Work, Work, Work

"Don't make the mistake of thinking you're gonna find the time to write.  When I have to write, I have to have something sacrificed from my schedule.  Is that an hour or two of sleep at night, is it a concert, is it a ballgame, is it a movie, is it a favourite TV show ... how bad do you want this?"

 Jerry B. Jenkins

Amen.

The people around me are starting to feel the growing commitment I've embarked upon.  I've had two brutal hurdles I've had to overcome, when it was impossible to write very much in a day because of the content that had to be found.  These are the worst days in writing non-fiction, since forward movement can't be made because of not knowing what to write, while the pressure of feeling the schedule drifting out of reach.  I set myself a pace of 1 page a day, about 900 words.  As it stands now, I'm at 48.25 pages on my 50th day, and struggling to catch up.

This is not a crushing pace.  I've done the November novel writing contest ... 50,000 words in 30 days.  The first draft of Pete's Garage came out of that.  But the research on a fiction novel is comparatively light ... and all I need to do right now is hit a research wall that I can't climb easily.

Why does that matter.  I'll use Jenkin's words, but they could be mine, as I've learned this the hard way:

"This is the thing that hangs up too many beginning writers.  They don't have a publisher's deadline, so they have to set their own.  And sometimes we tend to ... fudge on our own deadlines."

Again, Amen.

I had deadlines for papers in college, and of course for the silly homework in grade school, but the only thing that mattered about those things was the grade I got from one person.  I usually got whatever grade I worked for ... for me, it was a matter of deciding how hard I wanted to work, how many books I wanted to read, how much effort was I willing to put into 2,500 words for a Classical History paper.  On the whole, it was one of those per class per semester, which meant 10 to 12 weeks of time, which is a lot of time for that many words.  About 25 words a day.

The first time that deadlines mattered started with working for the university paper.  Then it wasn't just one judge that I wrote for, but hundreds ... and very often people who were furious with my writing.  Long before I began to anger people on the internet, I did it in real life, in print, in a paper that some of my professor also read.  By the time I'd been writing for the U of C Guantlet for three years, I'd be sitting in a new class, political science or geology, and the prof would go down the list to see who was present.  I'm an 'S,' so it took a little time.  Then the prof would start to read my name, and stop.  And his or her face would ... twist a bit.  I'd say "here" and they'd look at me, thoughts churning, with an expression that said, "Oh, that's what he looks like."  Then they'd call the next name.

Three weeks later I'd be in their office, getting approval for the paper I'd write, and when that business was done, the prof would mutter something like, "I disagreed with your position on women," or class warfare, or the national debt, or whatever ... and I'd say "Okay."  Because these people had power over me, and didn't like what I wrote.  It puts things in perspective, when 20 years later I'm writing for the internet and hearing that people who have zero power over me don't care for my opinions.

But ...

I was saying, the people around me are feeling the effects of my project.  Suddenly, I'm refusing offers to have coffee.  I'm answering the phone and saying, "No, I don't have time to talk."  I'm not interested in seeing a movie.  I'm telling my partner that she's going to have to cook dinner for herself tonight.  I'm shrouding myself in silence and closing my door.  I'm grouching.  I'm taciturn.  I'm talking too much about the book when someone else is asking me a question.

I'm 50 days into this.  Measured by the source material, the book looks to be about 240 to 280 pages.  I'm discussing with Tamara whether or not this should be two books.  She's helpful, patient.  She's been through this before, many times.  We've been together nearly 21 years ... and I've been a writer all that time.

How bad do I want this?

Despite efforts and frustrations, I haven't been able to produce a major work of my own writing since 2014.  Since then, I feel like I've taken part in an extended dress rehearsal, with one thing after another.  I wrote three drafts of Fallow and came to the point where the work simply failed to meet my expectations.  I worked on one wiki, transferred it to a blog, then started another wiki from scratch, one that's working out at last.  Work is writing and editing, editing and writing, with steady deadlines but small work loads day-to-day, usually not more than 3 to 5 paragraphs ... about the equivalent of this blog.  All of it is practice, practice, practice.  I think it's getting me closer to Carnegie Hall.

At the end of the day, I take 40-50 minutes to work out, to get physical, to keep up my health.  Mostly, I go to bed awfully tired.  It's so easy to quit.  It's so easy to fudge a day, then the next, then a week, then more.  I haven't actually taken a day off all this time, and I admit resistance against any possibility of putting this on a shelf in case I'm unable to pick it up again.  I wrote crazy amounts of the Character Background Generator last summer and then punked out at 47,000 words.  I'm just about there now, just shy a few thousand ... and very conscious that I don't want to put this down right now, when I'm only about a fifth of the way through.

But ... a break has to be had at some time.  I do have plans to travel around Alberta and BC in May; Tamara and I have talked about getting out to Haida Gwaii and then south to Vancouver Island, plus roaming around parts of both provinces I've never been.  This is assuming our health holds; Tamara is undergoing some observation and it may be necessary for us to begin procedures where I'd have to give her a kidney.  We've had our first meeting on that front and I'm good with that solution; thankfully, I don't have to be compatible with her.  Canada Health has a program where my kidney could be exchanged with a stranger's kidney, where that stranger isn't compatible with his or her spouse; thus, my kidney goes there, and his or her kidney goes into Tamara.  It's very reassuring.

Barring that, however, which could suspend our plans, I am hoping to take a week to ten days rolling around a bit, when the snow stops falling and before the mosquitos way up north get big enough to carry off the car.  That's about, um, 60-70 days away.

If I could keep up this pace until then, I'd feel real good about taking a vacation.