When the Devil is in the Schedule

I just came back from a local writers' conference put on by the Greater Seattle RWA chapter. One of the speakers is a writing coach who did a series of workshops on our exact topic this week: Schedules, writing time, and how to get back on track when you get derailed. (Check out Lindsay's website if you're interested in learning more about his coaching offerings.) I won't steal all of Lindsey's thunder - which, frankly - I doubt he gave us in full measure in a couple of one hour workshops, but here's what stuck with me.

1. Know where your time goes. Before you get into any kind of emergency situation with a writing project, know what you're doing and when you're doing it. He suggested taking a full week, declaring it a judgment free zone and noting down everything you do (to the 15 minute mark) for the week, including watching TV, surfing the net, FB, Twitter, whatever it is. This is not to be used as a cudgel to beat yourself up with once you have it. It is a tool meant to offer you some choices about when and how you allocate time for writing and for emergency crunch modes should you absolutely have to have them.  (The point really is to prevent crunch modes.)
2. Set word minimums for yourself. Yes. You read that correctly. Minimums. And set them low. Lindsay suggested starting with 200 words a day. Not even a page. His reasoning went like this: Most writers have word count goals. 1k a day. 2k a day. That's a 20 foot ceiling in a big room that you have to fill up with words and when you do, you've only just been good enough. By setting a low minimum, chances are very, very good that you're going to blow past it. And then, you've exceeded your goal and gotten your brain high on the success. Even on days when everything has gone to hell in a hand basket, you can probably manage 200 words. It's just a few lines. But then, you get to word 200 and you're in the middle of a sentence. So you finish it. But then, you're in the middle of a paragraph. Might as well finish that. Presto. You've blown past your minimum and given your brain a shot of endorphins. Your brain gets addicted to that stuff pretty quickly and that, my friend, is going to drive you back to the page. Now. You aren't always going to have a 200 word minimum. At the end of each week, analyze how you did. If you consistently wrote past 200 words, raise your minimum by 100 words. If you only barely made those 200 words, or kept stalling at one hundred something, lower your minimum by 100 words for that week. This gives you a flexible way to accommodate that sightseeing trips through hell we all seem to take from time to time.
3. Run to the writing. This one really resonated for me. There's a story Lindsay told that I won't tell here, but the summary was him going to a professor and confessing that he'd stopped writing and didn't know when he'd start again. She told him that he had two choices. He could run away from his writing, or he could run to his writing. Writing, she said, wasn't the problem. It was the solution.

All of this is lovely stuff, but doesn't speak to crunch mode. Crunch modes happen because reasons. But unless you live entirely alone and have no friends or family, crunch mode affects everyone around you, not just you. So I argue for avoiding it by all means humanly possible. I say this after having to spend way too many days writing 8k a day in order to make a deadline that was an extension of the original deadline. That one wasn't life keeping me from writing - I'd been writing. It was the book not coming together the way I wanted. I swear I wrote that story three times over. Still. The book came out better than I'd hoped it could. The problem was that my family paid the price and that's not fair. Thus, expending my energy now on doing everything in my power NOT to get into a crunch like that again. That means learning about my production rhythm and managing my projects accordingly.

Perils of the Writer: Deadlines and Schedules

I'm a big believer in a regular writing schedule.  Find a time of day that works best for you, carve that time out, and affix yourself to a chair and get it done.  It's not always easy or fun, but that's how one gets it done. 

Now, fortunately, so far, I've not had much of a problem with deadlines.  The Thorn of Dentonhill and A Murder of Mages were essentially complete manuscripts when they sold.  Editing work was required, but the time I was given to get that done was ample.  On top of that, as soon as I signed the Thorn contract I started to put my nose to the grindstone on Thorn II. 

That doesn't mean I'm immune to things blowing up in my face.  A disruption to my life can throw everything out of sync.  A few weeks ago my wife was in a car accident.  Fortunately her injuries were relatively minor, but the car was totaled.  So the process of dealing with things like insurance, car rental, and so forth is time and energy out of my day, and that has to come from somewhere, and "somewhere" more often than not turns out to be writing. Or sleep.  Or the dishes pile up.  Those last two tend to come to a head far sooner than the writing, though. 

Since my deadlines are relatively self-imposed at this point (i.e., when I want to get something done is sooner than other people are asking for it), getting back on track is mostly a matter of readjusting my expectations and going back to the grind.  I've learned from experience that trying to do things like double my output or "catch up" usually results in things going even further off the rails.

Not to be all tortoise-and-the-hare, but slow and steady, getting back on task and doing the work each day is really the only thing you can do.  But it does help that my personal deadlines give me enough breathing room to account for things going wrong. 

Deadlines - the Missed Ones

AUGH!! Deadlines you say? You mean like the deadline for this blog post? The one I almost totally missed? Okay. I did miss it. Entirely.

Because of a whole other set of deadlines. The kind that make you forget your own name, much less what day of the week it is. And oh, by the way, that thing you do every week? Writing a blog post? Pff. Yeah.

These were those kinds of deadlines. I'm sure you know them - "No food after ten PM the night before. No water after six AM. Be here by 9 AM. Surgery starts shortly thereafter."

Had these instructions been for me or for my husband, I'd have been fine. Adults, right? We get why those deadlines and rules are in place. They weren't for either of us. They were for my youngest feline. All she knew was that I starved her all night long and then added insult to injury by loading her into a carrier before I fed the OTHER cats, but not her. Then there was the car. And the accident on the bridge on the way to the vet.

She usually howls at the top of her lungs. Not so this morning. Because of course, she was weak with hunger. I had an hour of pathetic, tiny, guilt-inducing mews. She reserved the big guns for actually walking into the vet clinic. So that I had the wails of my baby girl resounding in my ears as I turned and abandoned her to that horrible (in her opinion) place. Her vet is terrific and gentle and respects his patients.

Now we're keeping busy here at home while we await another deadline - the call saying surgery is over and she's waking up, followed by the call saying we can come get her and bring her home.

The History of Deadlines

by Allison Pang

So, here's the thing. Deadline is one of those words writers use all the time. We talk about the pressures of writing under a deadline. "Can't talk/tweet/blog now - I'm under deadline!" And it's not just writers who have deadlines - pretty much any sort of professional office is going to have them for various things - before a deliverable is due, for example. (Projects also have "milestones" which are basically mini-deadlines, but eh.)

Point is, we're pretty flippant in the way that we use it, given its rather macabre beginnings.

Where does the term deadline come from? How did it come to be associated with writing in the first place?

If you start digging a bit, you discover that newspapers started using the term around the end of the Civil War. (The theory being that newspapers had to get articles out on time when the information was relevant. If you missed your "deadline," it meant that the story was dead and wouldn't be printed.)

But how did the newspapers come to use the term?

By interviewing Union prisoners of war kept at the now-infamous Andersonville Prison. (Not to say that captured Confederate soldiers had it much better in Union prison camps, but this is the one people talk about. History is written by the victors, after all.)

Anyway - for the 14 months it was open, Andersonville Prison held about 45,000 Union soldiers. Over 13,000 died in that time due to the terrible conditions.

The prison itself was built in 1864 - at 26 acres, it was only intended to house 10,000 soldiers, but at its peak held 33,000 at one time.

And by prison, I mean it was just a big open field with a stockade built around it - 20 foot log walls buried 5 feet into the ground, with guard towers every 80-100 feet.

Initially, the prisoners weren't allowed to have any shelter at all, but many of them died as a result of heat stroke and exposure and eventually they were allowed to erect little tents to block some of the elements.

Not to mention the stream that ran through it that was supposed to be used for drinking/bathing water. This might have been better if the Confederate soldiers who guarded the prison camp weren't camping upstream

and basically polluting the water with their own garbage and feces. The center of the prison was basically a 4 acre swamp of liquid shit.

So, basically you have 30,000 people crammed into a tiny area without shelter, a disease-laden source of drinking water and limited supplies of food/medicine/clothes - this led to typhoid, cholera, dysentery, scurvy and other assorted awfulness. There were two "dead barns" located at the north and south ends - where bodies were stacked up until they could be buried in mass graves later on. (About 100 people died a day, in fact, during that summer in 1864.)

The man in this picture was one of the survivors, if that helps paint the picture more accurately.

Where do the deadlines come in?

On the inside of the stockade there was a trench dug about 19 feet away from the wall. (Eventually a small wooden fence was built to make it easier to mark the barrier - you can see it in this picture to the right.)

If any prisoner crossed or even touched that barrier, they were shot dead by the guards in the towers without warning.

Hence, the "deadline."

Sort of puts a new perspective on things, doesn't it?

There is a lot more to this particular bit of history than these small number of facts, but it's a bit more complicated than this blog will allow for, so I'll end it here.

Deadlines & The Earworm

I promise to not shoot you if you cross your "dead line"  and I've long given up on the days of heaping  more projects on your list of To Do Now; however, I do offer you a new (ish) earworm for whenever you have a deadline approaching.

It's from a Canadian band called the Arkells, and the song is "Deadlines."

Do you, dear readers, have a "deadline theme song"? What is it?

 ~wanders off singing, 'We got deadlines to meet // We got deadlines to meet~

Lines in the Sand

The word of the week?

DEADLINE

Yeah.... No coincidence that "dead" is in that word, right?

Turns out it dates back to the Civil War. Prisoners of war could not cross the "dead line" drawn around their stockade, on penalty of death.

Fortunately, that particular penalty is *not* written into my publishing contracts.

I hope.

Maybe I should go read the fine print again, just to be sure...

All kidding aside, a deadline is a fearsome thing for the creative individual. Delivering art by a specific date can be a tricky thing. Always beneath, like an underground lake of doubt, is the deep, chilling fear that this time I can't do it. Because art isn't something that I can just plan on cranking on with extra time and effort to get it done. It happens on another time scale. On another plane of existence.

One without lines.

That said, I turned in a book yesterday. Right on deadline. The third book in my Covenant of Thorns trilogy, Rogue's Paradise, was due March 15 and I sent it at 6pm.

Also - it's really a coincidence in the best sense, of two things co-occurring at the same time - this week, March 20, sees the release of the final episode of my serial novel, Master of the Opera.

It's another kind of deadline - not the sort I have to deliver for - but one that marks the end of the serial. It started with the release of Act 1: Passionate Overture on January 2, so this has dominated my 2014 so far.

It's a good line to cross.

It's funny how the writing thing works - a book starts with flicker of an idea. Maybe an image or a feeling or a situation. From there it slowly grows, moving through all the stages of mulling, pitching, refining, writing, revising, polishing, editing, (sometimes negotiating), proofing, reviewing, and finally releasing. Even then, it's like having grown children. The book no longer requires such concentrated care and feeding, but it's always yours, forever a part of your life.

It's almost a vast, extended family. No wonder they call it a "body of work."

Still, I'm loving to see this one graduate from college.

Cheers everyone!

Jeffe's Five Tricks for Juggling Multiple Projects and Deadlines

This time of year, all of my flowering vines blossom, like an end of summer special treat. They'll be the first to go when we get a frost, so they are all the more fleeting for that. Transient and precious.

Speaking of which, Dear Author is giving away three copies of Ruby.As of this writing, the giveaway ends in 36 hours, so hie on over if you're interested.

A lot of people seem to be out enjoying the long weekend - the three-day Labor Day Weekend, here in the U.S. and the traditional end of summer. All the kids are either back in school or headed that way. The academic types are kicking into the new semester. For many, this weekend is the last hurrah - camping, boating, barbequing.

For me?

I'm planning to write 8,000 words, review four sets of copy edits, critique two emergency contest entries and finish reading a critique partner's (CP) book.

Would I rather be out playing? Sure, on some level. Part of me wishes I could park myself on a lounge chair under an umbrella, drink adult beverages and read for pleasure. Except I also know I can't afford that time right now and, in the end, I'll be happier to get my work done. Having an extra day off the day job is like a gift of time.

And this, my friends, is how I do it. This week's topic is: Juggling Multiple Projects & Deadlines: How to Do It Well.

I was about to type that I'm not sure how well I do this, but then I checked myself. In a rush of self-congratulation, I have to say that I think I do juggle multiple projects and deadlines with a fair level of skill. But wow - it's been an acquired skill. So many things interest me that I want to do them ALL. Along the way, I've learned tricks to keep all those balls in the air.

#1 - Organize, organize, organize

Okay, you laugh, because you know I'm the Spreadsheet Queen, but I'm a huge believer in keeping organized as the key to getting it all done. I remember a time back in grad school - lo, these many moons ago, when computers were kept in a special room and we didn't have them on our desks, much less our laps - when I drew an enormous calendar on the blackboard over my desk in the lab. I plotted out my exams, both the ones I was taking and those I was giving, research, and various other projects. One of the professors walked by, shook his head and said "looks like displacement activity to me." But he was wrong. Making those calendars enabled me to plan my effort and keep on track.

Now I use Excel. I've written before about how I track wordcount. That's part of an overall effort to keep myself not just producing, but producing on schedule. In my Progress Count workbook, I have a tab called Priority List. I have all of my active projects listed there, from those proposed to in copy edits (the final stage of editing) - right now there are 13, though two are back-burnered - with columns for tracking. I note current status, next step, next step deadline, which is up to bat, what's on deck, estimated time required for the next step and the dates for delivery. Right now I have deadline dates ranging from 9/4 (those copy edits) to June 2015.

When a publisher asks me when I can deliver a proposed manuscript? This is the spreadsheet I go to.

#2 - Slow and Steady Wins the Race

I never used to be this way. Ask my mother. When I was in high school, I drove her CRAZY because I was always completing projects the night before they were due. I was absolutely one of those people who needed deadline pressure to get my off my duff and seriously working.

And I hated being that way.

The thing is - that deadline pressure that gets you moving? It's stress. The adrenaline response to that atavistic fear of HOLY SHIT, THAT TIGER WILL EAT ME IF I DON'T RUN LIKE THE WIND is what gets you moving. However, nature intended this to last long enough to get us the fuck away from the tiger. Not to last for our entire adult lives. Being under constant stress was bad for my health. More, it sucked in a big way.

These days, my incremental wordcount plans and spreadsheets are all designed to keep me balanced. If I do everything right, then I can get my work done - steadily moving forward every day - without stressing about it.

#3 - I Am Always Under Deadline

I don't quite get it when writers say things like "Oh, I can't do that because I'm under deadline." This makes no sense to me, because, ever since my third book, I've had deadlines. Now, as I noted in #1, I have eleven deadlines. Even before that, I used self-imposed deadlines to keep myself on track. See #2. Aren't all professional writers always under deadline?

Sometimes I think that, when people say this, they mean that they're feeling the deadline pressure. That they've glimpsed the tiger or feel its breath hot on their necks. To me, this is more saying "I'm under the gun." And sure, that happens. With these copy edits, they came in late last week and I hadn't known when they'd come in. Some publishers - it seems the bigger they are, the worse this is - don't tell you when edits will arrive. And when they do, the turn-around they expect can be unreasonably short. Often this is because the tiger is hunting them and they're tearing through the woods hoping to escape with their lives. I mean, jobs.

#4 - The Half-Again Rule

Okay, so, for my day job I work for an environmental consulting firm. We're forever tasked to estimate Level of Effort (LOE) to complete a job. This means both hours and dollars. It's not easy. Worse, if you underestimate, your project runs over and the company ends up eating the loss. Which makes the bosses UnHappy. (And they turn the tigers loose.) Quite some time ago I learned the Half-Again Rule and it has saved my tender hiney from the tiger more times than I can count.

The rule is very simple: Estimate how long you think a task will take and add half of that to it. So, if I think I can write my novella in 30 days, I plan for 45. Easy peasy. This allows for all the Unexpected Things. Like sick days, or goof-off days (hey - they happen!) or family celebrations or tragedies that demand your time. Or if your New York editor says "can I have these revisions back in 24 hours?" Don't laugh - that's happened to more than one friend.

Pad that schedule with the Half-Again Rule. You will never regret it.

#5 -  Deadlines Are Tools, Not Weapons

By all of this, I'm saying - juggling projects and deadlines is about planning, not panicking. I believe strongly that "I'm under deadline" should not be synonymous with "I'm under the gun." A deadline is a date on the calendar. It lets you count the dates between then and now (Excel even has a function of =TODAY() that you can plug into formulas for this very purpose) and figure out how much work you have to do each day to reach that goal. Number of words divided by number of days (plus half-again!) will tell you what you need to do.

Work the tool and no one will hold a gun to your head.

Making Deadlines: Work the Body to Focus the Mind

What do I do when deadlines claw their way into my peripheral vision?

 Run.

Okay, okay, it's true. I don't run. 

Ever

I walk. I attempt practice yoga. I do whatever physical activity encourages my body and my brain to be on the same page. I do that activity for an hour at the minimum but never more than 90 minutes. I'm after mental clarity not training for an Iron Man.

To Focus the Mind, Calm the Restlessness of the Body

Yes, yes, an hour dedicated to physical exertion sounds counterproductive. "Wait, I have to get the final edits in by the end of the week, I don't have time to pee much less exercise."  That might be true if the deliverable didn't depend on your creativity. However, we all know the point at which your muse walks away is the precise moment you're groveling on the floor, weeping, promising your first-born, and throwing in a box of kittens.

Exercise helps your brain focus

The thing is, you can lock yourself in the linen closet and you can be alone ... with your wandering mind. This is not the mind that is focused on the creative task at hand. No, no. This is the mind that wonders if red wine really is a good substitute for hair dye. Is twinge in your side too much broccoli or is your appendix afixin' to explode? And gee, look at those mangled nails. If you chipped the rest of the polish off they wouldn't look quite so horrible.

Arrrrgh! If only your brain would FOCUS.

The hour you wasted banging your head on the keyboard could have been used doing something less traumatic to your head and more conducive to your creativity.  The next time you have to knuckle-down and deal with a rapidly approaching deadline, clear away all the physical distractions -- those outside your body and those of your body.

What sort of exercises or physical activity do you, dear reader, do to focus your mind?