First of all I want to say I’m sorry to see Rowena leave the blog, but lack of time is something I understand completely.  In fact, I’ve been trying to answer email for the last two months with imperfect success.  I hope Rowena comes back to visit often and that the five of us who remain can carry on.  We’re thinking of moving Amanda to Tuesday and leaving the weekend for promo and fun stuff.  For those who are veterans of my conference, I warn you that I might start putting up the occasional quiz.  You’ve been warned.  If you have a hankering to find out which mad monarch you’ve been in the past, or perhaps which animal you change into, you’ll get a chance some Sunday or other when the other members of the blog aren’t looking. 🙂

And interestingly enough my post this week IS about time management and stress…

I’m running as fast as I can.  It might not look like it, when I spend most of my day at the keyboard, but inside I’m running.

Right now, my life has very set times and places.  This will probably change, if/when the kids leave home starting next year.  But right now I wake up at six thirty am to make sure that they get  breakfast and don’t rush out the door with no lunch.  (Look, if I’m not there to make sure, they don’t eat.)

Then I do the absolute necessary (usually catboxes!) around the house, if I’m not going Officeish (usually Wednesdays and Fridays.)  If I’m going officeish, I run up the stairs to shower and get ready, since my ride leaves by seven thirty.

In either case, I sit down by eight or so, do the blog if I haven’t done it before, then write till around three thirty, when I must start doing dual duty again, by starting dinner, doing laundry and whatever else needs it.  Yeah, the guys do stuff around the house (and other extracurricular stuff, too) but ultimately I do most of it because I’m better at it.

If I am still compus mentis, I edit in the evening, most of the time for myself, sometimes for NRP where I’m supposed to edit some of the authors (mostly my friends.)  To this I’m adding editing my own old stuff and putting it up with Goldport Press.  And I try to get to bed by eleven.

Around this fits stuff like birthdays, the occasional weekend away, and yeah, I do consider a walk in the park with my husband an amazing treat.

Now, before you tell me that I’m going to burn out, remember I’ve done this with variations (no officeish till last year, no putting stuff up, no NRP but other stuff I was doing instead) for a good six years.  I’m actually less burned out now than before, and will probably feel a whole lot better next year.

Why next year, you ask?  Because next year I’ll be largely out of contracts.  Does this mean I don’t intend to traditionally publish anymore?  No.  I’ve said before and will say it again that I’ll work for Baen while they want me to.  (I’d say till death do us part, but they’re a corporation and can’t die.  And some people have doubts about me.)  BUT I’m changing the way I’m working with them in the way I’ve wanted to for YEARS but didn’t dare: I’m writing everything on spec, sending in, and letting them decide if they want it or not then.

Until this year, this was not a feasible strategy.  Why not?  Because I have a really high sell-through rate on proposals for a working writer – I sell between fifty and seventy five percent of every proposal I write.  See where that’s not a practical way to live, if I’m only selling fifty to seventy five percent of every NOVEL I write?

But now that’s not a consideration.  If there are things they don’t want to publish, then I’ll bring them out myself.  I have yet – save for one, and that was not from Baen, and it sold to someone else – to get a rejection on any of my books that cites a flaw with the book.  Most of them say something like “we have too many of ” or cite reasons that the editor doesn’t like it that have to do with the editor not the book.  Like the famous “Your woman wasn’t assertive enough” – I’ll leave it as a class exercise to imagine how assertive my female character was, and how insane that comment is.

Add to that that I hate writing proposals and that this is incredibly stressful to me, because once the characters come alive it’s wrenching to have to let them die while I move on to something else and leave that book unfinished.  Yes, I know that’s crazy, but that’s how it feels.  Also my proposals usually fell like I’m groping around looking for a plot, which is largely true, since I don’t plot THAT way and therefore don’t know all the twists before I write the novel.

Now I don’t have to deal with that.  And I don’t intend to.  Baen will get all my DST-time books, and all my shifter books, and perhaps others I think are up their alley, depending on how many books they have in cue, and what I want to be seen when (the idea of having control over this is by the way amazing.)  I might even send some books other places, if I don’t think they’re right for Baen.

But in either case, it won’t matter.  If the traditional publishers won’t publish them, I’ll find other ways to bring them out.

Now, consider that writing a book a month is not difficult for me (and that’s taking weekends off) but that what’s been stopping me are the months of self-doubt in between, when I sit in front of the keyboard and not a word emerges.

If you subtract those months, it will look like I’m working harder.  But I’ll actually be relaxing more.

So, no matter what it looks like, over the next year I intend to keep running.  But this time, not on ice.  Or at least, I’ll get me some cleats.