Semesters, Structures, and Schedules, Oh My
AUGUST TOTALS
46,613 words (goal: 33,333)
8 projects
27 days written(!)
YTD total: 281,616 (goal: 266,667—well on track to hit yearly goal of 400k)
Classic ‘me’ to pare down my goals and then blow my old goals out of the water. Hit a real low point in writing in August with my central project, which I had wanted to finish. Made good progress, but that progress didn’t look how I wanted it to—I put in nearly 18k new words on it, but net gain was only 121 words thanks to deleting old drafts.
I did start and put several thousand words on multiple next projects. This is good, but not great. I’m full of ideas and short on follow-through. Really taking to heart the idea that you need to actually finish things as a writer. Just the idea, though. Actually doing it seems like a lot of commitment.
I’ve been having a rough go lately. It’s 2020; who hasn’t. My reading’s fallen off, my work focus is shit. I have big aspirations of regular exercise. I often have big aspirations.
I was largely great at academia, except when it came to the institution itself; we parted mostly on ideological terms. I thrived on the semester system. My school actually had a trimester system, so my year was neatly divided into three chunks of thirteen weeks, separated by occasional breaks. It’s not that it was easy, but having some understanding of how to divide my work according to deadline priority—the structure of classes—was a boon.
The biggest difficulty with moving to self-employment has been the lack of external structure. Every September I feel supreme whimsy for the academic life I left behind: the sense of purpose behind it, before it hollowed me out. I don’t miss academia, really. I am much healthier these days, with a much broader depth of skills to hang my identity on. And it never backfires! Never ever. [shoves writing crisis under the rug]
What I truly miss about academia was the purpose of a career. Academia took me places; I did more travel in the name of research than I’ve done on another basis. I learned things, met people on the basis of their passions. There’s no reason, of course, my central goal of publishing can’t provide me these same things! I just have to sit down and do it which, as established, is the hard part.
To encourage me back into habits that benefitted me, I’ve done something that’s nerdy even for me: I’ve spent the last week creating what amounts to a semester schedule.
This is not to say, exactly, that I’ve got the next thirteen weeks planned out for myself. Instead, trying to set up a weekly schedule forced me to sit down and figure out my medium- and long-term goals, then cut them up into smaller, doable components— week by week, then day by day. The “semester” system worked for me because I could see a distant but seeable end point and understood what each week was working toward, so that’s what I tried to replicate.
And that’s the story of how I wound up writing up a multi-year, 15-book self-publishing release plan that is simultaneously way too ambitious and eminently doable, parcelled roughly into trimesters, weeks, then days.
I retrofitted my existing weekly progress spreadsheet (blue and transparent columns) to autocalculate my progress on each project on a week-to-week basis. The “difference” columns inform me on what my writing targets are on a weekly basis. Week 36, last week, my colloquial Week 0 on the semester, my goal was to write 10k on {codename}Mask, which, as you can see, I fell short of by about 3k. (The dates don’t quite line up; my ‘semester’ weeks end two days earlier than my annual weeks. But the point of this system is to provide myself with a lot of wiggle room, since I, once again, am mostly trying to address my problems with follow-through.) I know I’ll be short this week as I’m going camping this weekend, so my goal of 5k has been augmented by what I need to make up from last week to hit my total goal of 55k. Now, on the written daily schedule I have in my notebook and the subsequent daily to-do list I make on a whiteboard in my office, I understand how to parcel up the goals for this week on a day-to-day basis: Wednesday and Thursday I’m likely to write a little less as we shop and prepare for camping, so I’ll be frontloading Monday and Tuesday this week with writing goals and Wednesday and Thursday with chores.
(My Week 0 had some mixed results, but I was really only trying to figure out how to make the schedule make sense. Hopefully this week will see better progress.)
The spreadsheet autopopulation will ideally, too, help me figure out how much wiggle room I should afford myself on these goals going forward. My system has notable shortcomings: I am planning, for example, to write 8k net on {codename}Mask this week, which—depending on how much I remove—could mean I am scrambling to hit a 13k total that is out of my grasp. My aim is to finish and send the book out to beta readers two weeks from today, something that almost certainly won’t happen given various life obstacles I’m currently trying to work around. I plan to release {codename}Apparition in early December; it’s half-written, but it need a serious overhaul, which is why the net totals are so low—I’m aware that I’ll be transferring out a lot of material as I rewrite.
It will need to go out to betas in mid-November to go out on time. The novella, meanwhile, I want to put out in late January; it basically serves as my secondary project, the thing I plan to work on when I need to time to sort out a problem on {codename}Apparition. My December expectations are generally lower for myself, as it’s typically a difficult time of year for me and will likely be especially so this year, so I left it light on the scheduling.
This schedule has a lot of moving parts, but something about a tiered system of multiyearly, trimester, monthly, weekly, and daily to-do lists is very soothing to me. I recognize a lot about this will change as I progress, but I feel more confidently that this won’t fall apart than I have about any of the other many productivity hacks and schedules I’ve tried over the last few years. Having a schedule for this newsletter has already hugely benefited me; I’m hoping these wordcount expectations, along with setting an arbitrary deadline of Saturdays to finish my book of the week, will give me the structure I need to actually finish something.
Sighing heavily in the chill of incoming autumn being envious of kids with their homework-laden backpacks doesn’t do me any favours, so may as well make a stab at returning to a systematic productivity under my own authority. Week 1 of the Fall semester starts now. I may not have a set reading list or papers due, exactly, but by God at least I know the days of the week.
Mostly.
AUGUST MEDIA ROUNDUP
Here’s some of what shaped me in August.
BOOKS
ALL SYSTEMS RED (MURDERBOT #1) — Martha Wells (4)
WONDERBOOK (Revised) — Jeff VanderMeer (4)
THE MIDNIGHT BARGAIN — C.L. Polk (3.25)
THE EMPRESS OF SALT AND FORTUNE — Nghi Vo (5)
ARTICLES & TWEETS
In Uncanny Magazine, Hillary Monahan writes about representation of Roma in fiction. Several accounts from Roma people have been included on what they wish people knew about their cultures. (Is there a word yet for digitally-amassed oral histories?)
Nathan J. Robinson writes in Current Affairs about paywalls and argues against them, saying “the truth should be free and universal.” It’s an interesting meditation on how compensation for research and writing is generated. Research takes time; lies take much less of it. Who should pay truthtellers—you and I? Someone must.
This interview with Tinashe in Rolling Stone was great for a lot of reasons, but I especially love her argument on abolishing (music) genre.
Brandon Taylor and C. Pam Zhang talk about being on the Booker Prize shortlist and writing from the margins in the Guardian.
Laurie Morrisson writes on the 88 Cups of Tea blog about what to try if you need to jump start your love for your story.
WEB
I’ve discovered SCP for the first time—a fake wiki about a fake paranormal investigation foundation titled “Secure, Contain, Protect.” My favourite entries are SCP-055 about the highly forgettable anti-meme and SCP-1733 about the recorded basketball players who gain sentience the more times the tape is played.
GAMING
Finished CONTROL, a game openly inspired by SCP. Broadly, I loved it. I will be thinking about it for a long time. There are lots of unsolved mysteries and elements of lore that make it rich, but possibly… too many unsolved mysteries. I wanted ONE more answer. Just one.
PODCAST
Regular readers know I’ve been rifling through 88 CUPS OF TEA’s back catalogue. The way these authors talk about craft and the way host Yin Chang leads the discussion is a really good match; I’ve enjoyed each one.
My main media intake this month has been the RUSTY QUILL GAMING podcast; I am nearly caught up. This is a hard one for me to talk about—I think it can be hard to get into, but for me it really hits its stride somewhere around the episode 100 mark. (They ran a recap episode just before Season 3 / Episode 86, which may be a good late entry point.) Some of the supplementary material in this podcast is excellent on craft—I especially enjoyed Metacast 7 on long-form RPG campaigning. GM Alex Newall gives good advice on pacing, especially on propulsive narratives and character arcs. I found it highly applicable to fiction writing as well.
I also started narrative fiction podcast WOODEN OVERCOATS about competing funeral homes in a fictional island town in England. It’s a comedy! The twin siblings that run “Fun Funerals” are a couple of my favourite archetypical characters I’ve encountered in a while. Rudyard is a perfect bastard; Antigone is the deeply weird goth girl we all might have grown up into in a stranger universe.
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Wishing you luck in all your scheduling, schooling, and/or structuring endeavors this fine September. Thanks for reading OUT OF CHARACTER—let’s put something on the page.