I finished a draft yesterday, the longest book I’ve written in a long time. It’s going to take a lot of rewriting because I felt like I narrowed in on what the story was really about as I went along, and now I need to go back and adjust the rest of the book to fit.

I ended up veering sharply from the original outline. A major character I spent a lot of time developing never showed up at all. He may make it into a later book as a complication, but I may cut discussion about him from this book. The event that was going to be the midpoint ended up being the climax. The midpoint ended up being something I hadn’t expected. The planned ending got moved to a later book because it got rid of a character I realized was the main villain and I decided we needed to keep him around to be a pain before we get rid of him.

I’m really looking forward to going back and doing revisions on this because I love playing in this world and I want to see what I can do in revision to make the book what it should be. But for now it needs to rest and I have a lot of other things I want to work on. I need to proofread the next Rydding Village book to get it ready for publication, and I’d like to draft another one. I also have a lot of marketing work to get done.

But I may ease up a bit on work because next week is the big local classical music festival and I’m ushering for a few concerts. I have some projects I want to finish around the house and, weather permitting, the yard. I’m going to try to relax for a couple of days. I’m meeting a friend for lunch Saturday and I’ve got a concert Sunday afternoon. That should be a good break for the brain, though my mind already has a couple of new story ideas brewing.

This has been a crazily productive week, and I proved to myself that I do have time for the things I tend to put off.

For one thing, I’ve written about 4,000 words a day every day this week. That’s around the peak pace when I’m really on a roll, but I haven’t managed to sustain that pace for a long time.

But while I was doing that, I also got my house in order and took care of a lot of projects. I love having a neat house, but I hate housework and I always feel like I don’t have the time for it. I get busy and things get out of control, so it feels overwhelming, so I can’t get started and it gets more out of control. Since I’m near the end of a book, I kept saying I’d deal with it when I finished the book, but then it was distracting so I didn’t get as much work done as I’d like.

This week, I decided to do alternating sprints. I’d write a thousand words, then take a break to work around the house. I started with something easy, getting my bedroom tidied. That just involved putting away the clothes that had piled up on the Chair of Doom, then dusting and running a Swiffer over the floor. I got all that done during one break. Energized by that progress, I wrote another thousand words and then tidied the office. I also got a good start on cleaning the kitchen while I made tea during an afternoon break between writing sessions. By the end of the day, the kitchen was mostly clean and my bedroom and office were in order, and I had 4,000 words.

The next day, I started on the living room on my breaks. I sorted out the work stuff that had ended up in what I call my writing nest on the sofa, where I’d been doing brainstorming. I also got the coffee table cleared off, and then I finished cleaning the kitchen. I still got 4,000 words done.

Wednesday, I vacuumed the sofa and flipped the cushions for better wear and got the coffee table totally cleaned. I ran some errands and got a big basket/tote for the living room to put all the throws in when I’m not using them so they don’t take over the living room. And 4,000 words.

Thursday, I vacuumed the rugs, cut the grass in the front lawn, and did a lot of weeding. And I still got 4,000 words written. It was good to have a nice, clean living room to collapse in that evening.

Today’s a busy day, as I had a grocery run, then it’s chamber music day and I have a Zoom meeting, so I don’t know how many words I’ll write. I’ve hit the end of my targeted first draft word count for this book, but I haven’t yet finished the story. I normally come in lower on the word count in the first draft and then flesh it out in the second draft, but I may be trimming a lot in the second draft. I’ll probably have to cut a lot of talking and eating scenes. I wrote a lot of conversations that I think were more about the characters telling me things about themselves than about the actual story. I can use this knowledge to shape the characters, but the scenes don’t have to be in the book.

Maybe I’ll finish it next week. I don’t know if I can sustain my current productivity pace, but I still need to organize the spare room and the basement.

I’ve been playing a game with myself for the past week or so. As part of a goal-setting exercise, I had to picture my ideal day in my ideal career. If I had everything I wanted, what would my typical day be like?

And then it occurred to me that there was nothing stopping me from having that kind of day now, so I started pretending that I was already a bestselling author. The book I’m writing now got published and was a huge bestseller, so I was pretending my writing was the sequel. What would bestselling author me do differently from the way I work now?

That’s been a surprisingly effective way to get stuff done. Bestselling Author Me would have a lot more confidence about promoting her work, so instead of overthinking opportunities, I’ve made myself jump at them. An author working at bestseller level would be diligent about getting work done. She’d put in a full day’s work on writing, business, and marketing and not get sidetracked by random things.

But my ideal life also has time for life beyond work. I may put in a day’s work, but I then give myself time to rest and relax after work. I do yoga, spend time reading and knitting, maybe listening to music, a little TV time. My back had been complaining after I overdid it with some gardening work and contorting myself to reach raspberries, but a week of doing yoga daily and I felt a lot better. I’ve also been sleeping better.

In my ideal life, my house is clean and organized and stays that way. I haven’t achieved that yet, but I made good progress in some trouble spots. I’m fine-tuning my office. One irritation is the rug in my office. My office chair’s casters are meant for use on carpet, and I don’t want to scratch up my wood floors (which are original to the house). The rug I bought was for a different chair when my office was set up differently, and the chair keeps rolling off it or doesn’t want to roll smoothly. I got fed up with that, and since Wayfair was having a sale, I found a new rug that should fit better. That’s coming later today.

One odd thing that came up from this exercise is that I seem to do better when I dress for work. Not that I’m putting on a suit and makeup, but on a hot day last week I wore a light linen dress instead of my usual summer uniform of shorts and a t-shirt, and I felt a lot more adult and professional. I felt a bit like a glamorous bestselling author. So, I picked up a few cheap t-shirt and tank-style dresses. They’re actually more comfortable than the t-shirts and shorts because there aren’t any waistbands, and I feel like I’m at work when I’m dressed up a bit.

Of course, not every day can be an ideal day. I’ve had days when I was slipping — like this Monday when I got sidetracked by online shopping for office rugs and yesterday when I couldn’t seem to focus at all — but then the next day I start the day by thinking of how my ideal day would go. On the non-focus day, my “what would Bestselling Author Future Me do?” approach meant that I took care of a lot of other stuff instead of wasting time and doomscrolling. I did some brainstorming and planning, some research into marketing opportunities, and took care of a lot of little admin and life tasks that I’d been procrastinating.

It feels really good to get to the end of a work day and be able to look back on what I’ve done and then relax with no guilt because I met my goals for the day. That makes it easier to go into the next day chasing that feeling. I’m trying not to think in terms of having to do this every day, forever, but I do try to start each day with the goal of living it as though I’ve already been successful with the things I’m going to do that day.

I may have discovered the secret to getting administrative and promotional work done: 80s music.

I love the writing part of a writing career. Making up stories is my comfort zone. It’s fun.

The business part of it, on the other hand, is less fun. I put off doing work like bookkeeping, responding to e-mails, and updating my website. Promotion and marketing is even worse. There are aspects of it that can be fun, but because the rest of it isn’t as much fun, I often don’t get any of it done. Part of it is that I’ve worked so hard to prioritize writing so that I don’t get sidetracked in meta-work — procrastination that feels like work but that doesn’t actually lead to a book being published — that I feel weird spending time on other things. And part of it was that my day job career was in public relations, and I hated it. Writing was my escape from my hated day job, both in giving me something else to focus on and in it being my escape plan to eventually have a career I enjoyed. I didn’t realize how much of a part of a writing career marketing and PR would be.

My promo efforts have been mostly haphazard and scattered. I do things when I absolutely have to do them, and I still let a lot slide. I complained about how little my publishers did to promote my books, but I’m just as bad. I keep saying I’m going to do more, and then it just doesn’t happen.

Supposedly, one good way to add a new habit is to combine it with either something you’re already doing or something you enjoy. That’s the “spoonful of sugar” approach. Make the thing you need to do more fun by adding it to something you look forward to.

Which brings me to 80s music. I was an 80s teenager (yes, I’m old). While I didn’t have the best time in high school, I still have a lot of fond memories associated with 80s music. I remember having the radio on in my bedroom when I was scribbling parts of stories in spiral notebooks or reading. Or I listened to the radio while driving the country roads when I finally got my driver’s license and was practicing. There are the songs on the soundtracks of the 80s movies I watched with friends in college. Besides, most of the music from that era is very happy-sounding (even if a large part of it boiled down to being peppy songs about fear of nuclear apocalypse).

The town where I live now doesn’t have much in the way of radio, since we’re surrounded by mountains. There is a local community radio station. It’s volunteer-run, and just about anyone in town can have a radio show. Half the people on my street have shows. This is the station I keep on in my car for when I’m running errands around town and it would be too much trouble to connect my phone each time I get in the car. It’s so random that you never know what you’re going to hear. You can go from old-school country to reggae to blues to French music, to jazz, to current alternative, but I discovered while running errands that on Friday mornings they have an 80s show from 10 to noon. I enjoy driving around town, bopping to songs I remember from high school and college, as well as some more obscure stuff they didn’t play on the radio in East Texas.

I can’t really write to music with lyrics, so I couldn’t listen to this music while writing, but it occurred to me that I could use this for admin/promo time. It’s something fun that I can’t listen to while writing fiction but that makes good background music for doing other work, and it means I have a scheduled, dedicated time for doing my promo work.

I’ve only been doing this for a few weeks, and I’ve had some other stuff going on most of those times (including today), so I don’t have hard numbers yet, but I’ve done a bit more promo stuff than I have in a long time. I’ve even gotten back to occasionally posting on Instagram, and I’ve done website updates. I’m actually looking forward to my admin time instead of putting it off and dreading it. After a few more weeks, if I don’t end up with more Friday funerals I have to sing for (not people I knew, but they need choir members), I may start seeing real results.

If you need the 80s power, you can actually stream this show at the station’s website (live and archived on demand). The list of shows is here, and this show is “Up in the Attic.” You can see how eclectic the lineup is at this station. “Big Pappy Turtleneck” is my next-door neighbor, and the hosts of Native America and The Horseshoe Lounge live at the end of the block, across the street from each other.

I’m about a quarter way into a first draft, and I’m being remarkably sane about it. This is usually when I have no brainpower or energy for anything else (I call it Book Brain), but I’ve managed to get my writing done and I’ve managed to do other things. Yesterday in my mid-morning writing break, I Swiffered the floors and pulled some weeds in the back yard, and I still hit my targeted word count before lunch. I cooked dinner. Though I will confess that I resorted to a frozen entree on Monday, but that’s what they’re there for, and needing the frozen entree was more because I was doing stuff in the yard and lost track of time to the point that I didn’t have time to cook than because my brain was devoured by the writing.

I’m trying to figure out what’s different so I can do it again. One thing is that I’m making a strong effort to start work earlier in the morning, before I get distracted by other things. That allows me to hit my goals before lunch, so anything else I do is a bonus. It also helps, oddly enough, that my back has been a bit stiff. Last week I was doing the writing while also attending an online conference, so I didn’t move around as much as I usually do, and then Sunday morning there was a lot of standing for choir, and during all the standing my back got stiff. So this week I’ve been making more of an effort to take breaks and get up and move. That’s how I did the sweeping and yard work. Instead of falling down the usual social media rabbit hole while I was taking a break, I got up and did housework and yard work, and that seemed to make me more productive for writing, possibly because those breaks were shorter and were a total change of pace.

In general, I think having so much yard work to do helps because it gets me away from the computer, but it also gives me thinking time, which makes the writing go better. It also gives me a sense of accomplishment. I can look out the window and see a difference, even if there’s still more work to do. I’m getting the giant grass under control and clearing out weeds. Seeds that I’ve planted are sprouting. I bought a cherry tomato plant at the beginning of the month, and I already have four baby tomatoes starting to form, plus lots of blossoms. It’s a good balance from writing, plus it’s a good way to get exercise so my back doesn’t feel so stiff.

I also think all the time I spent preparing this book helped. I was starting to feel like I was procrastinating, but spending so much time thinking about the book ahead of time means it’s not quite so draining now that I’m writing. I’m still getting surprises along the way, which is fun. For instance, I realized that I may be writing a WWII resistance thriller set in a fantasy world. That element was always there, since an underground movement was part of the story, but I didn’t realize it would have quite that same flavor until I started writing, and then I decided to go with it. But the structure and the world I set up earlier are still more or less the same and I don’t have to think so much about what happens next, so I feel less drained at the end of a writing session.

It’s nice to get my writing done and also be a functional human being.

The book festival last weekend turned out pretty well. I met a lot of local authors. A fan made a two-hour drive just to meet me, so I felt famous. I sold some books. I had a really good time.

And then I completely crashed. I’m the kind of introvert who doesn’t mind being around people and sometimes enjoys it, but it drains my batteries and I need solitude to recharge. I’m basically a cell phone that’s useful and bright when out and about, but it needs to sit on the charger at home afterward because all that work drains the battery. I had to drive the back road home because I didn’t trust myself not to zone out on the freeway. The back road is the old turnpike road that dates to the 1700s (it’s been repaved since then), and it has all the driving focus benefits of changing speed limits and stoplights, plus it also has all the quaint villages, historic buildings, and gorgeous scenery to help me stay focused. The freeway is more boring, and you’re driving the same speed without stops, so it’s easy to get into road hypnosis and snap out of it with no idea where you are.

Then I got home, made tea, and collapsed on the sofa. Sunday turned out to be pretty social, too, as there was a reception for new members after church, then there was an organ concert, followed by yet another reception, in the evening. I’d recharged enough to get through that, and I had some nice conversations and made new friends (someone who’ll give me gardening advice in exchange for some of my bulbs when I divide them), but I was even more tired when I got home.

By Sunday night, my battery was in the red zone where all you can do is dial 9-1-1. I went to bed early and slept late on Monday, then spent most of Monday working in the yard and brainstorming on the deck. My social interaction was limited to a wave and a hello to my neighbor, who was also working in her yard.

I guess before I do a bigger event like a convention I need to build up better social muscles. Then again, this was one of the more difficult kinds of interaction for me. Put me in front of an audience and I’m fine. I can talk easily. It’s a bit harder being in a mingling situation. Selling is hard for me. I couldn’t sell Girl Scout Cookies, and this kind of event was all selling, with a little mingling.

Now I’m back in my writing cave, developing a new story. That fits well with the time of year when I need to be doing a lot of work in my yard, since I think while I work and come up with ideas.

One of the writing discussions I had with the guys who cut down my tree was about the role of the author in any written work. One of the guys asserted that all writing was ultimately autobiography because it was filtered through the author’s perspective. He seemed surprised that I didn’t disagree.

When someone wants to criticize an author, the term “Mary Sue” or “self insert” gets thrown around (particularly toward women). While it can be annoying to read something where it’s painfully obvious that the main character is a stand-in for the author, living out their fantasies and utterly insulated from all story logic, the truth is that just about all characters have some element of the author in them, since we’re the only person we have experience being from the inside out. Our frame of reference is the way we see the world and how we experience feelings, both physical and emotional. We can empathize and sympathize with others and try to put ourselves in their shoes, but we still have to imagine based on our own experiences.

The way I like to describe it is that I put myself in a blender, add some other things, and then a character is what comes out. Each character may draw on different aspects of myself and leave out aspects of myself and will add other things to it, but I’m still in there. I try not to identify so closely with any character that I let the universe warp around that person and create my own little fantasy bubble universe in which a character is the most special snowflake ever and gets all the good things that I’d like to have, but I can’t imagine how I could leave myself entirely out of a character if that character is going to have any dimension.

But, as I said to the tree guys, the key to writing more interesting, varied characters is to make yourself a more interesting person. The more input you have, the more material you have to go into that blender to mix up with aspects of yourself. That means learning and experiencing. When I’m researching a character, I look for memoirs and autobiographies of people who’ve been in similar situations so I can learn about those situations from their perspective. It’ll still be filtered through me, but there’s other input, and adding that information to my head changes me a little because my view is broadened. I read a lot of biography and history, even when I’m not researching a specific book. I like to wander through the non-fiction section of the library and grab random books that catch my eye. I love YouTube because it’s full of people giving their perspectives on random things. It’s all more stuff to go into that blender.

You can talk to people who are different from you or have unusual professions (like the tree guys), go to different places, try doing new things (like taking a pottery class). To be a good writer, you have to be a lifelong learner. That’s a big part of the appeal for me. I like learning and absorbing information, going to new places and meeting new people — and then getting to consider it “work.”

I’m almost at the end of the draft I’ve been working on, which I’m pretty proud of, given all the distractions this week. You’d think that being iced in would be good for productivity, but I’m spending a couple of hours a day chipping away at the iceberg that is my driveway. They got the street cleared yesterday, using a front-end loader to break up the ice, scoop it up, and carry it away, but that left about an eight-inch high cliff from my driveway to the street, and there’s ice/snow up to the bottom of my car, all the way around it. I generally gear up and run outside just before lunchtime, chip away at the ice while it’s in direct sunlight (though still well below freezing), then run inside when my hands start to hurt from the cold and warm up with hot soup. I do another session in the afternoon. I’ll make hot tea and put it in a thermos, then go outside and chip away at some ice until my hands hurt, then come inside and have hot tea. I have a pathway from my door to the mailbox, a good chunk off the iceberg at the foot of my driveway (where the loader left edges that give me some leverage for breaking it up), and most of the slabs of ice off the top of my car.

I normally don’t get a lot else done when I’m on a first draft. I know it’s always like this, and yet I never seem to take it into consideration when I’m planning. I always think I can spend an hour or so a day on promotion and take care of little projects to organize my house because it’s not as though I spend all day writing. And yet nothing else seems to get done. After this draft is done, I need to do some serious house organizing work because I never finished setting up the basement after I moved in and I need to do that to get the rest of the downstairs in shape. I also had some marketing projects I wanted to work on, and those haven’t happened. So, that’s February’s work. For the next month I spend working on a draft, I’m going to plan better and just admit that the bare minimum of everything other than writing will happen that month.

Now I have about two more scenes to write, and then I’m going to let myself collapse, other than doing more shoveling, if it’s not snowing again.

After just one pottery class, I already have information that will affect the book I’m working on with a character who’s a potter. Last week, we were doing hand building, working without the wheel. We made bowls using molds and “slab clay,” a sheet of clay sent through a wringer-like device to flatten it out. Then we made vases using coils of clay.

One thing I learned was that this takes a lot of upper-body effort. I was more sore the next day from the pottery work than I was from the eight-mile hike I did later in the day. You’re bending over a work bench, so your back gets stiff if you aren’t careful. You have to “wedge” the clay to work out any air pockets and make sure the moisture is evenly distributed. It’s a lot like kneading bread, but the clay is much stiffer than bread dough, so it takes more force and strength. Then there’s a lot of control while doing the shaping.

I also learned that working with clay really dries out your hands. My hands were so rough and dry after the class. I had to keep slathering my hands with lotion the rest of the weekend. They finally started to get back to normal in the middle of the week. It looks like I’ve got a scene with Elwyn I can add, where she comes up with a balm for the potter to use.

I’m having to adjust the timeline of the book based on something else I’ve learned. It’s important to the plot that my potter makes a certain piece that has to be done before the end of the book, but pottery is a slow process. A piece has to be completely dry before it can go into the kiln, and that can take weeks, especially if the piece is thick. The pieces we make during this class won’t be fired until about 2-3 weeks after we made them. We’re doing the glazing in the last class, so they’ll have gone through a preliminary firing by then. If there’s any moisture in the clay when it goes into the kiln, it will boil and make the piece explode. Today’s kilns have some temperature controls, so they can raise the temperature gradually and reduce the risk of explosion, but I’m dealing with a wood or charcoal-fired kiln in the book, so there’s a lot less control. That means I had to find a way to insert at least a week into the timeline so that the item the character makes early in the book is ready by the time it’s needed.

I did learn from the instructor how clay can be recycled and revived, so my scenario of the person trained as a potter coming across an abandoned workshop and being able to use the clay that’s been dried out is viable (I told her what I was writing and gave her the specific scenario, and she told me how it would work). I have to play with the timeline a bit on that, but I found a way to do what was needed more rapidly.

This week, we’re working on the pottery wheel. I had a toy pottery wheel as a kid that used air-dry clay, and I never managed to make anything viable, so I’m a little anxious about how big of a disaster this can be. I keep telling myself that it’s about the process of learning and getting information and I don’t need to make a pro-level piece my first time. I just don’t want to send any clay flying across the room.

My big excitement for the week was getting a new author photo taken. I got the notice that I’d been selected for a library book festival in an adjacent town (I’d applied a couple of months earlier, after battling the warring impulses of “Why would they want a has-been like me?” imposter syndrome and “Do they know who I am? They’d be lucky to have me” ego trip), and they asked for an author photo as part of the things I needed to send in to participate.

That was when it struck me that the photo I’ve been using is more than twenty years old. I had it done soon after Enchanted, Inc. came out and my agent told me I needed a professional photo (I’d been using one I took with the timer on my camera). I’d just had my hair done, since I had some booksignings coming up, so I found a photographer and scheduled an appointment. Based on suggestions from some writer friends, I looked for a photographer who did headshots for actors.

Then I got to the appointment and found that the studio was in an … interesting … location, and the actor headshot thing was his sideline. His main line of work was taking what we can call “professional” photos for the sort of women who advertised on the back pages of weekly newspapers, if you know what I mean. He kept trying to make me look sexy, and most of my expressions were mean and scary. Maybe that’s why I’m still single. When I try to look sexy, I look like I’m plotting murder. We finally found one shot in which I didn’t look like I was about to shoot lasers out of my eyes.

To tell you how long ago this was, after the photo session, I went to see Revenge of the Sith a second time since I was on the side of town that had the theater with digital projection (at that time, there was just that one theater in the area, adjacent to the Texas Instruments campus where they developed that equipment).

I kept using that same photo because I didn’t think I was changing that much. I still had the same hairstyle and my skin was pretty good. I even still wear the same dress. I wasn’t doing as many booksignings after I stopped doing traditional publishing and my books weren’t in stores, and then I backed off doing a lot of other public events. I wasn’t putting my photo in my books, since that adds to the delivery fee of e-books. The photo just lived on my website, so it didn’t seem worthwhile to go to the effort of getting a new one.

Also, I’m not crazy about getting my photo taken, which is funny because I was a notorious camera hog as a small child. There’s a family story about toddler me sitting on my grandparents’ front porch, and when there was some cloud-to-cloud lightning in the distance, I posed and asked, “Is someone taking my picture?” But as an adult, I’m better at staying out of pictures. I especially don’t like posed pictures, and my irritation with the photographer is what comes through in the picture. That made finding a photographer something to dread.

But I figured that with this book festival in a new place, I should probably update the photo. I knew I’d be needing a new photo eventually, so when someone posted to the local Facebook group looking for a photographer, I’d follow the links in recommendations and was bookmarking people I liked. That meant I knew who I wanted to contact, and I was able to get an appointment.

The studio was in a nearby town (where the book festival will be), just off the courthouse square downtown. It’s a family business that’s been around since the early 1900s, and the storefront and sign were like something out of an old movie. The photographer was a lot less sketchy than the last one. She understood my reluctance to get my picture taken and did good poses that kept me at ease, and she didn’t even try to make me look sexy.

It’s interesting to see how I’ve changed. Some of the differences come from having a photo taken in January vs. June. My hair’s darker without having any highlights from the sun and my skin is lighter (though some of that is a makeup difference and difference in lighting/backdrop). My hair is more or less the same, since it styles itself and I don’t have a lot of choice there. My skin is still pretty good and I don’t have a lot of wrinkles. But the flesh seems to have melted off my face. When I was younger, my body was thinner but my face was still a bit round and chubby. Now I actually weigh more and my body’s a little thicker, but my face is so much more hollow. I can see why people get fillers in their face. I have to admit that I look different enough to make it worthwhile getting a new photo.

And while I was there, I got a new passport photo taken, since my passport expires soon and I need to renew it. Due to the photo requirements there, all my inner murder demon tendencies come out in that photo, but it’s probably accurate to how I’d look after an overnight flight.