*low gong-like noise*
“Hi, kettle? This is pot. You’re soot-stained!”
“You’re one to talk!”
“Oh, no, don’t you puff your steam at me. I’m not merely stained; I’m far, far beyond that in the black. The human calls this ‘seasoned’.”
“Riiiiight.”
“Seasoned is another word for experienced. As in, having seen many seasons. So, while the human scrubs you back to your shiny copper self, let’s talk about how to keep you from getting as scorched as I am…”

Authors spend a lot of attention on how to pace their characters, and how to pace the book. Mention that you can’t have nonstop action or you get reader fatigue, and they’ll nod, and assiduously make sure that they have a reaction scene for the emotional processing and the pacing in between every action scene…

But they often won’t apply pacing to themselves.

Once upon a time, several years ago, I decided to set a goal of writing every day. I did, too! For months! I got massive word count!

I also expected to get more scenes that I had to cut… and was quite astounded when it seemed instead that I got just the same or fewer. I also had fewer pacing problems because the pace at which the plot was happening was closer to the pace at which I was writing, so I didn’t forget to put in reaction scenes because my gut said “Oh, that was a week ago. Long time. On to the action!”… only to have one chapter a week mean that the last bunch of action was only one page ago to the reader.

So it sounds like an unalloyed good, right?

Right up until the ache I’d been ignoring in pursuit of my pages a day, every day, became full-blown carpal tunnel. That sucked.

So, it turns out the Big Guy who created the universe was smarter than me when he passed the creation story down through a stone to bronze age tribe, and it contained a mandate that even if you are barely living on the edge of survival… one day out of seven, you must rest.

Ever since then, I’ve made sure that no matter how much of a white heat I want to write in, my planned writing schedule never goes over 5 writing days a week. (Not 6, because Day Job has a lot of computer use, too.)

This applies to more than just the typing part. I watched my darling man, whom I love above all others, try to keep up a blog as part writing exercise, part marketing, part hobby, part job. The first time I posted on his blog was to apologize to his readers that he’d had a heart attack, and a quad bypass, so thrice-daily updates were going to be suspended for an indefinite period.

He did amazingly at keeping up the blog for years, and making it interesting – but as he acquired a wife (me), and moved to a new state, and started publishing fiction he was writing as well… the rhythms of his life changed, the full-time demands of doing the blog every single day in addition to everything else was burning him out. Not only was he suffering, the quality of the blog content also suffered for it.

So we talked, and he changed it. Now he puts up one post on Sundays, scheduled ahead of time, and takes a full day off… and it’s not treated like a war crime if he can’t get 3 posts up a day. He’s able to go to doctor’s appointments, or out with friends to dinner, or to the range, or spend time with me at home, or go on a road trip, and even try, as hard as it’s been, to fight through the pain and write fiction, without constantly worrying about the meeting the demands of the blog.

When you decide to turn fiction from a hobby to a business, you are now in business. And part of treating it like a business is to remember that you shouldn’t be the toxic kind of boss you’d flee from if it were anyone else. “My boss is an asshole but he lets me drink on the job” is a funny meme, and an absolutely terrible way to run your work flow.

Would you work a job for a giant soulless corporation where the boss demanded you show up and be creative every single day, with no weekend days off for years? Where they demanded you come in and work when your husband’s having major surgery? Where there were no sick days, no vacation, ever?

Don’t let yourself be the boss you hate. Or as Jordan Peterson puts it, “Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.”

So the First thing you ought to do is look around and triage. What can be delegated to someone else? Delegate it. No, don’t beat yourself up for “dumping it in their lap unexpectedly”… they saw this coming a mile off. You’ve probably already done it for them already. Let them return the favour! Nobody should be a single point of failure in any group, committee, or organization, and maybe now is the time to stress-test that and encourage workarounds by… NOT BEING THERE.

Second, what of your own work that you can’t delegate, can be scheduled for later? Scheduling is important – you’re not “shoving it aside” or “putting it off” and then feeling the impending doom of an avalanche of half-ignored things… you’re scheduling it, and saying “I can lay this burden down, until this date, when I will pick it up again.”

Third, what can just flat be dropped? No one expects you to have a clean house when you or your husband is sick, and you shouldn’t expect it from yourself either. I’m currently on a course of Augmentin, and guess who isn’t even bothering in one iota about the diet? Just getting and keeping food down is the challenge right now… I am not going to waste mental energy I don’t have trying to beat myself up about clean eating. I’m just going to have pineapple upside down cake.

When the trifle I intended didn’t work? No worries; I just went to the store, got more ingredients, and made a second one instead of trying to rescue the first.  If dinner burns? Flip a lid over it, turn off the burner, laugh, and get Chinese takeout.

Now Fourth, pull out that calendar you just rescheduled your tasks on, and take a red marker, and start picking two days a week (because you need healing time. One day is great when you’re doing well. Two is necessary for building back up) and writing in thick red sharpie REST to block out the day for nothing else.

Resting won’t be easy. You’re not used to it. It means you have to spend time alone with your thoughts instead of drowning them in distraction. Meditation will often, for me, result in a 45-line set of all the small tasks I’d been putting off or forgotten to do, written down so I get them out of my head.

But it’s not a bad idea at all to shut down the computer so you can’t sit down for “just a moment” and try to do “just this one thing”, turn off the phone so you don’t start distracting yourself with doomscrolling and chats, and just let your brain and body rest.

And fifth, once you’ve rested enough to physically and mentally recover, go do something out of your normal just for fun. Because it has nothing at all to do with my normal demands of Day Job or of creativity, I will steal friends away for painting pottery here in town, or a 45-minute drive out to the Whiteside Museum of Natural History, where they firmly proclaim “Dimetrodons aren’t dinosaurs! They’re Older Than Dinosaurs!“…

Or just enjoy some Vietnamese food that may or may not be on the menu, but if Nguyen serves it to me, I’ll eat it. Or introducing friends to affogato – a drink consisting of two shots of espresso over gelato.

Or the butterfly house at the local nature center.

Or a tiny town festival that’s all enthusiasm and make-do, but hey, the farmers washed down and shined up the antique tractors pulling the cheerleaders and peewee football team on farm trailers repurposed into carnival floats! And the bake sale table was delicious!

Or picking grapes… wait, no, that counted as research. Though the playing cornhole and eating home made pie and ice cream at the U-pick farm was just for fun.

Because life isn’t going to wait for when you’re ready to finally relax and enjoy it. It comes at you fast, already going by at one second per second, and if you don’t pace yourself and look around, you’re going to be miserable, and you’re going to miss it.

(blog post picture by The Latest Kate)