Maggie Stiefvater blogged a little while back about time management, and particularly how it’s possible to juggle writing with parenthood. I never know what to say when people comment on how I write books while I have small children to look after. On the one hand, I’m constantly thinking of my failings, of the long gap between books, of how long it has taken me to get here. On the other, I don’t want to sound flippant, or imply that anyone can do it, that there’s anything particularly special about me. I don’t want to sound all judgy about anyone who does find it impossible. Some days it is impossible, and who am I to say what someone else’s possibility looks like?

What I should say, but never think of at the time, is this: it’s hard work. Raising children is hard work. Balancing any kind of paid work with raising children is bloody hard work. I’ve learned a lot about my writing over the last five years since my first child was born. I’ve learned not to be precious about how and where I write. I’ve learned how to get it done, one achievable goal at a time. I’ve made it to a really important rung on the ladder – selling books to publishers – and am working very hard on the next one – writing books to deadline.

As Maggie says, having children isn’t an excuse not to write. I’d like to add that it can be, however, a very valid reason, whether you’re talking about five years or two weeks. This is particularly pertinent to me because the school holidays started today.

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I’ve talked before about the variable nature of writing work and productivity. It’s a sad fact of this job that it can be hard to tell whether a particular task will take you ten minutes, three hours, a week, a month, or a year.

Last night I had one of the most productive ten minutes of my writing career thus far!

I’ve been working away on book 3 for some time, and while I had a general idea of where I was going, I wasn’t entirely sure how the whole story was going to wrap up, and I had at least a dozen major problems to solve before I got there.

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So April went pretty well, with me getting back into the pace of regular writing. The first week of May… well, I wrote 6800 words or so, which is not shabby at all, and yet falls short of the 7500 I was aiming for. 700 words, that’s not much, right? Except that these things are hard to catch up on and then you get left behind, and…

Looking back on the week I can see my errors. I did great for several days, not only knocking off the 1500 word target comfortably, but also burning through to do lists, which incorporate necessary tasks, housework, exercise, Pendlerook business, other writing/editing, and those things I’ve been putting off for weeks or months. I’ve discovered a few rules of thumb, like that if I don’t factor in exercise I don’t exercise, and that if I want to actually complete a day’s to do list, it has to be a) realistic and b) not have more than 10 items on it.

Things didn’t get problematic until Thursday, a day when I only have about 3 hours at home, and those hours with a baby, which means one naptime. Trying to pack a whole 10 item to do list into that day was a mistake. Deliberately cutting short the amount of writing I had to do that day, to make it up on my much friendlier Friday (in which I have five hours at home before the school pick up, with baby, and at least two naps) would have been fine if I didn’t also have to do items for Friday. 2000 word Fridays are possible if there is nothing else to get done. I was aiming for 2500… plus STUFF.

Btw in case it’s not obvious, ‘nap’ as a unit of measurement is roughly an hour to an hour & a half when the baby (not ME) is napping and I have time to do things without my attention having to be shared.

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Weird to think that April was the first time I had touched Book #3 (which may or may not be called “Saturnalia,” publishers are hoping for something a little more X of/and X to match the first one… we’ll see… ooh how’s “Ides of Saturnalia”???) since NaNoWriMo last year (November, of course) in which I whipped out the first 50,000 words of this sucker.

By the time April rolled around, I was keen to get going, though a touch alarmed at my utter lack of an ending. At the end of this April, I am still no closer to an ending (well, okay, I have a bit of an ending, but not an ENDING ending, I definitely know what the climax will be) but I have a lot more meat on Saturnalia’s bones.

It’s only 20,000 words, but it was a key 20,000 words. And, you know, past the halfway mark, presuming the book doesn’t get delusions of grandeur. All good things.

At this stage I’m planning/hoping to have the whole thing wrapped up sometime in June, with enough time to redraft, polish, and make it awesome instead of merely ‘there.’

Third books are extraordinary things. You have to pay off everything that has come before, but also ideally it is a creature in its own right. I am hoping that each of my books has individual identities, but I’m pretty sure this one has lots of twists and turns coming that no one knows about. Which must be soooo fascinating to read about given how I’m not actually giving any information up at all.

The good news is that I got in a sex scene I wasn’t expecting, between two characters who definitely weren’t supposed to do that, but I can hardly blame them, as they had time to kill, and who wants to read half a chapter of two people waiting around? Not me! I’ll be interested to see the outcomes & ramifications of that little incident, I can tell you! Yes, writing a book is actually much like reading one, only it takes a lot longer.

I’m still building structure and plot and even a little extra world under my feet, so not yet at that exciting running downhill fast part of the book, but hopefully I will get there soon.

The writing part itself is getting harder, as in the physical act, because even as the book sucks me in and is inspiring me greatly, my baby has learned to crawl and is attempting to nap less, which means my 8:30-2:30 work day is shrinking into occasional bouts of 45 minutes or so at a time. All this and I have discovered that actually I really like having a clean house (and it does make baby crawling less stressful to have tidy floors) which SUCKS because as soon as the baby goes down for a nap my brain is all ‘yay, now we can CLEAN’ which I suspect means there’s something deeply wrong with me.

I have no idea when my edits for Book 2 are going to turn up, and I want to get as much of Book 3 as possible drafted before that happens. I’m trying for 30,000 in May given that 20,000 in April worked out so well. May and June especially will be all about Book 1, which will be fairly distracting…

Then, come September, though there will still be editing and proofing and all that stuff to do for 2 & 3, I will be able to write something new. Even possibly to sell something new, as I’ll be trying to sell on proposal first. I’m also putting in grant applications this year for a Nancy Napoleon novel, since I adore her and the timing is pretty good for some more Hobart Noir. New projects are afoot, haharrr. This writing thing is pretty awesome.

So no, as it happens, April Tansy does not grudge March Tansy that month of time off and getting her head together at all! Apologies to those of you hoping for a slapfight. I seem to be juggling things reasonably effectively right now. Though April Tansy is still snickering about the fact that March Tansy entirely failed to plan for those school holidays right at the beginning of the month. There are some in June too. TAKE NOTE, FUTURE TANSY!

Putting books on shelves is one of the most fun EVER things to do. Even if it has to be negotiated around the schedule of a cranky baby, who currently sleeps in the room full of bookcases & books to be moved. Which means that all clearing of shelves, moving of shelves, and filling carry bags/boxes with books to haul out, has to be done while she is awake.

You may already have spotted the flaw in this plan, which is that awake baby is awake, and does not particularly like sharing Mummy with books, and of course Daddy is needed too for the actual moving of bookshelves… thank goodness for the playpen. I would thank goodness harder if cranky baby was capable of sitting in said playpen for more than ten minutes before cottoning on to the fact that everyone else is having fun doing things outside the playpen, and screaming the house down.

So far I have a whole bookcase devoted to YA, and another one with an Ancient Rome shelf, a kids book shelf, a pretty old fashioned hardback shelf, an awesome specfic trade paperbacks shelf and several glorious empty shelves.

I have not yet dealt emotionally with the fact that I had more books that could comfortably fit on said shelves BEFORE the move started, and thus there are going to be some left over at the end of this process. Do not speak of it.

I managed to write 2000 words yesterday, again to the schedule of cranky baby. She is napping less, and needs more personal entertainment during her awake time, which is hard on the stay-at-home-writer, but it’s good to know I can kick into a reasonably medium gear on the last work day of the week if I need to.

After listening to the Underwater Menace on my iPod all week (a story I knew almost nothing about – fish people! Atlanteans! A mad scientist who wants to blow up the world because dude I’m a scientist who wouldn’t want to do that? I had so much fun that I decided to hunt down one of those fan-put-together telesnap audios I had heard was floating around the web and have been enjoying the Faceless Ones, another that I knew almost little about. I can categorically state that Pauline Collins would have been an appalling Doctor Who companion despite me having loved her in just about everything else she’s ever done, and I miss Ben and Polly already.

Further listening has brought me to the Bridging the Rift special episode about Chicks Dig Time Lords which is brilliant and interesting, and includes two of the book’s contributors. I’ve also really enjoyed some of the CoolShite on the Tube shows recently, especially their Rocky Horror soundtrack episode and their ridiculously involved and detailed review of Adventures of Power. Who knew there was so much to say about air drumming?

April has been a mixed month for me, writingwise. The Easter holidays and a whole lot of personal stuff smashed into me, to the point where I stopped, reassessed, and changed my plan. Instead of getting stressed of my week of no writing, I counted out how many weekdays I had left of April, and bumped up my daily goal to 1200 words. Sorted!

As predicted, though (and not properly prepared for) I’ve been finding it hard to get back into the swing of my book. What I really need is a spare fortnight or so to read through the thing and think my way into it slowly, but, you know, I took a month off. I have so little available writing time (and less each week, the baby is tapering off on naps, damn it!) that I have to have precise, small, achievable goals and keep them up regularly or the whole thing will fall apart.

That said, today is the first day this week that I didn’t make my word count. I spent the morning at Pilates (which I am loving in a freaky sell-the-concept-to-your-friends kind of way), came back to deal with the baby, and when I finally sat down to write, I struggled to get any words down. I gave up just short of 400, utterly bored with my book and myself. And you know, that was it, my one chance for the day. School pick up and parenting took over.

But you know, no excuses I need to prepare more for Thursdays, obviously. Need to do more of that ‘pre-scening’ our Richard talks about, so that when I get my single hour at the computer I can actually produce the goods.

I’m starting to suspect that this book will in fact be looooonger than the other two, and that’s going to affect my scheduling too.

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In recentish times I’ve talked about my top 10 standalone fantasy novels, why series novels should not pretend to be standalone fantasy novels, and the kind of standalone fantasy novel that’s really a stealthy series.

There’s one kind of fantasy novel I haven’t discussed in any depth, and it’s the fantasy format which is most iconic as well as the most vilified. It also, apparently, sells better than any other fantasy format.

I’m talking about the trilogy.

The trilogy gets a bad rap, mostly from people who don’t read fantasy novels. It’s the equivalent of Fabio book covers – the feature of the genre most fixated on by outsiders. In truth, fantasy trilogies are popular for many good reasons. They are long enough that you can tell a really epic story and build up a thoroughly detailed world, but not so long that people start worrying about the author’s life expectancy.

According to publishing legend, the format came about when the hardback of a moderately successful novel by some chap called Tolkien proved too long to publish in a single paperback edition. It was broken up into three paperbacks, and promptly became a zeitgeist-making, record-smashing, hugely popular book of a generation, and then another generation, inspiring publishers to actively hunt “something a bit like it”. While many of the immediate successors to Tolkien did not in fact write trilogies, ultimately the popularity of this format is laid at his door.

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I couldn’t sleep last night, which bugged the hell out of me. Serves me right for going to bed early in order to get up for Arsenal v. Barcelona, I think. I ended up getting up at 2am and writing, on the grounds that if I didn’t get any sleep, I would be too trashed to make the most of my one child-free afternoon for the week, so I might as well get some work done.

There are no children awake at 2am. I might have to remember this for the future.

I spent a couple of productive hours reading through my doc and figuring out the big middle section of my plot, and then tuned into the game which started out promisingly enough, and then collapsed in a big messy heap. Oh dear, I actually said that out loud, didn’t I? The heap was in fact constructed mostly of Messi. That man is horribly good at what he does – if he ever loses the mullet for a better haircut, he will be diabolical. Shame he felt the need for some show diving in the first half.

Where was I? Oh, that’s right, writing.

It occurred to me this morning that I really need to get this novel written fast, so as to get it set firm in my head how it ends before I start hearing responses to Book One that might divert me from my purpose. Also that it might be good to have a purpose.

Hmm I’m at the point of tiredness where the whole body starts to ache.

It further occurred to me that people are reading review copies right NOW, the book itself comes out some time in June, and really that’s not a lot of time to write 70,000 or so new words. And to find a purpose. Well actually I’m pretty sure I found the novel’s purpose around 4am, but that may have been a particularly strong yawn.

Why does it have to be school holidays… Mama wants her pillow…

Writing. Writing good. Must write more writing. I may have written the novel’s full capacity of sex scenes already. That’s a bit depressing. Also, pulling an all nighter just to produce 800 words is a touch depressing, even if they are awesome plot-heavy words and also the most I have written since last Thursday.

Zzzz

So, April has arrived. That means that Saturnalia: Creature Court Book Three needs to be well underway. My current plan is to write 20,000 words per month, which is my favourite sustainable level of writing – unlike Nano’s 50,000, it allows me to do some other things at the same time!

20,000 words a month means 1000 words a day on weekdays only. Factoring in weekends is still a new concept to me – it’s a little counter-intuitive when you have kids because your first thought is “oh, my honey is home then, this means tons of time to myself” which is of course entirely wrong. Weekends are nice. Having days when you don’t have to work makes for a better, more intensive working week.

Given that the 50,000 words I produced of this book during last Nano turn out to be actually pretty good (I KNOW, what were the odds?) I should have a half decent draft by the end of June.

Today, Raeli and I started bailing toys out of the playpen – Jem is going to need it stat, as she’s well and truly on the move. One of the essential writer’s accessories is a baby who is not currently choking herself on fabric scraps.

Tomorrow, I write again – I seem to have set myself up to do a sex scene next which is awesome- nothing writes up faster! I wasn’t going to have one that early in the book, but as Kaia said this morning, my characters have probably spent my entire “fallow month” in bed with each other anyway, so I might as well let them get on with it.

Sometimes you use systems to measure things that can’t be measured, because that’s better than not measuring anything at all.

The writer’s daily wordcount is a great example of this. We know, as writers, that you can have a great writing day which only results in 12 words, if they’re the right words at the right time, and you can have a rotten writing day and still produce 3000 words (which may in fact have to be disposed of in a seedy back alley somewhere later). We know that setting a daily wordcount is an imperfect way of recording the progress of a novel.

But those of us who do track wordcounts generally do so because – you have to track something. It’s hard to pin down in a spreadsheet whether you wrote good usable words or crappy steaming piles of crap, but it’s easy to check the wordcounter and type in that today, you achieved 1146 more words than you had yesterday.

Sometimes a work day consists entirely of deleting words, and you know it’s the best thing for the novel, but you still feel glum when you enter a negative number in your little spreadsheet, or word counter. Much the same, I suppose, as someone exercising to lose weight, who knows they have put on muscle instead of fat, and thus have made progress, and yet… the numbers make them sad.

The main reason to track wordcount is that a novel is a huge, unwieldy thing. By dividing it up into small achievable daily goals, you can see your way out of the project, see your way almost to the end. There’s a huge difference between 100,000 words of polished almost-publishable goodness and 100,000 words of draft zero, and yet the numbers matter. They keep us going. They get us out of bed in the morning.

They provide a light at the end of the tunnel.

I honestly don’t know how writers who don’t keep track of wordcount deal with writing a novel. How do they cope without those little happy moments of achieving tangible progress? How do they deal with all the other things that have to be done in their life, if they don’t have a random number that they can hit each day and then feel satisfied that they have “done” their day’s work? Do they measure by hours at the desk? By chapters under their belt?

But there are some days when you can achieve progress, wonderful wonderful progress, without setting any words on the page at all.

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