I Should Sue My Boss

Continuing on from my post about how my work has increased . . .

Earlier this year someone posted to a writers’ group I belong to, asking how those of us who write full-time decide how much time to take off work.

Which rammed me face-first into the fact that I have no answer to that question.

Time . . . off . . . ? What is? I’m not kidding when I say I’d never in my life given real, meaningful thought to the matter. I have never worked at a conventional job, where things like “vacation days” and “sick days” and so forth might be a consideration: it’s either been summer stints, no more than three months at a stretch, or it’s been teaching jobs. Or writing, where I am my own boss . . . and when I stopped to take a look at how that’s going lately, I realized I should probably sue my boss.

See, at the beginning of this year, I decided to try using a spreadsheet someone had made that would track my output. I’ve never done that as a long-term thing; sometimes when I’m drafting a novel I’ll record my daily progress, but I chuck that once the draft is done. But I was curious, so I took the spreadsheet and modified it to have separate tabs for fiction and nonfiction, plus one that would add those together for my total wordcount. (The spreadsheet in question is set up to look like a calendar and has coding that changes the color of the cell depending on how much you wrote, hence me using what someone else had made — the bells and whistles were attractive.)

Thanks to this, I had a way of gauging how many days I’d taken off thus far in 2023. I couldn’t really measure time — whether I’d spent at least X hours on a given day doing work — and of course this was only tracking word output, plus the notes I’d added to cells when I spent the day doing something else in that “main work” category (e.g. copy-editing Labyrinth’s Heart instead of drafting The Market of 100 Fortunes). But in the absence of a better metric, I decided to count it as a workday if I’d recorded any words written or noted other main work. Undoubtedly that counted some days where all I did was spend half an hour revising and then posting a Patreon essay — but it also missed days where I spent hours catching up on work email or updating my website or doing one of the million other tasks that surround the main work. I decided to call it a wash.

So with that rule in hand, circa April I counted up how much I’d been working so far this year . . . and I did not like what I saw.

In January I took three days off. I don’t mean three days surplus to weekends; I mean three days. Counting New Year’s. Admittedly, it was crunch time, because I was having to draft one book, revise another, and copy-edit a third — that’s not quite normal working conditions. But crunch time was not followed by compensatory relaxation: in February I managed seven days off, but that’s still one less than the number of weekend days in the month. March saw me working three straight weeks with no break, whereupon I was done with the draft and fell over for a bit . . . by which I mean eight (not quite consecutive) days off, equal to the number of weekend days. So in the first three months of the year, I was a full seven days in the hole just by the metric of a five-day work week — let alone any notion of vacation or sick days or official holidays.

Things did not exactly improve from there. Over the next few months I attempted to make up for how the year had begun; the practical result of this was that I closed out the first half of the year a mere five days below the weekend line (still no vacation etc). In July I went on actual vacations, two of them . . . well, one and a half? ish? Because the second one was right before Alyc and I launched the Kickstarter, so it was in reality a working trip, me doing campaign prep from my hotel room in Hawaii, and it means I didn’t make up any of that lost ground.

And then August happened. With the Kickstarter. And all the book/campaign promo — I had a week where there was some kind of podcast or interview or whatever scheduled every single day. And I went to two cons.

I took one day off in August.

Which is why I spent as much of September as I could possibly manage on official, no-seriously-I-mean-it this-time vacation. In theory there’s a book I want to be writing on spec; the original plan was that I would launch into that as soon as I was done drafting The Market of 100 Fortunes, all the way back in April. My subconscious’ answer to that was you may go directly to hell, and looking at the data, I can see why. I didn’t manage to start it in May, either. Or June. And by July I knew there was no way I’d be able to draft fiction until the Kickstarter was in my rearview mirror; I managed, by herculean effort, to do one afternoon of revision on a project in August, but that was it. Then September rolled around and AHAHAHAH NO, we were not starting anything just yet. My concerted effort to Not Work netted me a glorious fourteen days of relaxation out of thirty . . . but thanks to the madness that was August, that still doesn’t get me back up to the “five-day week” line for the year. Vacation, above and beyond the basic idea of weekends off, is still out of reach.

Now, I recognize that in the grand scheme of things, my problems aren’t that bad. There are far too many people who have to work multiple full-time jobs just to make ends meet (if they even do). Or who work this hard while also dealing with health problems, child or elder care, or other obligations that demand a lot of their time and energy. But for my own particular situation, if I want to be able to go on working anything like effectively, something’s gotta change. The battery is draining faster than it’s charging.

Next post (probably final post) will be about what I’m doing to try and turn that around.

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