Only For The Really, Really Stupid–How To Run A Blog And Write Novels And Work The Day Job

A fellow writer asked me:

“a post i’d like to see on here is how to work full time, write a novel AND blog at the same time. I find my self more and more having to choose between posting a blog, catching up with my feeds and commenting on peoples blogs and actually writing the novel. any ideas?”

Well, the smart-mouth answer is:  Learn to do without sleep.

But actually, that’s probably the worst thing you can do.

The really smart answer is

a)   Be organized.

b)   Schedule your time

c)    Stick to the schedule religiously

d)   Develop super-human discipline in order to stick to said schedule.

All in all, that’s a really obvious answer, and I’m sure you’re throwing mental tomatoes at me already.  But really, the answer is that obvious.

Obvious.  Just not easy.

What I can do is paint the picture of how I juggle it all, and you can figure out for yourself some of the ways you might be able to streamline your own life.

First up:  Why try to get a full time writing career off the ground at the same time you’re working full time, and then add a blog into the mix?

Crazy?

Maybe.

Make it two blogs instead of one.  Definitely stupid, right?

Well, that’s me.

• I have a full time job – and not just any job. It used to be a 9-5 job I could leave at the office. But apparently I’m good at my job, and it’s turning into a cantankerous, demanding “career” quite without me meaning it to. So working through lunch breaks is not unusual, and working late has crept into my vocabulary.
• I have published seventeen novels to date, various short stories and a slew of articles, all of which need marketing and maintenance.
• I have at least four more books coming out in the next 12 months.
• I have two major public appearances in the next 40 days, and one of them is asking for a Powerpoint-based lecture to be delivered to publishing professionals from across the province.
• I have a husband, two adult children, two teenagers, two cats and a rock python. (The cats and the python are called, respectively, Merry, Pippin and Sam.  Can you tell we’re a fiction-oriented household?)
• I don’t have a car.
• And I run two blogs, where I try to post daily.

Adding two blogs into a mix that was already maxed could be construed as idiocy, but there were several very good reasons for launching them, which I’ll cover in another post.

As Richard has already discovered, the one major drawback of blogs is that they’re incredible time sucks.

Here’s how I juggle it all, in the order that Richard asked:

Posting

1.    First, I maximised my writing time (the time I spend actually developing and writing manuscripts).  I scraped my weekly schedule for every small pocket of time I could find, and off-loaded everything else I could live without

2.   I have “daily” writing sessions that takes place every day except Saturdays, with the occassional Friday night off for dining out, family stuff and relaxing (and never two Fridays in a row).  By giving up 30 minutes of sleep a night (a really tough decision, as sleep is a critical factor in your long term success), I found myself three hours a night to write.  I chopped those three hours into an hour for each blog and an hour for the manuscript.

3.   On Saturdays (today!), as long as I don’t sleep in, I get 3 hours of writing time, 90 minutes for each blog, and 3 hours for marketing both the blogs and my books.

4.   I have a portable calendar program, Mozilla Sunbird, that lives on my USB drive.  I use it to schedule regular posts, guest bloggers, and to keep track of where I’m up to with posts.  (An on-line calendar such as Google might work for you, too.)

5.   On the same thumb drive, I have a folder of post ideas inside a Microsoft Briefcase, so the folder is synchronized with the original one on my home computer.  If I get ideas for posts as I’m moving about my day, I dump them there, for later.  Ditto, correspondence with potential guest bloggers – I literally drag the email out of Outlook and onto the thumb drive.

6.   For each blog-posting session, I write whatever post I’m up to. If I finish the post in that session, I use the future-publish function to schedule the publication of the post for the day it is intended.  Then I mark that day’s post off the calendar, and get on with the next post.

7.   If I’m disciplined about sticking with my schedule, I can usually keep about a week ahead of the actual post date, which gives me a few days’ grace if life throws a curveball (it always does — in fact, I’m currently recovering from the latest one.  I’m writing this post on the day it’s due…I’ve got some catching up to do!).  When I finally get back on schedule, I work to get ahead again.

8.   Sometimes posts that should be posted right now will come to me, and I’ll post them straight away, and shuffled that day’s scheduled post either to the end of the scheduled posts, or to the next suitable time.

Catching up with my feeds

1.   We have a wireless network here at home, and my Palm Pilot has a wireless card.  I use Google Reader to harvest my feeds, and whenever I get a spare moment (eating breakfast, the bathroom, waiting on someone else in the household to get their act together so we can leave, five minutes before I fall asleep), I’ll hit the “next” button and read the next blog entry in my feed.

2.   The coffee shop in my local supermarket offers free Internet access, so I’ll use the Palm Pilot there to catch up on posts, too.  If I’m somehwere where I think there’s an accessible wireless Internet connection, and I have time to spare, I’ll test the wireless connection and read if it gives me access.  If I habitually hung out at a cafe or coffee store that offerred subscription access, I’d probably pay for a subscription.

3.   If I read an interesting and relevant post that I’d like to link back to in a post of my own, I star it.  If I happen to be reading feeds on a desktop computer (eg, lunchtimes at work), I’ll actually copy the URL into my ideas folder.

4.   When I’m looking for post ideas, I’ll go to the starred folder in Google Reader, and skim through.  I have a reminder in my ideas folder to check Google Reader as well.

5.   I’m always behind on my feeds.  I’ve got about 180 subscriptions, so it’s an endless challenge to keep up.

6.   In addition, I have about ten Google Alerts keyed to subjects related to my blogs, which helps me find news, sites and blogs that I don’t know about yet.  They land in my in-box each day, and I scan them as soon as they come in.  If an item prompts a post, I dump the URL to the ideas folder.

Commenting on other people’s blogs

1.   I admit I’m deficient on this one.

2.   However, there’s some successful bloggers who never comment on others’ blogs (Chris Anderson of The Long Tail and Wired springs to mind), and they don’t feel the ommission harms them in any way.

3.   There’s also a school of thought, that I subscribe to, that believes that commenting just to get the link back to your blog is disingenuous and people will sense it.  If I can’t leave a thoughtful, content-relevant post, I won’t leave one at all.  It tends to limit my comments because thoughtful comments take time, which is always in short supply for me.

4.   Plus, I’m nearly always reading posts via a feed, and on my Palm Pilot, so tapping out a response on the Pilot also adds to my reluctance to comment.  If I really have something strong to say, though, I’ll get out the folding keyboard and comment that way.

Writing the novel.

I’ve pretty much answered this one already.

1.   Maximise your writing time,

2.   Then proportion that time appropriately between your blog(s) and your novels.  How much time for each is a decision you need to make for yourself.  You can adjust it as time goes on, too.

3.   As one of the major reasons for keeping a blog is to market yourself and your work, look at all the other marketing strategies you’re using, and see if they’re duplicating the effort or effect of your blog.  You could give up your monthly email newsletter, for example.

4.   But don’t give up those marketing strategies that work well for you.  Just off-load the less-effective ones, or pay someone else to do them for you.

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When I plug this weekly schedule into my Books-a-Year calculator, it tells me I can get 4.10 novels written a year – that includes editing and plotting time, an average of 100K words per book, and a low-ball estimate of 1,000 words an hour.

Not too shabby, under the circumstances.

If I sell all four books as soon as I write them, that means I’m having to gear up for a book launch four times a year.  With my current commitments, I wouldn’t want to do more than that.  I just couldn’t cope with the demands.

Knowing that I can get that sort of productivity out of this schedule helps me relax and write what I should be writing when I’m supposed to write it.  It takes the fear out of the knowledge that blogs are time hungry pets.

Does that help?

First appeared on Anchored Authors on October 4, 2008

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Tracy Cooper-Posey © 2009. Cannot be copied or distributed without permission.