Remembering How to Weekend
The sun had taken aim on the trees in the distance but appeared in no hurry to dive behind them. I rolled over and hugged myself for warmth as the nylon picnic cloth did little to insulate me from the chilly autumn ground. I checked the time. I’d been asleep for an hour.
My wife, perhaps sensing my movement, stirred in her chair. Our dog looked between us and yawned as a trio of scarlet maple leaves fluttered to the ground.
“Do you need to get back?” Kristin asked, folding a book closed atop her lap.
For years, unease would have gripped me in that moment, squeezing my chest like a water balloon, sending a bubble of dread upward into my throat. I would have choked on the obstruction as my mind flooded with thoughts of the yet-unfinished chapter, the screenshots I needed to catalog, the maps I’d yet to place callouts upon. The book, which would later become my final video game strategy guide, was due to the licensor for approvals in three days. Through no fault of my own, the project had gotten behind schedule. Way behind.
But on this day, a glorious Saturday in October, my mind was elsewhere.
The Seven-Day Workweek
Save for the ten months I spent temping as a technical writer after grad school, I’ve been self-employed my entire adult life. Ever since “quitting my day job” back in the summer of 2000, I’ve been working from home as a writer.
At first, I called it freelancing because it sounded exotic. Sexy, even. Then, after graduating to a series of annual 10-book contracts (yes, you read that correctly), the term independent contractor seemed appropriate. Independent because I had no benefits, contractor because once it was up, I was unemployed. Later, after returning from two years of travel, I found myself scavenging for enough strategy guide projects a year to bridge the gap while I focused on Tailwinds Past Florence (it was fun while it lasted). In today’s parlance, I’d become part of the gig economy.
Apps and a little creativity make it possible for the ambitious (and the automated-out-of-a-job desperate) to hustle round the clock, working as independent contractors in a bevy of disparate fields. From Lyft to Fiverr to Etsy, the opportunities are numerous. My twenty-something former self would think this fantastic. The forty-something me shudders uncomfortably.
There are two persistent, yet contradictory assumptions people have about us work-from-home types. The first is that we spend our days sleeping in, playing Fortnite, and watching daytime television while pretending to be working. In pajamas. Always in pajamas.
The second common perception, and one that is eerily accurate in my case, concerns one’s ability to never not be working. This has been a problem that plagued me, well, essentially for my entire career.
There were no days off. There were simply days without a project. I used to joke that I either worked 100 hours a week or none at all. And it really wasn’t much of an exaggeration.
The time of day? The day of week? Immaterial. All that mattered was the deadline. Did I have one, or not? I wouldn’t say no to vacations or excursions but knowing what awaited me would often prohibit my enjoyment.
This is a fine way to approach one’s career for a while, but it’s not sustainable. Not over decades. Do it for too long and you come to believe you need to apologize – or suffer stress-induced angina – for spending a Saturday at the park.
Weekends are Important
“Not yet.” I said, then suggested we visit another nearby park for a walk around a lake. We later stopped for coffee and some light window shopping in the town of Enumclaw. That night, we added two more pins to our map of Washington State Parks, checking off a pair of facilities less than an hour away.
I had never thought about the concept of weekends, the necessity of them. To me, weekends were simply the days Kristin was home from work. They didn’t hold any mystique or represent a time to recharge. I worked whenever I needed to (a lot) and played whenever I could (not as much).
I had decided, perhaps subconsciously on a sunny Saturday this autumn, that this was no way to live. At the park that day, I woke from my nap with a clean mind, as free as I’d ever felt. As weird as it feels to admit this publicly, I felt like I was experiencing my first true Saturday. It was as if I had discovered how the rest of the world lives, or at least those of generations past.
For a Saturday in October, I felt like a kid again.
It’s rather ironic that it took until the waning days of my final strategy guide project to experience that. Or maybe I knew down deep inside that it didn’t matter anymore?
Work Needn’t Be a Four-Letter Word
Casual book lovers and snarky non-readers sometimes joke about the volume of Stephen King’s production, often assuming he employs an army of ghost writers like James Patterson. He doesn’t. Rather, he’s famous for saying that he makes a point of writing each and every day. Even if only for an hour. Christmas, birthdays, weekends, it doesn’t matter. He aims for two-thousand words a day, sixty-thousand a month, effectively producing the equivalent of a draft of an epic 680-page novel every three months.
That old saw about never having to work a day in your life if you love what you do may be cloyingly trite, but there’s an ounce of truth to it.
A quick glance at the spreadsheet I use to track my hours and daily wordcount shows that I logged at least an hour of “work” for 47 consecutive days in October and November, averaging 5.1 hours per day.
I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t know the numbers to be accurate.
There were plenty of days spent working on the Darksiders 3 guide in which I definitely didn’t love my job. Quite the opposite, actually, given how buggy the game was and how little support we received from the game publisher. And I’ve experienced plenty of difficult, frustrating times while writing fiction. But I look over my worklog since finishing that guidebook – the days that I’ve been free to focus entirely on my fiction career – and I feel as if I haven’t worked a single moment. I have to say that I truly love what I’m doing.
I’m a long way from averaging two-thousand words per day, but nobody becomes King overnight.
Especially if they plan to take Saturdays off.
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