I’ve been asked a few times what my writing schedule looks like, so today, I want to show you.
I don’t exactly keep a normal schedule. But I still get a surprising amount of stuff done. Never as much as I want to get done thanks to my high standards for myself, but I think that’s probably true for most people.
With my job and my writing, I tend to stay up until about 5am most nights, 3am if I have a 12 hour shift the next day.
But basically, I get up and take care of my small army of cats, then catch up on social media and do my post for the day.
Then, if I’m off work, food. If not, I get ready and go to work for 8 or 12 hours, using whatever precious little downtime I get to type up a sentence or two on my phone, a whole scene if I’m lucky.
If I’m home for the day, errands and cleaning and maybe a dash of video games or reading end up taking up about as much of my day as work would.
Sometimes I end up starting early, organizing book tours or researching things for ads in normal daytime hours.
But usually, I start on my books between midnight and 2am and do something book related until about 5 or 6am.
I’m almost always working on multiple projects, so I try to do something with each one in that time.
Right now, I’m working on three projects (writing Sihetva, editing A Blessed Darkness, and editing The Regonia Chronicles), so I try to do a chapter of each. More, if I can.
But sometimes I don’t get to all three projects.
And that’s okay.
The last half hour of my book time is usually spent wracking my brain to figure out what to post on social media the next day or two. I’ve tried the whole planning-posts-a-month-ahead-of-time thing before, and it just didn’t work for me.
It just felt like the massive block of time I was using for that month’s worth of planning was about the same total time as doing it day by day.
And it felt less personal, somehow.
Like it was removing the normal day to day stuff from my platform, and since one of the main purposes of an author platform is to let readers get to know the person behind the books, I didn’t like that.
Now, there are a few days that are exceptions to this. Days where I work a 12 hour shift go a little differently. The night before is cut off at 3am, so I only get about an hour for my books those nights.
And Sunday nights are usually rough.
I get home after a 12 and two or three hours later, I finish everything else done that I couldn’t do thanks to work and sit down to do my blog and newsletter for the week.
Which usually means I’m too exhausted to actually write or edit by the time I get those done and posted/sent out at about 4 or 5am Monday morning.
I’ll be honest, every week, I consider not doing a blog simply because I’m tired. Lol. Every week, I consider doing the blog and newsletter a different day or cutting them back to once a month, but there’s a reason I started them at this day/time. Because I know I won’t skip a week. I’ll get it done, even if I’m tired.
And that leaves all my book time throughout the week open for me to work on my books.
Forcing productivity, I suppose, because I don’t skip out on newsletters or blogs.
Every Sunday evening/Monday morning for… maybe two years? I’ve kept this up, and fully intend to continue doing so. Honestly, I’m a little proud of myself for not missing even a single blog.
There have been a couple times where I forgot to post about the blog on social media, but there’s always been a blog post. Lol.
And with as many projects as I work on and as quickly as I get them out, weekly newsletters seem appropriate for keeping readers up to date with what’s going on.
Now, I need to get better about advertising. I need to just block out a chunk of time every week to deal with that beast, to tweak the ads I have going and figure out how to make them work better. But before I can get any ad to actually do well, I have a feeling I’ll be enduring many more advertising classes.
Which I’m sure you can tell I’m really looking forward to.
Honestly, advertising is still the bane of my existence. Which sucks because it’s kinda necessary.
But in time, I’ll figure that monster out too. I’ve learned many a skill for the sake of my writing, and one day, I’ll be able to add that one to the list.
But for now, it’s not a daily activity.
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