Update: Schedules and Whatnot

Before I had to move and went off to Dragon Con and came back feeling like hell, I said I was going to think about what my schedule was going to look like moving forward. While things were chaotic, I did give it some serious thought.

My conclusion is pretty much what I said way back when. In terms of Unintended Cultivator, I'm going to move to a five days per week (M-F) schedule. My tentative plan is to get back to doing two chapters per day. Obviously, this week has been a shitshow and basically nothing went to plan. I'm still recovering a bit, although I'm not sure if it's physical fatigue from the convention and being sick or mental fatigue from the convention and the multi-day migraine. It's probably both.

There's also been so much disruption that I'm still getting my feet under me again in terms of writing. Today went smoother than yesterday, and I'm planning on posting at least one chapter tomorrow. Hopefully that chapter will go smoother than today's did. Then, I'm going to take Sunday off.

I would normally write that day to play catch up. However, while I did manage to get all my stuff into my new apartment, I didn't manage to unpack all of it. There are still boxes littering the place. That is particularly frustrating for me because I got a drafting table and exactly none of my art supplies are unpacked yet. While I don't really need any extra projects right now, I do need things that are not writing-related to help my brain unwind a bit from time to time.

One of those things is picking up drawing again. Specifically, I want to learn to do some basic manga drawing. I got myself a pile of books about it, and there is always the surprisingly deep well of knowledge on YouTube to draw from. I even got a drawing tablet for down the road when my skills are a little more advanced than vague stick figures.

Back to the point. Going to a five-day schedule serves some practical purposes. There are recurring tasks that my publisher needs me to do every time we put out a new Unintended Cultivator book. Reviewing copyedits, checking over the proofread, stuff like that. Having a couple days each week where I'm not already absolutely committed to hours at my desk to write will let me tackle some of those things in a saner manner.

Having a couple days off each week will also let me spend a bit more time on some of those side projects that people keep asking me about (Rinn's Run, Forde Voss, basically everything else I've posted five chapters off and then seemingly abandoned), as well as the next Isekai Terry book. There are some behind the scenes things being discussed that may make the super leisurely six-to-eight month writing schedule I initially had in my head for Isekai Terry book 2 impractical, but we'll have to see about that.

The takeaway here is that I'll probably be working most weekends, even writing most weekends, I just won't be writing Unintended Cultivator every weekend.

Perhaps the most important thing that taking a couple days off each week will do is allowing me to do things like blow off everything in the world once in a while and just sit on my couch watching anime for 12 hours on random Saturdays. It might not seem like a good use of my time, but I find maintaining good mental health is mega-helpful in keeping my productivity stable.

One last thing on schedules. In about a month, I'll be doing a short retreat with my publisher and some of the other writers they publish. It won't be a huge disruption since half of the retreat happens on a weekend, but there will be a day or two where I probably won't be posting. I'll do another update once we're closer, and I have a clearer sense of exactly how much disruption there will or won't be.