Would that Edits were as Habit-Forming as Words

With the notable exception of pantsing my way through my rough drafts, I'm very into planning. I am a big fan of the idea that it takes 21 days to make a habit. The Franklin Covey system and I go way back. I like SMART goals and spreadsheets and timetables. My planner is color coded in addition to being prioritized by type of task. I'm a huge planning nerd.

I was talking to someone about writing the other day and I happened to mention NaNoWriMo. We were talking about getting over the two-page problem. (You know, where you never get more than two pages into a story because you get stuck trying to make it perfect or your idea just runs out of steam after those first few moments of inspiration.) The reason I always recommend NaNoWriMo to people with the two-page problem is two-fold.

1. That's how I got over my own two-page problem back in November of 2006.
2. NaNoWriMo, falling in November, is 30 days long, giving you more than enough time to turn writing daily into a habit. (If you recall from the first paragraph, I firmly believe habits take 21 days to form.)

Not only did NaNoWriMo get me into the habit of writing every day, it got me into the habit of writing whenever I had time, of keeping a notebook on me for sudden moments of inspiration, and of expecting writing sessions to yield at least a thousand words rather than just two little pages. I found my writing style through NaNoWriMo, which just happens to be perfectly compatible with the program.

Other people have to work a little harder during November, being that they're not complete and total pantsers capable of banging out 1000 words in 15 minutes if hyped up on enough coffee and leftover Halloween candy. I spare brief moments of sadness for those poor unfortunate Wrimos. And then, you know, I have to get back to work, because there's likely a word war I'm supposed to be paying attention to.

But, Nikki, you might be thinking, it's April. Why are you talking about all this now?

An excellent question! You see, I have a problem. NaNoWriMo gave me the perfect way to form a writing habit. I have yet to find anything that helps me form an editing habit.

My style of editing is meticulous, with many methods and tools layered on top of each other. It can't be accomplished in the same fast-paced, no sleep, go-until-you-die-and-then-get-up-and-go-some-more fashion as my writing. I've tried it. I ended up completely burned out and almost decided to give up writing altogether. I also didn't get through the revisions, so, other than being a nice lesson in what I can and cannot do, the exercise was quite pointless.

Since getting pregnant, I've fallen off the wagon with regard to my writing. I spent my first trimester basically living the life of a newborn. Wake up. Eat something. Throw up. Gee, that was exhausting. Go back to sleep. Repeat for three months. There was not a lot of writing. There was definitely not a lot of revising. And now here I sit on the other side of it, completely out of the habit of working at all with no spiffy internet competition to help me get back on track.

I suppose I could try Script Frenzy, but I have no real interest in writing a script and I feel like that would just slice another month out of the very limited time I have left to get my current WIP completed and queried out.

And so I guess I shall have to get back into the habit the old fashioned way, just trying to remember to do it every day until I don't need the reminder anymore. It would be nice, though, if editing was even half as much fun as playing with shiny new words.

Making Up For Lost Time

Deadlines are a tricky thing. You set them, you remind yourself of them, and hopefully you meet them. But life is complicated and tries to derail you. You have to prioritize and reprioritize and pick and choose your battles with the calendar.

Time management can sometimes feel kind of like balancing a ball on your nose while juggling knives and dancing on a balance beam.

On occasion, you drop a knife. (Hopefully said knife does not land on your foot or end up clipping an innocent spectator . . .) Falling a little behind in your time management is okay; mistakes happen and life gets in the way. You buckle down, devote a day or a week or whatever you need to really focusing, and get back on track.

Sometimes, though, you drop all the knives, the ball bounces right off your nose mid-step and lands under your foot, and the next thing you know you're down on the mat, staring up at the ceiling.

You're so far behind that you can't catch up with a little extra diligence. It's just not physically possible. Crap! What do you do now?

My answer: you catch up with a lot of extra diligence.

I'm in this position now. I have this glorious three-book-a-year plan with writing timelines and revising timelines and querying timelines and everything designed to overlap beautifully. A key component of that plan, however, is that I get the first 50,000 words of my winter project written during NaNoWriMo.

The problem: I did not win NaNoWriMo this year, and I'm not even keeping the 36,000 words I did write. I'm scrapping it and moving on to a whole different project. So now I'm 50,000 words behind schedule. That's not something I can make up in a day or two.

I suppose I could shift my deadline. It is my deadline, after all. One of the benefits of being an unpublished, unagented, aspiring novelist is that the only person I report to is me. But because all of the timelines are wrapped around each other, moving one deadline means moving them all. And I don't want to derail my whole year just because I spent November working on an idea that turned out to be a dud. Dud ideas are bound to happen and I need to work around them.

So instead of a few days or weeks of extra focus, I'm going to try to spend the next few months making up for that lost time. I spent the morning going through my goal tracking spreadsheet, tweaking the next three months. I cut out a few of my days off. I raised the bar on my daily goals by 1000 more words on writing days and 5 more pages on revising days. If all goes according to plan, I'll be back on track by the end of March.

It'll be harder. It'll take more dedication and effort. But I'm creating time here. That ain't easy.

FullTime DayTime Jobber, HalfTime NightTime Writer

Working full time and stuffing in enough writing/editing time in to feel like an actual writer is quite difficult for me. I don't know how people manage it successfully. Except that they've had a lot more practice at it than I have. At times, I feel as though there's so much to be done with the bills, paperwork, and housewifely cleaning that I don't have enough time for me, let alone the myriad of characters plunging around in my gray squishy matter. And if it's this bad now, how in the universe am I to cope when I have kids? Fretting like this does me no good, serves no purpose. So the hubby and I had a chat over budgeting and longterm future goals. An agreement and compromise was born. The Plan.

The Plan involves a more rigid schedule during my weekdays to help me find both destressing time and writing time. During the weekend it's more fluid, to allow me to write during my best part of the day and be home administrator as needed. The Plan involves only one social outing a month (for the time being). I keep my critique meetings Sunday afternoon but I lose my TriMu meetings on Wednesdays and instead take on choir rehearsal. The daily schedule builds in time for my Morning Pages (The Artist's Way), plotting and planning time, and THREE hours of writing time after dinner.

A Typical Plan Day:

Morning Routine
AM Commute - Morning Pages
AM Break - Daily Writing Goal Spreadsheet
Lunch - Blog Reading/Composition
PM Break - Calendar, Email Reply-To List
PM Commute - Vent, Rev Up Blocking
After Work Routine
The 3 Plan Writing Hours
Before Bed Routine

The hubby has declared that I may continue to read all the publishing blogs and articles I would like - but not during my Plan hours. I may no longer research for my "agent wish list" nor submission guidelines until I have completed this latest editing run-through of StarStones. (Yes, by "run-through" I mean complete rewrite of several chapters, and pokey fixins of others.) No more work on short stories or smaller subs during Plan hours until this is done. Now, I can still scribble on the outskirts of those hours, but unless I meet my goals on the bigger work - the shinies and short stories get taken away. So I guess I better bust tail and get on it, huh?

Our priority goal?

To allow me to finish this run-through of StarStones by September 1st.

The Plan's 2009 Schedule:
September 1: Latest StarStones revision complete
September 2-7: Revision of query letter, research of submission takers, and the mailing of the first official query
September 8-30: Preparation of material for the October writer's conference
October 1-4: Writing Conference
October 5-23: More revisions
October 24-31: Pre-NaNo Plotting Week
November 1-30: National Novel Writing Month
December 1-31: Short Story Bonanza

A 2 hour session of new writing consisted of a 15 minute prep/outline, then writing for 15 fast minutes, exercising for 5, etc. until time was up. A 2 hour editing session would be a straight word binge. Until I do a week of the new 3 hour sessions, however, I won't know the flow. So expect the next update about this fulltime day job halftime night writer Plan to cover how I've managed to make it work for me.