Time Suck Control

Okay, so after yesterday’s rant and after a full day of running from pillar to post around the city, I conceived the idea of building a kind of calendar to get a grip on the time sucks that have expanded to fill all available time and space. TS, I call it: it stands for “technological stuff” as well as “time suck.” And the technological stuff IS, by and large, the biggest offender in the time-suck department. Add to that to the fact that I now have to drive 40 minutes round trip to get free access to the PCs needed to format e-books, and you have some serious time suck.

One of the successful (s/he says) porn writers claims to allocate time like this: write a 5,000-word bookoid in two days; spend one day formatting and uploading it.

Well…it’s possible you could crank 2,500 words in a day, though it would be a bit of a stretch. Probably not very good words. But whatEVER. And it’s probable that once you know what you’re doing, you could format the result for Kindle, Nook, or both in a single day.

Realistically, I’m not producing anything like that much copy in a day. Most of the time, when I finally get a chance to sit down and write, I manage about 1,000 words, give or take. The second Biker Babe book is at about 3500 words right now, and the plot has barely begun to thicken. It will need a rewrite…as a practical matter, I’ve been so whipped by the time I start writing, I’m not thinking clearly and so the thing just isn’t coming out the way one would like.

At any rate, the write-write-format idea has some appeal. So yesterday afternoon (speaking of time sucks…) I created monthly calendars to cover the rest of the year, dedicating time for writing, for TS, and for my highly minimalistic social life. Videlicet:

As you can see, half of today will be occupied with two meetings. Tomorrow, the entire afternoon is gone: have to drive halfway to Yuma to the monthly chivaree of my fave writer’s group. The morning of the 5th will be blown by a dentist’s appointment (the prospect gets me so upset I can’t even spell it right!). And since I know I will be very upset after that meeting, I’ve scheduled the rest of the day for running errands an other time sucks. Tuesdays or Wednesdays are designated for errands (also disturbing, evidently…), because those are the days when Costco is at its quietest and so, incidentally, are most other venues.

Obviously, this pristine schedule won’t last: there’ll be, for example, at least two more dentist’s appointments in the near future, maybe more. I do get together with friends now and again, believe it or not. And there’s always SOME damnfool thing that scotches up the best-laid plans. But at least now I have a plan.

For August, it gives me four or even five days a week for writing, which is quite a lot. Sundays are ambiguous this month: writing or TS, whichever is most pressing, because a lot of stuff is still in the set-up stage, and I’m still climbing various unpleasant learning curves. But once all that stuff settles down, it means that in the summer I’ll have an extra day for writing (I hope) or for time sucks (as needed), compared with the rest of the year.

After choir gets started, we have this:

In this scenario, half of every Sunday is occupied by choir, and so is every Wednesday evening.

The latter is significant because when I’m not falling over with exhaustion, I typically work until 10 or 11 p.m. So that excises several hours of work time — not very productive time,  by that hour, but still…things do get done then.

What’s left during the choir season, then, is three and a half days dedicated to writing, three and a half days given over to either TS or writing, whichever is most pressing, and four half-days of either writing or TS, if there’s time and energy for that on Sundays.

Now. The cool thing about this scheme (as unrealistic as it may be…) is that to meet our production goals, I’ll need to post something about once every three or four days. With specific dates already dedicated to time sucks (believe me, formatting and posting these things IS a time suck!), I can schedule exactly when I’m going to put the things up.

The 18 serials of Fire-Rider are now ready to go. Gary, the graphic artist, delivered all 18 covers, plus a high-res version of the original cover so that I can improve the image at the Fire-Rider website. If I start on that project tomorrow and only post on days that are already dedicated to time sucks, then the last FR story goes live on Kindle on October 3.

Since I’m not doing Kindle’s thing in which Amazon demands exclusivity and pays you not for the book but for the number of pages readers look at(!!!), then I also could post on Nook, once I figure out how. The figuring out will suck some more time, but actually it looks like it may be easier than posting to Amazon. In theory, I probably also could put it on iBooks, but the why of that escapes me.

At any rate, if all that’s going up is FireRider (plus an improved version of the cookbook, whose formatting I’m still wrestling with), that will give us a full month — all of September — in which to build an inventory. We already have six “racy” novelettes in hand. I’m working on two others right now, so that means I need to write only two and my freelances each need to write only two to meet our minimum goal for a single month. Ideally, we should have fifteen in hand, but ten will do the trick.

As it were. 🙄