Left Behind and the dark side of productivity

Did you know productivity has a dark side? It’s true, and it can take multiple forms. For instance, you can be very busy doing all the wrong things. Or you can be very busy being the willing horse, working yourself to death. Overwork is a real problem, and it impacts your physical health and creative health.

We’ll start with working on the wrong things. You can identify this one by looking at your goals. If you don’t know what your goals are, it’s a good bet you’re not doing the right things to get you to them. Write down your goals. Or ask the very simple question, "What do I want most out of my writing right now?" If your goal is to be on the NYT list, or to have a German and Japanese publisher, or to write something that inspires people or to have fun, write it down. Then ask yourself, "Will this choice/action move me towards my goal?" Chances are it’s time to drop some busywork and do the real tasks that will lead to the goal. 

It’s a very basic truth that the wrong actions will not lead to the right outcome. You can work 18 hours a day and do absolutely nothing to advance yourself toward your goal if you don’t know what it is, and aren’t doing the things that will get you to it.

So you have your goal and you are working towards it. Now overwork can sneak in. Maybe it started by adding to your daily goal; you tried to go from five pages a day to ten, and at first it worked, but now your brain is a gray fog and you’ve got tendonitis. The best way to deal with overwork is to avoid it in the first place, but since our culture encourages workaholism you are likely to be highly rewarded for exhibiting workaholic tendencies. And let’s face it, writers lean to the OCD side to begin with. Your obsessive impulses and career/social rewards encourage you to fall into the overwork trap. How do you climb out of the pit?

It might take actual planning and discipline to have fun and rest. If you like, you can make a to do list. Lists can help convince your overwork tendencies that you’re doing something vital and crossing off items gives a sense of accomplishment.

On that to do list, write some fun activities you haven’t had time for since you started writing 6 books a year.  Social fun, creative fun, physical fun. You can combine physical, social and creative all in one activity if you like. Take time every day to have fun, to play with your mind and your body.

I’ve found that if I don’t make play a daily habit, it gets edged out by all the other urgent, important things I have to do. I make time to read, to do creative play, to do something physical. Beware the overwork tendency that will tell you you have to devote a lot of time and effort to this. You can just take five minutes to sketch or snap a picture or write a haiku or toss a ball around. Make it small and attainable, and you can fit it into your life. 

Reading, physical play and creative play all help recharge the writing batteries and keep the gray fog at bay. Physical activity that you vary helps keep the body in good health and the increased circulation and oxygen to the brain help writing, too. Work is a wonderful thing, but too much is bad, and nature has a way of forcing a balance. You’ll find yourself seriously ill, injuried, or just plain fogged in mentally and unable to work if you don’t set a working pace you can sustain. 

Good stuff on burnout:

Rebuilding the fire: from burnout to breakout

Morgan Hawk’s articles on burnout:

Burnout; not just for the big dogs

Burnout: success is out to get you

 For the complete Left Behind and Loving It workshop links, visit PBW!

Left Behind in interesting times

The Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times", is raining all over publishing. These are interesting times as technology shifts markets and methods of distribution. Some think ebooks are the salvation of publishing, others think ebooks are publishing’s doom. What does the e really mean to you and me?

There is certainly opportunity. New ways to reach readers. New ways to connect with other writers and publishing professionals. New ways to publish and distribute content, from writing stories for cell phones to self-publishing ebooks. Amazon’s Kindle makes self-publication with distribution easy and profitable. Epublishers who provide top-notch editing, cover art and distribution can provide the opportunity for earnings equal to New York. 

With blogging, Twitter, Facebook and email newsletters, authors have multiple ways to reach potential readers with the click of a mouse and no postage and printing costs. PDF making software allows us to create ebooks of sample chapters and ordering information for upcoming titles, which any bookseller can download. Self-publishing a promotional ebook might be the number one way to win new readers to a series.

So what’s the downside? Many. The epublishing model means the author signs a contract for rights to a work with an uncertain dollar return. You might make thousands on an ebook; you might make a couple hundred.  Epiracy is at an all-time high. If you self-publish for promotional purposes, to give back to readers, or to release a work for profit on your own, the sheer volume of voices and choices online can drown out your e-offering. Between NY titles releases as ebooks, self-published ebooks, and epublishers which seem to multiply overnight, the flood of content available online makes it simultaneously easier than ever to reach markets and harder than ever for those markets to notice.

Then there’s the question of reversion of rights. Traditionally, reversion of rights and the ability to resell a work has meant a source of income to writers. As epublishing and POD allows a book to remain in print and available forever, the push is on for publishers to retain backlist rights, but it remains to be seen if this will be good or bad for authors in the long run. Likewise the question of advances; traditional publishing is already experimenting with the royalty-only, no-advance model epublishers operate on. If books are visible, well-distributed, and easy to purchase, royalty income and backlist earnings can more than compensate for advances and resale of rights. But note the "if" and "can" in there. 

Now more than ever, nothing is certain except that change is here, it can’t be stopped, and further changes are inevitable. The ostrich in the sand approach won’t help anybody, and neither will messianic proclamations that the e will set us free. Writers can’t expect professional organizations, publishers or even agents to look to their interests in these changing times. It’s up to each individual to study the markets, understand the technology, read every contract carefully, and negotiate to put themselves in the best possible position. Particularly the current contract issue of royalty rates for ebooks from NY publishers. The authors who scoff at those sales now and think it doesn’t matter may live to regret accepting traditional print book royalty rates when that percentage grows.

For the complete Left Behind and Loving It workshop links, visit PBW!

 

Left Behind and managing crazy

Publishing is a crazy business full of crazy people. The business model is crazy; for mass market, about half of the books shipped are stripped instead of sold and the average author is paid $5,000 for writing said book. By the time you deduct 15% for agent fees, taxes, and business expenses from that 5K, you’d be better off working as a greeter at Walmart. At least they make minimum wage. Although they do have to brush hair, dress, leave the house, smile and make eye contact.

Clearly we’re not in it for the money. And that’s because we’re crazy people. (Readers and editors, take note about the part where writers are proven to be genetically predisposed to take criticism poorly. It’s in our GENES.) Basically the difference between your average writer and your average schizophrenic seems to be intelligence. If you’re smart enough, you can put your crazy in a book instead of just raving. And get paid $5,000 for it, less 15%, taxes, and expenses. Okay, maybe we’re not that smart. 

So when you have a crazy business full of crazy people, where do you find sanity?

First of all, understand the crazy exists and whenever possible, check it at the door. What door? Whatever door it tries to come in, because if you let it, the crazy will overrun your life. If it helps, put a basket by your office door and drop a paper that says "crazy business" into it whenever you go in to work or come out to rejoin your family and live the rest of your life. Your family will thank you for not letting the crazy business into their space and your writing will thank you for not letting it into the work. 

And with family and work, we have two more keys to managing crazy. Your family will keep you grounded in the real world. And your work will keep you grounded in your self. Your best self, your true self, the self that imagines wonderful worlds and amazing adventures and says some deep things in the process that you didn’t even know you knew or believed.

I wash dishes and take out trash and play ball or build legos with kids, and that’s sanity. I write down scenes and solve plot problems and that’s sanity.  In the daily busines of living life, you can keep your balance and not lose your mind on the crazy train that is publishing. Yes, the business is nuts. Yes, the people are too. But so what? I’d be a lousy Walmart greeter.

And now I have another scene to write and laundry to fold.  Go visit PBW for the full Left Behind and Loving It virtual workshop list!

Left Behind and pondering deadlines

PBW’s Left Behind and Loving it series continues. Keep checking her site for all the participating links! Plus she is giving away a ton of awesome prizes. Including some copies of Animal Attraction, woot.

Whic segues nicely into my topic, since I am working on the sequel to Animal Attraction, which has no contract and no deadline. I’d originally proposed a spinoff, not a true sequel, but one that had returning characters and a different protagonist/central romance. That got turned down, which is why my next book from St. Martin’s will be totally unrelated. But the world and characters would not leave me alone, so I proposed a true sequel after that; the ongoing story of Chandra and the pack, the panthers, new friends and enemies, and more complications.  Also declined. 

 So now I have Red Queen, which I have referred to here as "the crack book" slowly gaining chapters and pages because I can’t help myself and because so many readers said they wanted it. But there is no deadline, which means two things.

 It’s easy to put it on the back burner. It would be very easy to hit a hard spot and stop working on it all together. Because nobody is going to break my knee caps if I don’t sit down and write it. 

Having a deadline does give focus and purpose to work. You know it has a market. You know it has a due date. You know kneecappers will loom in your future if you can’t work out how they get from point A to point B. All of this does help push the tush into the chair and keep the fingers typing. 

 It’s entirely possible that I never would have finished The Gripping Beast, never would have published the Sirens series I had outlined (which is still shy 1 book and a spinoff, Harold and Dane respectively) at all, had I not sold the thing to Samhain. And then I HAD to finish it.

So there are obvious Pros to having a deadline. You have an external commitment to finish the work and you know it’s going to get read. You also know you’re going to get paid for the work. Work you may or may not get paid for doesn’t have the same urgency when you need to buy school clothes, trust me.

Are there any Cons?

Yes. A deadline may force work to get done, but it may also force it to get done too soon, without enough time for the idea to ripen or the book to deepen.  It might mean that you write a book that would pay the bills instead of the book you would rather have written but couldn’t sell, and perhaps that unsold book would have been better. (Or not; sometimes marketability really is a true test of whether an idea is ready and/or solid.) Sometimes the pressure of the deadline keeps your tush in the chair racking up word count instead of a pause to rethink, leading to chapters that have to be entirely re-written. And finally, you may be tempted to abandon good work because it’s too hard, nobody wants it anyway, and you have to do something else to pay the bills that doesn’t leave much energy for the spec project.

So what’s a writer to do? Well, if possible, always have a spec project while meeting the current deadline. Because you never know when you might get a chance to run with it. Also, it never hurts to have inventory. It can be epublished, self-published as a promotional free read,  or simply remind you every time you work on it that publishing is nice but at the heart of everything you are still a writer and writing for its own sake is its own reward. And not burying yourself in the maximum number of deadlines possible allows time for that.

 

Left behind and reading Joe Hill

I have been one step away from buying and reading Heart Shaped Box ever since I heard it was coming out. It promised the best kind of thrills and chills and I utterly believed Joe Hill would deliver on the promise. This weekend sent me over the edge and I downloaded it from eReader.com.

Why did I hesitate before? Because I thought he’d deliver on the premise too well, frankly, and that sort of thing can give me nightmares. But in the end I had to see what happened after the heart shaped box arrived and was opened.

A hook can be just that basic; what will happen after this version of Pandora’s Box is opened? It doesn’t matter how simple a hook is, or how old it is. Pandora’s story is ancient. What matters is, does it work? Do you want to find out what happens?

I think this is a question writers benefit from asking themselves. Do you want to find out what happens? Is your hook one that hooks you? Asking what hook will get this agent, that editor, get the series into Target or whatever external goal you can come up with has to be secondary. Do YOU want to know what happens next? Are you hooked?

You’re the one who has to do the daily slog through the book from beginning to end, and that process can stretch out for a very long time from initial concept to galley proofs. Being hooked on the story yourself matters. To sustain you through that long slog, the story should hook you hard.

Just like Heart Shaped Box hooked me until I couldn’t stand it anymore and finally broke down and bought it, the idea that won’t go away and leave you alone is one to pay attention to.

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it: think about books or movies that hooked you. What do they have in common? Anything? Can you see an echo in your own story ideas, or can you see an opportunity to intensify the hook until it’s one you can’t wiggle off?

For the complete Left Behind and Loving It workshops, visit PBW. http://pbackwriter.blogspot.com/