I had an experience last weekend that turned out to be good research for my fantasy writing: my city had a boil water order that lasted all weekend. There was a water main break that dropped pressure throughout the system, and when the pressure drops below a certain point, they can’t guarantee that the water is safe (I guess the pressure that keeps the water moving keeps bacteria from growing, or something like that). They couldn’t consider the water safe for drinking until tests came back showing it was safe. That meant that from Friday through mid-day Monday, you weren’t supposed to drink, cook, brush teeth, or wash dishes (other than with the sanitizing setting on the dishwasher) with the tap water without boiling it first. Fortunately, they got bottled/canned water donated by WalMart and Coors and were handing it out at the city park, since boiled water isn’t great to drink without steeping tea leaves in it.

For the most part, it wasn’t too bad, thanks to the gallons of bottled water I got from the city. The one thing that was a pain was having to boil water for washing the dishes I had to hand wash. That was where the fantasy research came in. It’s easy to take for granted the amenities we have in modern life, but in the kind of pre-industrial world where most fantasy novels take place, they don’t have things like hot running water (unless there’s magic that creates it). I had to think about how my characters would have to get water from a well and heat it before they’d have water for washing dishes. At least I didn’t have to go to a well, and I had an electric teakettle instead of having to use a cauldron over a fire.

When I got annoyed by the extra work, I reminded myself that this was a valuable research experience.

It’s like the way the great Texas blackout of a few years ago, when nearly the entire state lost power during a bad cold snap and ice storm, made me think about how dark things are without electricity. It’s easy to forget that we’re seldom truly dark. There are streetlights and cars have headlights. It’s darker here than it was where I used to live (well, when we had power there), but it’s still not entirely dark in my house at night because there’s a streetlamp in front of my house. If that’s not enough light, I can flip a switch and have light in the house. I don’t have to fumble for flint to light a lamp. I have to think about how characters are traveling at night when horses don’t have headlights and there are no streetlights. It can’t be a full moon all the time. I also saw how little light a candle really gives off and how small the area lit by a candle really is.

This is my reminder to always think about where the characters are getting light and how they’re getting hot water. It takes more time for them to do things, and their schedule probably has to adjust to the amount of light they have.

Fortunately, we got the all clear Monday morning, and it turned out that the first test they ran on Friday had come back negative for contamination, so the water was actually safe all weekend. Which is good because I’d already brushed my teeth and washed berries before I found out about the boil water notice, and I only learned about it because I had a moment of weakness and checked Facebook before I usually allow myself to do so. Now I’ve signed up to get text messages for city emergency alerts because I don’t want to have to depend on the Facebook algorithm deciding to show me posts from the city.

I’ve mentioned my bad case of Book Brain when I’m working on a first draft, when I don’t have the brainpower to do much more than work on the book and I get easily distracted. I also tend to fall into all-or-nothing patterns, where I’m either writing furiously or getting stuff done, with no in-between. While I’m working on a book, housework falls by the wayside and I struggle with business administrative tasks. I don’t keep up with promotional work. I just write and collapse.

I’ve been trying to work on that so that I have more balance and manage to write consistently while also getting other stuff done, and I had a grand epiphany this week in which I wondered why I have to. If this is working for me, why should I change? Maybe I should lean into it and plan for it. I can plan my writing binge time, and then take care of all the promo stuff during the recovery phase, and that way I can schedule and post things while I’m in book mode without having to switch mental gears and try to create promotional stuff. I can do some cooking in advance and freeze meals and also stock up on some frozen entrees so I don’t have to worry about cooking. I can do a good house cleaning before I start writing a draft. Maybe I could even indulge myself with a cleaning service during the busy months (if I can find someone willing to be that occasional for me).

If I try not to be so intense when I’m writing a first draft, then it’s less likely to get done on schedule and it may not even be as good. I find that there’s an energy that comes from plowing through it quickly. I can be a lot more balanced during the revision phase. It’s just the first draft that takes over my brain and my life.

I don’t know when my next first draft will be. I need to finish this book, then revise, edit, and proofread it and get it ready for publication, and then I need to figure out what to write next and research, develop, and outline it.

I may also try to schedule my first draft time for months that lend themselves to it. Summer is good, since I don’t want to go outside then, anyway. January and February are also good, since it’s too cold to go out much (and if it’s like last winter, there’s snow on the ground the whole time) and there’s not much happening after the holidays. On the other hand, I know I don’t want to be working on a first draft in October because that’s my favorite time of year and there’s a lot going on around here. I’ll want to be able to spend that time hiking and exploring. That would be a good time to brainstorm and outline the book I’ll write in January. I can think while hiking and carry a notebook with me to jot down inspiration while I’m looking at fall colors in the mountains.

I saw a presentation at a conference a few years ago in which the speaker said she works a year ahead. Then her release schedule isn’t dependent on her writing schedule. She can write when she wants and still have her release schedule set. I love that idea, but I’d have to do a lot of work to get a year ahead and write enough books to have some ready for the next year instead of needing to release them as I write them. I’ve got a couple of books I’ve written but never revised, so maybe I could use them as a head start. If I have a release schedule set with books that were written the year before, I might actually be able to do a proper launch instead of just flinging the new book out there as soon as it’s ready.

I’m a bit more than halfway through Rydding Village book 4, and I seem to have a bad case of Book Brain. For instance, I managed to forget that this was a blog day, in spite of writing it on my to-do list this morning. Anything that isn’t the book seems to fall by the wayside in my brain. Not that I’m spending all my time writing. In fact, there’s a fair amount of procrastination. But I’m thinking about writing, playing out the movie of the next scene in my mind, often while I should be doing something else. When I get like this, cooking and driving can be dangerous. I’ve missed freeway exits because I’ve come up with a good idea and lost track of where I was. I have to set timers when I’m cooking because I’ll get sidetracked and forget that something has been on the stove too long. This is where my air fryer oven comes in handy because it will automatically shut itself off when the timer goes off. There’s a lot of microwaving during a bout of Book Brain. I really should do a better job of preparing for when I get about halfway into a book and make sure I have food I can throw into the air fryer or microwave.

I’m also not really fit for social interaction when I get like this. There’s a lot of tuning out the surroundings and staring into space. I’ll lose track of what the person I’m talking to is saying or what I just said because I just had a thought about the book.

I find that I’m more tired in this phase of a book. I’ll finish writing for the day and just collapse. I might be able to watch TV — at least, I have the TV on and I might be able to follow the plot of a TV show, but I wouldn’t be able to summarize it for you later — but reading is a challenge because the page becomes a jumble of words that have no meaning since my brain takes off into la-la land. I tend to sleep harder and longer and have vivid, intense dreams that may or may not relate to the book.

Although it’s disruptive to my daily life, Book Brain is usually a good thing because it means that I’m immersed in the story. Sometimes it’s like I’m writing fan fiction for the story in my head. I’ll come up with scenes that will never make it into the book, imagining conversations the characters might have that aren’t about the main plot or backstory scenes for the characters that aren’t relevant to the present. I do often get good insights about the characters from these mental detours, and that makes the characters more real to me as I write. Book Brain also means I get a lot of writing done and hit my deadlines. I’d far rather spend a couple of weeks spaced out and not able to do much other than write and collapse and have the book get written quickly than stare at the screen and go blank because there’s so much going on in real life. A balance would be nice, but since Book Brain usually doesn’t last for more than a month, at most, I can get the balance at other times. I do try to make myself leave the house so I don’t become a weird hermit. I can brainstorm while taking a walk, and I’ve found that going to classical or jazz concerts is great. I’m supposed to be sitting still and staring into space, so I can let the music wash over me while I think about my book.

If I keep on at the current pace, I may finish the first draft next week, and then I can emerge from my cave, blinking into the sunlight, and try to remember what I was doing before I fell into my book.

I’m having a hard time getting back into the swing of “normal” life after Thanksgiving. Part of it is that driving 9 or so hours a day for two days straight is tiring and there’s some recovery time required. Part of it is the break in routine, with time to get ready for the trip, then being gone for so long. I’m very much a creature of habit and routine, and messing up my routine really throws me off.

When I find a pattern of behavior that works for me, I can go on autopilot and function really well. Stuff gets done. But break that pattern in any way, and it all falls apart. One phone call during a time I have designated for other stuff will ruin the whole day. I have a really hard time getting back to where I should be. One ruined day can throw off the rest of the week. I also form new habits pretty easily, intentionally or not. A couple of days of doing things differently, like taking a day off, and that becomes the new normal, so it’s hard to get back to the routine.

This is why I struggle with work/life balance. It’s very all or nothing. Either I’m working according to my usual routine or I’m getting nothing done, and deliberately taking a day off for holiday or vacation will mean my routine falls apart and I have to rebuild it when I go back to work. If I take a week off, it’s like “what was I doing and how does this work?” when I come back from vacation.

I’ve tried all kinds of time management systems, and what works best for me is a fairly rigid schedule that I don’t deviate from in any way — I write at this time, exercise at this time, do this housework task at this time on this day — but I’ve never managed to stick with it for long because life happens to disrupt any routine and I burn out if I try to keep up a rigid routine for an extended period without a break. And then when I take a break I have a hard time getting back to the routine, so it falls by the wayside for a while until I get frustrated with myself and create a new routine.

I have managed to do okay with a weekly reset, so I’m hoping that on Monday I can get back to “normal.” It’s always hard to try to start a work week in the middle of the week. I will give myself some time off for the holidays later in the month, but I may not try to take a big break from writing.

And I’ll keep trying to come up with a system that works to keep me on track. In my dream life, I work diligently on my writing until I hit my daily goals, then do some business and promo work, and then the rest of the day is used for housework, life maintenance, and leisure. I would take long walks, read, do some music stuff, and go to local events. As it is, I fritter away time throughout the day, not accomplishing much or doing anything really fun, manage to hit my writing goals by the end of the work day (maybe), then have to deal with cooking and housework and fritter away more time. Writing down how I spend my time doesn’t work because it changes my behavior so that what I record isn’t an honest assessment of how I really spend my time but rather a record of how I want to spend my time. So maybe I should do that — make a grid for the day and keep track of my time like I had to do when I worked for a PR agency and billed my time to clients.

But for now, I need to get to writing and get my brain back into this story.

Happy new year!

I’m back at work, trying to not just get back into my old routine, but start some new routines that I hope will be more productive for me.

2023 was a bit of a mixed bag. I know I said that I was giving myself a year to get my writing business turned around or I might have to consider getting a regular job and scaling back the writing. That didn’t go so well. I made very little money last year. However, things did take a substantial uptick later in the year, which felt like enough of a turnaround to encourage me to keep going. I don’t know if I’ll set any kind of deadline for this year because this may be a big transition year for me. I’m pondering a big cross-country move, which is going to disrupt a lot of things. I’m currently veering wildly between “excited” and “terrified” at the concept, but I think what it boils down to is that I really don’t want to be in my current living situation anymore, but I can’t afford to live anywhere else in this area. I’m going to have to move some distance if I’m going to leave my current home. If I’m going to move out of this general area, I may as well make it to a place that doesn’t have a lot of the drawbacks to where I’m living now — mostly the climate. I’m not sure I can tolerate another summer like we had last year. It’s not the part about living in a totally new place that terrifies me. I’m fine with that, and if I could just teleport myself and my stuff into a new home, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But all the logistics of making that kind of move are daunting — selling my current home, figuring out how to ship my stuff (or if I should just ditch everything that doesn’t fit in the Subaru and start all over again instead of paying more than it’s probably worth to ship it), finding a new place to live, figuring out whether to find a short-term rental while I look for a home to buy and leaving my stuff in storage or finding a longer-term temporary place and shipping my stuff there to live for a while before I buy a house, dealing with things like banking and health insurance changes, etc. All that makes me want to crawl into a hole and stay where I am forever, even if I know it’s not where I want to be.

But if I’m moving, there’s no point in finding a job here. I’m considering looking for a job in the place I want to move to, which would have the benefit of allowing me to write some of the moving expenses off my taxes if I’m relocating for a job. But I would prefer to be able to really hit an upswing on the writing and not need that.

The good news is that Tea and Empathy seems to be doing pretty well. It’s already outsold Tales of Enchantment, which came with a built-in fanbase and which had a two-month head start. That suggests I’m finding new readers. Sales for all my books ticked upward a bit after that one was published, so those new readers seem to be finding my other work. I’m starting the brainstorming process for book 2 in that series and hope to get it done before I move.

I’m trying to focus really hard on my work for now. I’m treating it like a real job, with regular working hours and dedicated time for my key tasks. I’ve always been pretty haphazard with my promotional work, so I’m trying to allocate time and come up with a plan for tasks I can do in that time. For now, that means doing a lot of learning about things I can do. My weekend is already full of webinars I’ve signed up for, with one on Friday afternoon, one on Saturday morning and one on Sunday mid-day. The next trick will be actually applying what I’ve learned.

In 2023 I took my first real vacation (involving travel, more than one night away from home, and not for anything to do with work) since 2018 with my epic cross-country road trip that’s what’s kicked off this possible move, as I found that I really did like the place I’d been looking at online. Then I got the new (to me) car that’s suited for that kind of place.

I feel like I didn’t do that much writing. I developed and wrote Tea and Empathy, and I wrote the new stories for Tales of Enchantment. The rest of the year was spent working on a book that refuses to fall into place. I think I’m finally on the right track with it, so maybe I’ll finally get it done and to my agent.

I don’t remember a lot about last year. Just about everything before October seems like a blur. There’s a little more detail between October and June, and before June is blank. It was a weird year. This year is likely to be challenging, but I hope to be in a good place and ready to move forward at the end of it.

I have a bad case of what I call Book Brain, when I’m so caught up in writing that I have a hard time focusing on anything other than the book. Other thoughts fly out of my head. In fact, this morning, I was trying to make a to-do list, and I thought of something that needed to go on the list, but in between thinking about it and moving my pen to write it down, I forgot what it was. I’m still not sure what it was. I hope it wasn’t too important.

The Book Brain this week is mostly because I’m so close to finishing this draft. I’m in the middle of writing the big, climactic confrontation with the bad guys, so it’s very painstaking work. Sometimes, I stop to think for so long about what needs to happen next and how it should go that the computer goes to sleep.

Now I’m within 6,000 words of hitting my word count goal for this book. That’s maybe two days of writing, if all goes well. I’m not sure I have enough story left to fill all that up, but I already know of some things I need to go back and add, like entire characters who have shown up at the climax and who turn out to be critical to the plot, but who haven’t appeared before. I need to go back and add them to the story and then weave them in throughout so they’re set up properly to play their role at the end.

I’ll share more details about this book once I’m done and starting the process of getting it ready for publication. It’s something new for me, but I think it has a lot of the elements my fans like about my books, so although it’s in a different kind of setting, it’s still very much a Shanna Swendson book.

The thing that I needed to put on my to-do list just came to me, and this time I managed to write it down.

Now back to my book …

One good thing to come out of the pandemic has been the rise in online events and conferences. In the first year or so, everyone had to quickly pivot to online events or cancel them entirely, but then a lot of groups figured out that having online events opened them up to a whole new group of attendees. People who didn’t have the time or budget to travel to a conference could attend an online conference. You could go to conference sessions in your pajamas or sweatpants, and a lot of these conferences had the sessions recorded, so you could watch them whenever you wanted to. A few got good at doing interactive events, using programs like Zoom to create roundtables and networking sessions so you could talk to other attendees.

I’ve been to a lot more conferences since the pandemic started than I’d been to in years before it. I tend to get drained by being around crowds, so while I enjoy conferences, I’ll end up collapsing in my hotel room between sessions, and I’m left drained at the end. I lose about two weeks of writing time for a conference that covers a long weekend. There’s the preparation and travel before, then the travel and recovery afterward. With an online conference, I manage to get writing done during the conference, and while I might be a little tired after an intense weekend of sessions, I’m not so drained that I lose days of work.

I’m about to attend another online writing conference that starts this weekend. With this one, all the workshops are pre-recorded, and I can watch them whenever I want in the next few years. Then there are live events on the next three weekends, with live Q&A sessions and roundtable sessions. During the conference, I focus on the workshops connected to live events and the live events like networking and roundtable sessions. Then I can spread the other workshops out over the rest of the year.

I’ve learned that there are some preparations I have to make. Mostly, I need easy meals so I don’t have to spend a lot of time cooking, and I need snacks. Snacks aren’t necessarily a big thing at writing conferences, but there’s usually a hospitality suite at science fiction conventions, where you can get snacks and hang out. That seems to have created an expectation in my brain that if I’m at a conference, there will be snacks of the sort that I usually only let myself eat at conferences, so I’ll end up craving those things. I didn’t go nuts, but I have a few things to munch on while I watch workshops and presentations.

I got some spiral notebooks and pens for taking notes. Fortunately, it’s back-to-school time, so it’s all on sale. Like I need an excuse to buy school supplies.

Meanwhile, I’m in the middle of an online course, so I might be overloading myself a bit. The real trick is reminding myself that no one thing I learn is going to change everything. I may learn new things that will allow incremental improvement, but I’m not going to discover the magical secret that launches my career in a new direction.

I’ve never been much of a trendsetter, so by the time I catch on to something, it’s old news. My latest late discovery is the concept of the bullet journal.

Actually, I’d heard about this years ago when it first became a thing, and I was intrigued by the idea because I love planners and attempting to be organized, but I couldn’t find a good explanation that wasn’t extremely intimidating. All the examples I found were Instagram-worthy, with watercolor artwork, calligraphy, stickers, and fancy designs. But a couple of months ago I saw an interview with the guy who came up with the concept, and the way he talked about it made so much sense to me — and it seems that it was other people who went nuts with the basic concept and turned it into a competition.

The very basic idea is just that you create your own journal/planner. You just need an index at the front to help you find things and you can create your own code for how to mark items in your journal (where the “bullet” comes from). Beyond that, it’s up to you.

So I got a composition book out of my stash (I buy tons every year for 50 cents each at the back-to-school sales because that’s what I use for brainstorming books) and got started. I will never be sharing pages from my journal because there’s no art or design or fanciness involved. It’s all just lists. I don’t even create a monthly calendar page, since I have plenty of calendars.

For the planner part, I have a page for the month, on which I have a list of goals (like “finish first draft”) and to-do items (like a list of bills that have to be paid and the payment date) and any appointments. I’ll also write down any events after they happen if I’ll need to remember when something happened. Just that alone helps a lot because I don’t have that “did I pay that bill?” panic when I have a list and mark it off every month. Then I have daily pages (usually half pages) on which I put that day’s to-do list and any appointments. I’ll also put menu plans and what time I need to start cooking to have dinner on time. I’m trying to do yoga every evening before dinner, so I factor in that start time with my cooking time. Every morning, I check with the monthly list and put any of those tasks on the day’s list. I have a code for the to-do list for items that must be done that day and the work priority of the day, as well as for items that are in progress (started but not finished) and items I’ve moved forward to the next day.

Aside from that, it’s a book of lists. I have a list of books I want to read, movies I want to watch, a master to-do list (items that aren’t yet on the monthly list but that I need to get around to doing eventually), story ideas, etc. I also have a quarterly plan. Basically, if I need to keep track of it, I write it down on a list. I think I’m going to start a “put it away in a safe place” list so that I can find those things later. It might help to write down what I thought the safe place was at the time I put it away.

It’s really worked wonders for helping me get stuff done. When I write out my daily tasks, I can take those big monthly tasks and break them into less daunting chunks, or I can create a “theme” day to deal with everything in a certain category.

There’s no artwork at all, just lists in a composition book and an index and page numbers. I thought I’d share how I’m using the concept in case anyone else was intimidated by all those pictures of planners people are posting with artwork and calligraphy and stickers and all that. Just having a place to keep track of all the stuff in my head helps me a lot, especially with the little admin tasks that pile up and overwhelm me. Since I started doing this, I finally tackled some things that had been lingering on my to-do list for nearly a year.

However, I failed to put “post blog” on my to-do list (although “draft Friday blog post” was on yesterday’s list, and I got it done), so I didn’t think about it until later in the day. I don’t know if this proves or disproves how well this system is working for me. As long as I write it down, I get it done, but if I don’t, I may totally forget it.

There’s been a lot of talk in the writing and fantasy world about a recent article on a popular author. The article was bad enough that I won’t dignify it by linking to it, but an interesting thing that came out of it was that the writer believed the author has graphomania. He’s utterly compelled to write and would happily spend every hour of the day writing if he could. His idea of a vacation is having fewer things to take away from his time to write rather than taking a break from writing.

I definitely don’t have that, but I seem to have a sort of compulsive storytelling thing going on. I’m constantly coming up with and thinking about stories. My mind is always spinning with some kind of story idea, whether it’s the book I’m currently working on or something new. When I watch a movie or TV show or read a book, I find myself dreaming up story ideas inspired by it. I come up with spinoffs of my own ideas. Even if I had graphomania and wrote non-stop, I could never write all the ideas I come up with. This is why I laugh at the people who do the “I have a great idea for a book, I’ll tell you, you write it, and we’ll split the profits” routine with me. I already have more ideas than I know what to do with. Writing is the hard part.

But I’m not at all compelled to write them down. I mostly do that because writing stories down and sharing them is the way I make a living. Having stories constantly spinning in my head pretty much makes me unemployable at anything else. My mind is always elsewhere, and it takes me a lot of effort to focus on what I’m supposed to be doing.

Not all the ideas are worth writing down, and not all of them develop into books. Some are just mental amusements. Sometimes an idea develops for a long time and manages to become a book. Sometimes two ideas might collide and be enough to become a book. There are some ideas I’m more compelled to write than others, the ones I have to get out of my head or that I want to see in book form. Other ideas fizzle out and get forgotten. For instance, I had a story/characters in my brain for nearly twenty years, finally wrote it, couldn’t sell it, and have more or less forgotten it. Getting it written stopped it from playing out in my head anymore. Every so often, an old, forgotten idea will pop back up and demand attention. That’s what I’m working on now. I came up with the idea about 30 years ago, started working on it, then it fizzled. I wrote it ten years later, and it didn’t work. Then it popped up again and became something entirely different based on that setting/situation and characters.

I currently have stories for about five fictional universes at work in my brain. Just this week, I’m still figuring out the rest of the book I’m writing. I started thinking about a book I wrote a few years ago that didn’t quite work and that I’m thinking of revisiting for a different market. I figured out the book I’d want to write if I got a chance to pitch a book to the Star Wars universe. I’ve been pondering the book I started writing last year that didn’t quite work and have figured out what the problem was. I’ve also come up with several new characters and idea fragments in search of a home.

Maybe I need to develop graphomania so I can write all these stories, but there’s a huge gap between a mental story and a viable book, and figuring out what it takes to turn that mental story into a book can be incredibly difficult. Finding the words to convey the story is also hard work. I get exhausted from just spending a couple of hours a day actually writing. The rest of the day is spent thinking about what I’m writing and figuring out how the next scene should go.

If I didn’t have to make a living, I don’t know how much I’d end up writing. Like, if I won one of those billion-dollar lottery jackpots and no longer needed to earn money from writing, I might just spend my days doing stuff like gardening or hiking, with my brain happily dreaming up stories but without having to do the hard work of turning them into books. Or I might need to write some of them down just to clear out my head.

One thing I’ve learned from this workshop about discovering and using my strengths is that since most of my strengths involve learning, getting information, and thinking, I get energy from doing those things. It’s not just procrastination when I do a lot more research than I probably need to write something. It’s part of what makes my brain happy so it can do better work. That also gives my brain more to work with in thinking about the story, and it gives me time to puzzle it all out.

It also seems that doing the things that you’re strong with is a good way to avoid burnout because it gives you energy. I’ve almost always started a book project with a kind of “retreat” in which I read and watch stuff related to that project or that reminds me of the project in some way, and it turns out this is good for giving me the energy I need to dive in. But I think it might be good to make time to do regular retreats like this to maintain that energy. It doesn’t even necessarily have to relate directly to the book I’m working on. Just taking time to watch documentaries, read books on history, and brainstorm is good for me.

I’ve hit the midpoint of this book, and after a bunch of false starts and rewrites I think I’m finally on the right track, so now it’s time to figure out the rest. Therefore, since it’s a cool, dreary day (my favorite kind of weather), I’m going to devote the rest of the day to a retreat of sorts. I have class material to work through, and otherwise I’m going to find some documentaries and do some brainstorming while huddled under the electric blanket and drinking tea. Then I can drive forward into the rest of the book starting next week. It’s a lot easier for me to write when I’m able to picture what happens next.