How Was Your Summer Vacation?
Are you considering signing up for the paid subscription to Agents & Books? You should! This Fall is going to be amazing: we’re going to tackle Picture Books! Outlining vs Pantsing! And some HUGE BIG AMAZING stuff for NaNoWriMo! The subscriber content will be very worth it.
Hi Friends!
Are you buying new notebooks and sweaters? Sharpening your pencils? I AM! I love back to school (more than actual Fall tbh) and I am READY to tackle ALL THE PROJECTS. I spent the last week trying to get an edit of my WIP done. TRY is the operative work there, because as much as I wanted to, I just couldn’t get through 276 pages in a week. There was always an errand that needed to get done that always took an hour longer. My kid’s preschool was on a shortened schedule and my husband was out of town, so I was on solo parenting duty. I couldn’t ignore work email completely, and had to check in there. There was plenty of hand-wringing and procrastinating, too. I won’t lie. All in all, I wanted it to be a week of FOCUSED and COMPLETE CONCENTRATION and that’s basically impossible, regardless of how slow publishing is in August and how actually and totally reliable my childcare is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Last week was not a special kind of work week that existed out of time and space. It was a normal week and even with the distractions, I still got a good chunk of work done. More than 200 pages edited.
I’ve always been a work chunker. I (think) I would rather sit down and do all or most of something in one fell swoop than chip away at it daily. I’ve tried the answer 20 queries a day approach to managing the slush pile, and that has never worked for me. Read 10 pages before bed has never really worked for me either. Why? Because it takes consistency and consistency is boring! My brain doesn’t want it! BOOOOOOO!!!!!
Except, it’s basically the only way to get things done with other things that also need to get done, like work, life, family, etc. 45ish minutes of reading a day for me is roughly a novel a week. (And guess how many multiples of 45 minutes I spend on Twitter a day ugh.) I’m a very, very big fan of MommaStrong, which are 15 minute workouts that actually make a difference, whether you’re a Momma or not. I could slice up my day in a 100 little chunks and get everything done and it would be perfect. Except of course I would never do it all because no one can do it all, and that’s ok. But even half a dozen of those chunks everyday is better than one BIG chunk of something once a week.
This is where the write everyday advice comes from. It’s pretty good advice, imho. I find that I don’t actually retain that many details of what I’ve written if I go too many days between touching my manuscript, and that just means more time refreshing my memory. I’m not going to be able to write everyday, just like you probably won’t, but my new goal for the Fall is write or edit most days (and read most days and do queries most days and workout most days….) To not wait until I have a chunk of time on Saturday or a random quiet Wednesday and do what I need to do to find that 35 o4 45 minutes to get in there and do something, one thing. It all adds up.
If that isn’t a a lesson of adulthood, I don’t know what is.
XOXOX,
Kate