But best tip of all? Get rid of the TV!

1-It’s a real challenge trying to manage your time when both you and your husband work from home. Can you say get out of bed before 3 p.m.!?

2-As a freelance journalist, sometimes, I find myself writing more query letters and looking for publications than I do writing articles.

3-I really need to learn to become heartless. I spend so much time writing for other people, I’m missing out on writing opportunitis and income for myself! Family members and friends suck with this! “Since you write so well, can you help me with my resume, school paper or bio?” I have to learn to say no.

4-Blog time? Yeah, right. I think I’ll go blog about saying no.

And finally, on the writing community, I always wonder if they’re getting anything out of it..sigh.

Interviews/ProfilesOmnivoracious profiles Margaret Atwood.The Agony Column interviews Jedediah Berry (podcast).The Interstitial Arts interviews Connie Toebe.Marvel interviews Marjorie Liu.Wicked Little Pixie interviews Anton Strout.Locus interviews Jo …

I work across a lot of regional Western Australia – and it’s a long way between towns here. Most of the community of writers I bond with are on-line. So we used a forum as a pin-up board if you like – or a place to store useful tidbits – and used email to keep connected. But as you said – being connected to the internet is quite a blackhole on your time.

Cheers

Thanks, Varian and Justine, for a great post!

Although I don’t really like it. I write in the mornings now. At first I’m grumpy but when I find that I do get words on the page, I feel like I’ve accomplished something and I’ve given priority to my writing before my regular day starts.

Can’t wait to read SAVING MADDIE!

Also, love the unicorn.

I love your post, and I stand in awe of your self discipline. I have the opposite problem. I’m a full-time writer, but an embarrassing amount of that time seems to be spent (wasted) promising myself that I will write my next 1000 words “right after this.” Which could be anything from a “Cold Case” rerun to a poorly scheduled doctor’s appointment. My eighth book is coming out in a few months, so I do get the work done, but as you say, you have to block out that time when you want to write more than you want to do anything else. I find taking my laptop to a local coffee shop away from household distractions really helps on those days.

I think one problem novelists like me face is that we are forced to be long distance runners, not sprinters, and we run in a nebula. Our reward is out there in the mist somewhere, not tomorrow, be it finishing a long project or waiting for a the royalty checks to show up. We have no control over how our work will be received by readers and critics, or if it will sell. Some days it’s easy to lose sight of the goal, even with a shelf of published books and foreign editions right there beside you in the office. I call it “What have I done for me lately?” Syndrome. Not only that, but as soon as we celebrate the rush of bringing a new book into the world, a new project is (hopefully) already clamoring for us to buckle down and get back to work, a new deadline looming.

I loved what you said about needing a community of fellow writers. It’s such a relief to be able to talk shop with people who understand. My writer friends and I also love to get together and complain about things like the above, in great part because it is underscored by the realization that we are deeply grateful to have such problems. It means we really are genuine, committed, successful working authors. As a friend of mine says, we are off the porch and running with the big dogs.

Time to go manage my fears and just get to writing.

Thanks for the post…great info!

Blast it…

I know I don’t write nearly as often as I should. I don’t know if it’s laziness or not being able to find a better time to write in my schedule, or just a general lack of motivation, or what. It’s easy to say “you just have to want to be a writer more” but it’s hard, sometimes, to follow through. I’m trying, though.

But it’s true, the average USian watches four hours of TV a day. At the crawling pace of a word a minute, that TV watching turns into 87,600 words a year. To adapt your refrain, you just have to want to be a writer more.