive. The night before I traveled, the critical voice kept saying, “You’ll wake up late and miss the plane!”

Eating is always hard for me on travel. I’m gluten-free (and am most definitely gluten-sensitive) and dairy free. That just eliminates so many options. Even vegetarian and vegan don’t work well because they include gluten and grains (oats are equally bad for me). And gluten-free versions (i.e., buns) are often terrible. So I was glad to get back and eat normally again!

The 20 Books to 50K conference was amazing! The writers there are very business-focused. Everyone is like, “This worked for me, but it might not work the same way for you.”

This was particularly true for the productivity panels (I took all three). Most of this is from a writer who wrote 185 books, Elaina Johnson.

Track your writing for 30-60 days. She wasn’t talking about traditional tracking, where you endlessly fill out a spreadsheet for the sake of tracking. The 30-60 days is to find out the best times to write, what gets in your way, how you felt, etc.

Identify high word count days/months. They can lead to a low word count day/monthIdentify the lowest performing day of the weekLook for patterns

She recommended this word count tracker. The author is also an artist, so these trackers have amazing and fun pictures. I’m trying out the Wonder Woman one.

Some ways to train yourself to write more:

Add 500 words to your word count goalIf you write five days a week, add another dayIf you write for two hours in the evening, add another half hour, or even just 15 minutesLearn to write in 15-minute blocksLearn to write in chaos and with distractions. This is the opposite of what Cal Newport is teaching, but probably more realistic over the long term. Not everyone can build an underground layer.

She rattled off a lot of additional ideas:

Writing sprints with a timerForce yourself to hit the word count goalNo social media until a writing goal is metTry moving to a different location in the houseWrite the first two chapters of the next book as part of the current projectTaking notebook/computer to doctor appointments

One of the things that came out of the conference was that indies need to write three books in the series, then release all three (not necessarily at once). So I’m pushing Broken Notes further out so I can finish book 3 of Dice Ford. Broken Notes will also be part of a mystery series of three books.

My week:

Saturday: I flew back. No writing on the plane. Airlines have shrunk the seats and the aisles yet again. The guy in the middle seat next to me nearly fell over the seat trying to get back in. Just not a comfortable environment.

Sunday: I created a mock cover for the third Dice Ford book. It’s not ready for prime time, given I downloaded a test image to see if it would work before I bought it.

I also bought Atticus, a program for indie publishers. It’s similar to Scrivener. You can write the book in it and then create the files for publishing. Has a very cute terrier! The program is a much cleaner layout and doesn’t have some of the buggy problems I’ve been having with Scrivener. It also formats for ebook and print and has templates, including for copyright.

I jumped in on the first chapter for 1213 words using their timer.

Monday: I took the day off from work because I needed the recovery time from the trip (and also an extra day if I got stuck somewhere because of the weather). Washington, DC was frigid and my brain felt frozen over. I struggled to stay engaged and took longer to write 1009 words.

Tuesday: I redrafted the opening with 1013 words. Openings are always tough for me. I struggle to nail down the voice and the setting.

Wednesday: No writing today. I think the time difference finally caught up with me. I got off work, and my brain went, “Nope, nope, nope. Not doing this.”

Thursday (Thanksgiving): Owing to a family cancelation, I didn’t do anything on Thanksgiving. I went out for lunch at Silver Diner (the chef has been on Beat Bobby Flay and Chopped), which was open until 2:30. Then I had top sirloin steak for dinner. Two writing sessions, one to redraft a chapter in the Time Management book and another attempt at the opening in Dice Ford 3. 1816 words.

Friday: I tried writing today rather than admin. But with the weather bouncing around and dry, I had a sinus headache and was very tired. I couldn’t focus. 375 Words.

All in all, a pretty good week. My critical voice wasn’t happy about the low day, and it still kept nagging at me to stop on the other days. There’s no winning with it!

Viva Las Vegas

I’m still recovering from a trip to Las Vegas last week. That 3-hour time difference is no joke! I attended the 20 Books to 50K, which was an amazing experience. It’s a business-focused conference–and Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch were both giving panels.

So I got a chance after Kris session on writing short stories to get a photo:

Critical Voice Week 10 and Building a Collection

The ever-changing weather of Washington, DC made it a challenging week for me, especially following a cold. The weekend was in the 80s and pretty warm. Monday through Wednesday was blustery and sunny. Wednesday was also very dry. Thursday and Friday was rainy. Saturday was in the 70s, and now we have a freeze alert for the night.

My sinuses do not know what to make of it all!

It’s been a bit of a struggle getting back into writing. I wasn’t always good about recording what I did (I’m using a Bullet Journal). But I got 2,000 words total on a short story for an anthology call. I’ve decided to just aim for the thousand word mark. So I write 1K. The next writing session is to hit 2K, etc.

The story will be a challenge for me. Most of my short stories hit around the 3,500-4,000 word mark. This one has a minimum of 7K.

But the opening line I came up with stuck with me and said, “Write me!” So I went out and made a cover for it. The story uses the same characters from Story 7 of the Great Challenge, Giant Hunter, so I have a new series.

I also had to track down seven stories I submitted that I hadn’t heard any response on, though all the magazines were reported to respond back within a few weeks. Turned out the submission system did not like my email address. It would send me the initial notification, then nothing else. All the stories had been rejected, so seven rejections. I think two more may have been rejected but I’m waiting on those to call it.

Also, I was surprised when I opened my email late this week and discovered I’d picked up a Silver Honorable Mention from Writers of the Future for Superhero on Ice (which I did a cover for):

Meanwhile, I also started to put together another short story collection, called River of Crossroads. Cover:

Putting them together is a bit of a complicated process. Since there are eight on tap, I created a list in Microsoft Lists to help me with the planning of them. It’s just the collection title (or working title), then columns for each of the five stories, and Completed.

The process:

Pick the theme for the collection and then pick the stories that fit that theme.
Pick the order for the stories. There’s a bit of a science to doing this–not like I did my early collections where I just put a bunch of stories in one volume. I identify which story has the best opening and that one’s first. The one with the best ending is last. The story that isn’t quite as good as the others, or doesn’t fit the theme as cleanly goes in the middle.
Paste the stories into the template, along with the individual copyright notices, and a low-resolution image of the cover. There are always headaches with this. I discovered after I did what I thought was the last story that I duplicated one in another collection.
Write an introduction (which I have to redo because of the replacement story).

Next week, I’ll have something interesting on tap!

Critical Voice Week 9

This week, I didn’t get any writing done. I caught a cold over the weekend. The military side of me said, “Accomplish the mission,” but if I did that, I would be sick longer.

Towards the end of the week, I was well enough to finish up a collection for release on December 6.

Five fantasy tales of the sea, rivers, and lakes from Writers of the Future Silver Honorable Mention winner Linda Maye Adams.

In Family Places, an old sea tale Christine Webb’s grandfather told her as a child lingers in her memories. Can mermaids leave messages in bottles? A Writers of the Future Honorable Mention story!

Grace Carrington kills the monsters that lurk in deep waters in Dark from the Sea. But an attack comes from an unexpected enemy: success. The Lighthouse Board believes hunter Grace is obsolete.

Water mage Eleri races against time to track down magic poisoning a local stream near her village in Stitching Streams.

In Spooner’s Cove, map mage Tallis makes a sinister discovery—ships in a remote cove, portending an attack.

A mysterious boat wrecked on a lakeshore hides secrets. An obsessed man, determined to destroy the boat. Amanda Wheeler races to find answers before obsession turns deadly in Lake of Whispers.

Dive into this exciting collection of twisted tales of water.

Preorder here!

Critical Voice Week 8

This week, I took a page from my post on goals and critical voice. After I reached 10K steps a day, critical voice started demanding I reach that every single day. I started ignoring it, but it kept encouraging me to check the step counter on my phone to see what my number was.

And it had virtually no meaning.

Critical voice got upset if I forget my phone, or it didn’t record the steps properly (having a day where I walked a lot and only got 100 steps).

Me: Why do I need to know how many steps I walked?

Critical voice: How else will you know if you’re being successful?

Me: But why is the number important? What do we do with it?

Critical voice: It means you’re being successful.

It’s a very circular argument. There’s actually no real answer to why I should track my steps. s.

Which goes to word count also. Why exactly do I need to track specific numbers?

Most of the reasons I’ve run across are so you can track how long a project will take. But again, why are specifics necessary? If you know that you need to do 1K a day to finish a project and you hit that number, why is it important to record specifics?

Critical voice: So that you know you hit the goal.

Me: But I hit the goal. How does it help me?

Critical voice: It shows you’re making progress.

Same circular argument. There isn’t any reason to track specifics. So this week, I simply ticked off when I completed my required wordage.

Saturday

I wrote about this last week, but it was a cycling day to get Time Management for Fiction Writers done. It’s now set aside for a bit until my creative side wants to drift back to it and do a final sanity check before I ready it for publication.

Sunday

I dove back into Broken Notes. It was hard getting back in after the week of cycling on the other project.

Critical voice is infamous for remembering the story wrong. It reminds me of all the trauma from originally doing this story, so it must be a terrible idea. It actually wants me to abandon it again.

But I ticked off my daily count. Take that, critical voice!

Monday

I get my feet wet on another non-fiction project, also one that’s been sitting: Research for Fiction Writers.

I started this previously, and then critical voice stalled it out. So it’s another one to return to–and it’s a hard topic. Everyone talks about research based on how they did it for term papers in college. It’s enough to make anyone hate doing research. Why associate home, grades, and lectures with the fun of fiction writing?

I want to go in a different direction than all the other books out there, like I did with my Time Management one. And I want it to feel meaty.

I ticked off my daily count.

Tuesday

Research for Fiction Writers: Ticked daily count.

Broken Notes: Ticked daily count.

Wednesday

Broken Notes: Ticked daily count.

Thursday and Friday

Admin days:

First up was getting the pre-release for Space Dutchman ready. While it takes a long time to do the proofreading phase of the process, it makes the publishing setup much easier. That’s up for pre-release November 15.

I refreshed Death at the Fair and Mayhem in the Library, which needed new covers. I also had to read through the stories, which are mysteries similar to Broken Notes. Critical voice has been lurking in the background, whispering that I don’t know how to write a mystery. These stories reminded me that I do.

How do you deal with critical voice?

When I wrote a manuscript for a veteran’s anthology, I had an unexpected critical voice clash.

I’d been accepted for the book, which was published by a traditional publisher. There aren’t many women veterans writing their stories, so it was a big deal for me. The editor of the book sent me comments for revision to my manuscript. Seemed straight forward. I made the corrections and sent them back.

Some time passed. Then she had more changes. I felt less certain of what she wanted. The changes requested were a few paragraphs pasted into email. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was getting this information from the New York editor. I suspect the New York editor didn’t have to time to spend providing specifics.

But I made the changes and sent them back. More time passed. I took the Depth in Writing workshop from WMG Publishing. That’s an amazing, transformative workshop. It shows you how to pull the reader down into the story with setting and five senses. It also was a horrifying revelation for me as to how bad the beginner advice is.

A third round of edits came back. By now, it had been about a year. This time, it was obviously the New York editor, and I was obviously not getting what she wanted. This time, the editor provided some crucial information and the proverbial lightbulb went off: The editor wanted depth.

So I went back into my manuscript and added the setting of Saudi Arabia, what it smelled like, the food, the dust.

When I finished, the critical voice slammed into me from the side. The manuscript had gone from 1,500 words to 3,000 words. Critical voice started spinning. “It’s too long! Now they’re going to reject it!”

I was terrified! I half-believed that story the critical voice told me. But I sent it back anyway,  they were fine with it.

According to Choose Your Story, Change Your Life: Silence Your Inner Critic and Rewrite Your Life from the Inside Out by Kindra Hall, our critical voices also tell stories. They’re often negative or fearful. They can also sound calm and reasonable, like the problem is you, not it. Mine sometimes sounds logical.

But what can you do when it’s telling you stories that sound oh so reasonable?

Identify critical voice

This is the single most important step. Recognize when it’s there. Many people never get off this step and give up writing.

When you’re caught up in it, it’s also very hard to see that it’s there. Signs of presence include:

Spending inordinate time on non-writing tasks and justifying them as writing. This can show up as revision, world-building, and even research. One writer sewed the costumes for her characters.Speaking negatively about your writing (i.e., “all first drafts are bad”).A struggle to get words down on the page.Stalling in some part of the process. This can be anywhere in the story.Getting defensive or angry when someone suggests other options. This often shows up during critiques.Unfinished projects, One writer in my critique group would write three chapters, then submit for critique. If anyone commented other than “It’s good,” he dropped the story and started another three chapters.A book as an event/is important/is your baby. This can happen to anyone. Two big name writers stalled on their last books. One is procrastinating in TV, and the other passed away without ever writing the book.

If you can spot when it’s trying to stick its foot in the door, often you can defuse it before it becomes a problem. Still, it sometimes sneaks up on you.

Identify the Origins of critical voice

Your critical voice likely came from somewhere, which will be the origin of the stories it tells. In Choose Your Story, Change Your Life: Silence Your Inner Critic and Rewrite Your Life from the Inside Out the author notes that these memories are often incredibly detailed.

Mine happened in second grade. The teacher was older than my grandparents. She called me to the front of the dingy classroom to answer a math problem on the chalkboard while the class watched. I had trouble solving the problem. She became impatient, spanked me in front of the class, and berated me angrily. I remember my face heating up with embarrassment, certain everyone was staring at me when I returned to my desk.

In hindsight, she was near retirement and may have hit her tolerance for young children. Other former students did not remember her kindly. She’s been dead for over thirty years, but my critical voice turned her into a critical voice zombie! I think that’s where my problems with typos and perfectionism orginate.

Understanding where the origins are can help minimize the impact of the old stories. I’ve had remind myself that the adult me would never have done what she did to me. Why was I doing ot to myself now?

Reframe

Reframing is a method of changing your perspective, often on something negative. That’s critical voice!

Sometimes it’s asking different questions. I think if I’d reframed my questions about my writing issues instead of aiming at solutions, I’d have worked it out sooner.

This is one I’m experimenting with to overcome my critical voice fixating on word count. The challenge is that I needed to do something to ensure that I didn’t write only three hundred words and stop. That seems to be a natural stopping place for me.

But I recorded it on a spreadsheet like everyone recommends, I fell off it quickly and reverted back to some writing and not enough progress. Maybe like exercise, I needed a little bit of structure, but not too much. I accidentally     stumbled into reframing word coutn as a task, not a goal. You track goals, you mark tasks completed.

Take a break

If you recognize that critical voice has gotten claws into you, take a break. Don’t try to battle with it. The break can be a few minutes to take a walk, an hour delay, or even the next day.

I was writing a short story called “Voices in a Calm Sea.” Really flowed through the second scene. But I was also on a short fuse deadline of five days. The next scene might have been the last one I needed. Critical voice zoomed in and bounced up and down. “Let’s get it done! Let’s get it done! We have to turn it in.”

Nope. I stopped right there and waited until the next day. I needed two more days to pull it all together. My creative voice doesn’t always come up with what it needs in order.

Get enough sleep

This was a surprising one that I discovered while taking Franklin-Covey’s 7 Habits course at work. Covey mentions it almost in passing, so it would have been easy to miss. If you don’t get enough sleep, it makes you more critical. So if your day job is keeping you awake at night, exhaustion can feed your critical voice ammunition.

There are some low-cost options to improve your sleep right away. You can purchase blackout curtains for your windows, along with either binding clips or butterfly clips. These do an amazing job of keeping out the street lights, along with some noise reduction. The clips are to make sure there isn’t a gap between the curtains (plus you can take them on travel and use them for the same purpose!).

Electrical tape can conceal any light sources in the room. I switched my alarm to an app called Sleep Cycle, rather than using a traditional alarm clock. There’s nothing worse than waking up and seeing those red numbers glaring back.

You can also use a fan set on low to filter out noises from the street. I’m also experimenting with a weighted blanket.

For more information on improving your sleep, try Dr. Mark Hyman’s Sleep Master Class. It’s free at the writing of this, though it says limited time (which has been several years).

Finally…

Critical voice doesn’t have to cripple you. But it takes a lot of effort to identify it at first. Once you see how it works for you, you’ll start spotting it more quickly (most of the time, anyway).

Taking Time Off

One of the common threads over the last few years is that workers aren’t taking leave. Some companies force employees to do it with a “use or lose” policy. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people lost leave instead of taking it.

This behavior was also encouraged by the time management gurus. They thought sleep interfered with your goals, so why not time off?

Prime territory for critical voice.

According to Hustle & Float: Reclaim Your Creativity and Thrive in a World Obsessed with Work by Rahaf Harfoush, this also plays into the American Dream. We think that if we work hard, we’ll automatically have success.

You see this even among fiction writers who focus on word count production as a sign of success, but not on learning. I know a writer who produces a million words a year and languishes in token pay markets.

Taking time off is vital for the creative side. It helps refresh our brains and gives us new input.

Never did I understand the reality of this until COVID-19. In the weeks following the shutdown, I longed for a simple trip to a museum so I could soak up the exhibits. I didn’t even care what they were. I only knew I needed new input.

The reasons for not taking time off are pretty consistent:

Fear of falling behind, dreading the pile of work they will have.Fear of not being a team playerThe company will find they can manage without the employee.

During my days of chaos, another reason that came into play under those: Agency.

Agency pops up because you have to decide to take vacations. Since I was putting out so many fires, I didn’t have time to think about vacation. I would work, work, work, and try to escape on the weekend. Because I was so overwhelmed, I was barely functional on the weekends.

I knew I needed to do fun things, but it always seemed like they were competing with writing.

I tried visiting museums. But they became like a to-do list—something I had to do to have fun, not something I wanted to do.

The result was that I would suddenly bump up against burnout and realize I needed to take a week off. I’d schedule leave about a month out, then suffer for the next four weeks, knowing I needed it now.

When I got to the time off, I was still so stressed, then I worried about all the reasons people have trouble taking time off. Particularly, I was the only one doing everything. If I wasn’t there, nothing was being done. What if I’d forgotten something? I couldn’t even get myself out of firefighting mode.

Yet, somehow, I thought, now that I have all this time, I could get writing done!

Then I returned, and the email was horrifying. Everyone was waiting for me to get back with whatever crisis they had. I spent the week stressed out, falling behind on everything while people pelted me with emergencies and interruptions.

I always thought the problem was the day job. But a lot of the problems started with me.

Remember, everything is black and white to the company: profit and loss. The company does not care. You have to.

The first step is to plan out your leave for the entire year. Use your agency to decide when you’re going to take it and put it on your calendar. Look not only for the week-long ones you’ll need but opportunities for taking one day off. If you don’t have a lot of leave, use holidays with your leave.

Now you’ve got the anticipation of thinking, “What would I like to do?”

That’s fun because it allows your creative voice to play. What does it want to do?

Any kind of travel is expensive, so this gives your critical voice a job that it finds fun as well. It’ll want to figure out how to do a trip—whether a day trip or a flight across the country—economically.

The book Get Away! Design Your Ideal Trip, Travel with Ease, and Reclaim Your Freedom by David Axelrod got me thinking about how I could do that.

It was new for me because I pantsed all my travel. I’d did the basic hotel and airfare and winged the rest. Scheduling it at the last minute the way I’d been doing it contributed a lot to the problems.

Since I had selected a specific date, I thought about what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to fly anywhere because things were getting expensive. A driving trip would be doable. The Shenandoah Mountains? Naw. I’d done that in 2020. Luray Caverns? Meh. Done that before.

Natural Bridge? I hadn’t seen that, and it was one of those places I’d wanted to visit. The first step was seeing how far away it was. About four hours, so it was doable for a drive trip.

Then I researched the Natural Bridge area for things to do. I settled on a visit to the bridge and a dinosaur park and booked the hotel. I was going to circle back in a few weeks and buy the dinosaur park tickets online.

When I did, I discovered I’d reverted to my pantsing ways. I was traveling there on the weekday and the dinosaur park was only open on the weekend. Did I change the hotel reservation or change my plans?

I changed my plans. This time, I dug into more detailed research of what else was available in the area. I found the Virginia Safari and started reading through the site. They were open during the timeframe. And I could feed animals!

I booked it right away. It gave me something to look forward to for several months. My creative voice knew that feeding the animals would be a lot of fun.

The second step takes place at the day job. I reviewed my schedule about three weeks out. It helps keep surprises from becoming emergencies.

With scheduled leave coming up, I now have time to close out tasks well in advance. It’s important to do this at least two weeks out. When I tried this a week out, I had a crazy week where I couldn’t get anything done. Two weeks allows you to work everything in.

The first thing I do is ask for someone to cover several areas and make sure I’m clear on what they need to do while I’m gone. Please, never go off on a week’s leave without doing that. It’s very challenging for the person who has to fill in. They have no idea what’s going on or what you did.

Then I work through getting all my tasks done. Many gurus advocate working late or through lunch to do it. To me, that’s like punishing yourself for taking time off for yourself!

However, if you’ve been keeping up and focusing on reducing the firefighting, it’ll help get you out the door without feeling like you’re escaping over the prison wall. I’ve shifted some recurring tasks on the calendar to do them a little earlier and knocked out any mandatory training. If I get swamped (because somehow, something always comes up. It must be a rule), I’ve identified tasks I can let go of this week.

I’ll set up my out-of-office in Microsoft Outlook early, so I don’t forget. It allows you to set a specific date when the out-of-office is to start and end. A very useful addition!

Then I look ahead to the week I return. Is anything there I can do now? Again, I may also let go of one of the scheduled tasks.

This is where it’s important to keep up where possible. There are always times when you have to let something go this one time because something more important pops up. But if you’re keeping up most of the time, it’s not a deal breaker.

Sometimes I’ll try to be optimistic and keep the task on the calendar, but it often changes once I see my email.

If you have any problems because, well… people, since it seems like these will show up right before you are on leave (must be a rule out there!), take notes. This helps offload any annoyance before you go on leave and also helps your future self because you’ll want to forget it for a week. Dump your notes and any other documentation into a folder. This way, critical voice isn’t going to pop up and say, “What about this?”

Starting Thursday, wind it down. Just like what you would normally do on Friday at the end of the week, but with an extra day. Clean up your tasks, clean up your folders, and do general tidying. Don’t leave a mess for your future self to return to. Your critical voice will latch onto that and nag at you all week.

Your goal is to walk out the door on Friday with the sense of completion like story validation gives you.

One challenge of vacation planning, though, is the tendency to over schedule. We’re told repeatedly that we have to schedule everything so it will happen. It is okay to have vacation events that don’t fill up the entire day.

It was a lesson learned for me. I added two scheduled events—ones with actual times and booked those in advance. The first went by the wayside because it was extremely. I finally said “Forget it,” even though I’d spent money scheduling it. The second I could only do on the day I drove back and critical voice was convinced there wouldn’t be a problem. Except that I’d have to hang around for three hours until the event, then return home late afternoon.

My creative voice rebelled, and I didn’t do either.

When I returned a few months later, I only scheduled the safari, since that wasn’t time-dependent. Then I stopped at a museum along the way (pure pantser decision) and added two events on the fly after I got there.

Scheduling should provide some structure, but shouldn’t be at the expense of having fun. Nor should pantsing the travel be at the expense of having fun.

What the heck do you do with social media?

The challenge for fiction writers is to get noticed in a cluttered digital world. Advice is everywhere. Most of it is given by people who do social media full time. It’s not much of a reality for a writer juggling a day job and a side hustle.

But if it steals time from your writing, it’s a big problem. You’re not writing if you don’t produce new fiction.

It’s common to hear writers say they do ninety percent marketing and ten percent writing. But a new book is marketing. If the reader likes the first one, they’re out of luck buying another book if there isn’t one!

But most social media advice for fiction writers is terrible.

Fiction is hard to sell with social media. Most of the recommendations are for entrepreneurs who have a business. For example, if I had a time management business, I could post on various social media platforms tips and advice. It would be useful for the people reading it. If I hit the right spots, they might contact me for a consultation.

For a fiction writer? The earliest advice was to present yourself as an expert on your book’s topic (from entrepreneurs, of course!). This is problematic for a variety of reasons.

The most obvious is that the “expertise” might only apply to one book. I’m working on Broken Notes, which is set in a Queen Anne historical house. Okay, I could blog loosely as an expert on that. Maybe. But my next book is going to be a fantasy. Now what? Blog as an expert on unicorns?

You can see how silly that advice is.

Less obvious is the time suck it can become. When I co-wrote, my partner posted on Civil War firearms. It was part of the setting, and he knew a lot about the topic. We both told ourselves we would build readers that way.

There was a lot of interest in the posts. We regularly received emails about them. And most of the emails were “What’s my grandpappy’s muzzle loader worth?” None of the people visiting were interested in the books.

As a result, writers gravitate to writing tips. Usually, they’re beginners, and often don’t realize they’re providing bad advice. These types of pages attract other beginning writers, but not readers. In 2017, a writing duo was indie publishing fiction and had a popular sideline for fiction writers. They discovered the writing sideline was messing up their algorithms on one of the booksellers, causing their sales to decline. A writer might buy one of their novels, but not be a reader of that genre. So they discontinued the writing classes.

The problem is that this area sells more quickly than fiction. It’s common now to see writers blogging as experts of fiction, have books out on the topic, and even give classes. Yet, they have almost no fiction published.

There’s the additional problem of agents “requiring” writers to have thousands of followers before they submit a manuscript. It makes writers scramble to build any followers, even if they’re not buyers.

But it’s a backdoor rejection. The agent knows it’s challenging to have that many followers without a published novel. Exactly how would you build a following when you haven’t established any trust with future readers?

An agent who requires that isn’t interested in finding new writers. They’re only looking for established ones. So they give the writer a task that’s probably impossible to complete, and the writer never submits the manuscript.

So what the heck do you do then?

Promotion that is writing

This is easy because it makes use of what you’re already doing. Spend some time learning what genre. If you just dismissed that, saying, “I know what it is,” you need to know more. I did the same thing, and it turned out I was overbalancing on personal preferences.

Genre is a marketing label so readers know what to expect. If you write a romance, they expect a happily ever after. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like happy endings. The genre requires it.

 If you write science fiction, you need strong world-building. I read a book billed as a “Sci-Fi Mystery like J.D. Robb.” No to all three. The author had too much science fiction for a mystery, not enough mystery for a mystery, and not enough science fiction for science fiction. Then there was the romance that took over the story halfway through. Genre conventions are important for the reader.

Another area to work on is short stories. If you get into a professional rate magazine, it’s worth a fortune in promotion. If you run out of markets, then you indie publish individually and in a collection.

Finally, publish twenty books. Readers won’t start trusting a writer until they hit that mark. The books can be novellas, novels, non-fiction, or collections—but should be long fiction (doesn’t work with individual short stories). I’m just starting to hit that now, and I’m seeing sales bounce up.

Set boundaries on time

Social media is designed to be addictive. The companies want to pull you in and keep you scrolling to the next post, tweet, or picture. So you have to be ruthless about your time. It’s alarmingly easy to spend a lot of time on it without realizing it.

Start by not doing any social media close to the time you write. It’ll bleed into your writing time too easily.

Then set a boundary on how much time you can spend. You can use an external boundary to help keep it in check. For example, if you’re waiting on your food to cook, that might be a good time to grab some quick time on social media.

Select only two social media platforms

These words of wisdom came from Craig Martelle at Superstars. He runs the 50K to 20 Books Conference in Las Vegas.

It’s making sure you don’t spend all your time trying to keep up with multiple social media platforms. It takes a lot of time just posting to two, and one of mine is my blog!

You might see other writers posting to all the platforms. Those writers either aren’t producing much new or they have a lot of help. James Patterson has forty-one people doing that for him.

You might have to spend money

When I say that, I’m not talking about buying ads. Writers always default to that first and it should be way, way down the line, after you’ve tried all the free ane inexpensive options. Ads should be leveraged when you have a lot of books so you can get lots of sales.

But you might need tools to help you save time. For example, you might use Buffer to post tweets during the day. When I signed up for Book Funnel to build my newsletter, I used Buffer to set up the book giveaway tweets. It’s still hard because I have to create enough Tweets for a week. You’d think four a day isn’t that much, but it is! I’ve wrestled with finding the time for it. Do I write a month’s worth? Or do I do a week’s worth? Do I post on the day? And I still have to be a human being more than someone auto-tweeting.

Last word…

A trend emerging for the “influencers” is burnout. These are people who are producing a video for YouTube every week, then popping in for an interview on another influencer’s video feed. They’re “on” all the time, trying to “have it all.”

But it takes its toll. A food blogger I followed bowed out earlier this year. She just couldn’t keep up anymore. Others have invited other bloggers to post or have changed what they do.

With our day jobs and limited time, sometimes it’s just as important to let it go for today.