Ask An Author: Schedule Me.

(Picture: a couple of my creepier dolls, staring at the world.)

Welcome to our $3 reward level, where people ask me questions, mostly about the business, craft, and process of writing, and I answer them as best I can.  Reasons this is a good idea:

* I am an internationally published author
* I release an average of four books a year
* I have won multiple major awards
* I actually make my living doing this

Reasons this is a terrible idea:

* Have you met me
* Like, ever
* I should not give advice to anyone

Now it's time to ask me literally anything, and watch as I flail around in an attempt to provide a coherent answer.  Please feel free to discuss in the comments, and to submit new questions either here or by emailing me through my website contact form.  As a reminder, this reward tier only works if we have questions: please, please feel free to share yours.  If you want to ask anonymously, just send your question in via my website, and say that you'd like me to leave your name off when I answer.  If you do not ask me to redact your name, it will be included, if only because it's fun to see your name in print sometimes.

This month's second question comes from Caitlin, who asks: "How do you switch mindset between universes? Or, how do you schedule your writing between one series and another? I mean, I imagine it takes time to load all the rules, characters, style, etc. into your mind to write about, so I imagine you working solely on a Toby project for some time, rather than say Toby on Monday and InCryptid on Tuesday. I'm curious how you fit them all in."

We're not going to start regularly seeing two questions a month.  However, I told Caitlin that this question was next on deck, and then failed to answer it immediately.  This, plus the fact that I missed a few posts in 2022, makes me think it's a good idea to post this now.

So.  Let's talk about scheduling.

Now, some parts of this are going to be intentionally very vague--I don't give out my daily word counts, and so even though they're very much a part of my scheduling process, I'm going to have to gloss over them.  This is going to mean some fake math, where I represent exact numbers with letters.  Also, please keep in mind that I am a full-time author at this point, meaning I don't have to spend my time doing anything but writing (and the admin that comes with writing, which I am very bad at), but will also have more flexibility with my schedule than someone who's also juggling a day job.

Now, let's get granular.

This question is sort of two questions at once--how do you change series, and how do you schedule?  The first is something I can answer, but that answer may or may not be useful to anyone else.  Essentially, I just think of it as changing the channel on my internal television.  Just like I know who's in the cast of the various shows I watch, what the rules of that world are, and what happened on last week's episode, I know those things about my own work.  So when I need to switch positions, I change the channel.  Can I tell you how?  No.  Can I help you learn to do the same thing?  Again, no.  But it works for me, and hopefully there's something that works for you.

Next up, scheduling.  So I tend to divide my days into two columns.  "Novel-length work," which is a larger column, but not inherently a more important one, and "Short fiction/admin work," which is how I get paid and don't make everyone in the universe angry all the time forever (see again, "not inherently more important).  I do this because I've found that a break and change of subjects midway through my day lets me get more done.  In other words, if my limit on column one is X, my limit on column two is Y.  So by having two columns, I can do X+Y a day.  I cannot do Xx2 by only having one column; my brain rebels.  This part of the process requires me to know my work flow and limits very clearly, and to be utterly honest to myself about them.  That's hard.  I want to do everything, and never pass on anything.  But sometimes, that can't happen.

This done, I look at my deadlines.  Some deadlines are clear and absolute: I need to have each month's Patreon story done by the third week of the prior month, so there's time to edit and review it, and time for Will to do the file conversion.  The month doesn't refuse to end if I'm running late.  Other deadlines are squishier: "oh we'd like an answer in the next week" or "can we get this book sometime in the fall."  So I try to pin all deadlines to something concrete, for the sake of my process and hence my sanity.

I know roughly how long any given project is going to be before I start.  Sometimes it can be a pretty wide swing--our shortest Patreon story was about 3,000 words, while the longest was 82,100 words.  But usually I'm within 2,000 words of the bell even before I create a file for it, and I can plan from there.  After that, it's a matter of breaking down the calendar to know how many work days I have, and breaking down the project to figure out how many of those days it's going to need.

Say I'm going to write a novel that is Xx30 words long.  I know I can write X words a day in the novel slot, so I break out my calendar and count off thirty days where this book can have my full focus in that position.  This won't work for everyone.  My process is very "start at the beginning, and when you get to the ending, you stop," and most of my revision/rewriting/editorial justification happens when I have a finished first draft.  If you're someone who needs to revise while you go, maybe you're doing Zx60 or some other made-up equation.

Editorial scheduling is something else altogether, and often consumes the short fiction/admin slot on any given day, but I try to keep things as balanced as I possibly can.

So that's that.  Like all of us, I'm stressed and sad and cabin fever-y from COVID, but please, please, keep asking me questions for February!  I don't want to have to start taking questions from Elsie, it would not end well!  Remember that I'll take questions about anything, and that if it can be answered with "yes" or "no," it's not a great question for this format; also if it's something I can't flog for paragraphs, like "how often do you brush your cats."  If you're tired of this reward and want to suggest a replacement, drop those here too.

Meanwhile, if you want your question to be kept for future use, emailing is better than commenting, if only so I've got a long term copy in my inbox.  But I do see all the questions, and try to remember to copy and keep the really interesting ones.