When I wrote last week’s post, I didn’t realize it was a two parter. Then, I read it to Jen and in the conversation the followed, I suddenly saw that the post really was rather general and that a bit more specificity might be in order. It is a pretty big topic, after all.
So I thought for today’s post, I’d dig a little bit deeper into my own changing realities and expectations and what that experience has been like. Your mileage may vary.
This last few years have been very much the best and worst of times. I experienced a perfect storm of Major Life Events. These events radically changed my realities and as I think I said last week, I resisted changing my expectations to line up more with those new realities.
In October 2007, Tor offered me a five book contract to write the Psalms of Isaak and my career — after seven years in the short story markets — changed significantly. So did my production needs. Instead of writing 30-50k words per year, I needed to be closer to 150-250k to keep up. We wanted to get the first three novels into the world fairly quickly to help get the series up on its feet. A great opportunity — but also a big change that added its own special stresses.
A month later, my Mom died. Yet another major change in the reality of my life and a grieving process that took me out of writing for about five months right in the middle of drafting a second novel that needed to be finished on a fairly tight schedule in order to keep our publication strategy intact. Flash forward a year later and Jen and I discover that our family planning has paid off in a twofer deal we’d never even considered. Twins. But no, the perfect storm was not complete. Because just after learning we were having twins, my Dad died. And my first novel, Lamentation, came out a week later to be very well received in the world. Queue another five month work stoppage right in the middle of drafting my third novel, still working towards an aggressive publication schedule.
And of course, the book coming out was a different kind of stress than the loss of my parents. But it also had a big impact on my time. Suddenly, I went from one or two fan notes per year on my rather obscure short stories to a steady, weekly flow of notes coming in about the books. Along with interview requests, book signings and the other aspects of the business. Good stress. But stress nonetheless. And more expectations.
When the twins were born, as amazing and glorious as it was, it completed the perfect storm of change with a flourish of sleepless nights, out-of-control stress, big financial pressure and the most significant life change I’d yet experienced. I had roughly a thousand words left in Antiphon when they were born. It took me weeks to get those words and once those words were in, they were my last for nearly a year. And after a decade of being able to write whenever I wanted at a speed of about a thousand words an hour, you can imagine the internal frustration I was experiencing. Why? Because I refused to let the changes in my reality lead to changes in my expectations. And that compounded the issues, prolonging the impact of the perfect storm. It was spring before I could write again and even then, touching the Psalms of Isaak created a bizarre anxiety that was nearly crippling because suddenly a performance pressure had shown up. When we’d planned and schemed about babies, we’d done so based on the normative experience of having one at a time. But two meant double the cost. Which meant a need for increased revenue. And where could I find that revenue?
In my books, of course.
It seemed perfectly reasonable based on past reality. Drafting a book in four or five months would keep that revenue flowing in, just enough to keep the daycare bill paid in addition to our other increased expenses. The books that I suddenly couldn’t write anymore the way that I had in the past. The books that had to sit through the unexpected one year work-stoppage. Reality was in conflict with my expectations.
It took me a while to see it. I can be quite stubborn. And things became easier when I gave myself permission to adjust those expectations or change those realities where I could to line them up better with one another.
What did that look like specifically?
First, I figured out that I can’t write effectively under that level of pressure. Maybe if I were only dealing with one or two major life events but not the seemingly endless stream. It was impacting my health and threatening my sense of well-being. We needed to find another path toward increasing our revenue and I needed to get back to thinking of writing as storytelling as opposed to paying for daycare.
Second, I had to figure out how to jumpstart my writing after a year of fussing and floundering. My solution showed up in the form of a contract with Wizards of the Coast for a Dungeons and Dragons short story. My expectation was to write Requiem. Quickly. And locked up everytime I tried. So I put that on hold to write something fun that touched my nostalgia for the game that was such an important part of honing my storytelling muscles. It worked. I went from no words to 7k words in just the course of a weekend. From there, I jumped into a slightly longer project — the Metatropolis Cascadia novella for Audible. This let me get my writing legs back under me to the tune of about 32k more words.
And in coming back to writing, I found I had to change my expectations even further. Gone were the days of putting on my headphones at 3am and losing myself in my work. Bottle-making, diaper-changing, baby-cuddling all showed up right in the midst of that ideal writing time. And despite the importance of that writing for my family, I knew where my priorities needed to be. I get to share this time in my daughters’ lives just once and they are the most important story I’ll ever help write. But that didn’t change the frustrations and my need to get back to writing. So I had to find new ways and times to write. And I had to accept the new reality that my writing production was going to slow down and stay slow probably for a few years. I resisted this for months. Did I mention how stubborn I can be? Flat spots started showing up on my head as I banged it against the wall of my unrealistic expectations.
I started slipping out on Saturdays for a few hours of writing in local restaurants. I started grabbing time in the evening in that gap between getting home and getting the girls to bed. I started looking at weekends where I could slip away to write and found a beachhouse I could borrow occasionally that I could retreat to in order to get some focused writing time. This of course impacted Jen’s reality as she now needed to find friends and family willing to come help with the girls while Daddy was away writing his books.
And in accepting that things were going to be slow for a while, I had to adjust my expectations around my dayjob. It became more and more obvious that the goal of going full time as a writer needed to be laid aside. My previous plan had been write a lot of books quickly, get them into the world, and go full time as soon as humanly possible so I could write even more books and get them into the world. But the more I thought about that and thought about the crazy pressure-cooker that it created in me, the more I realized that having a dayjob was not only likely for a number of years but also probably optimal in that it created a baseline of income and affordable benefits — and reasonable expectations given the new reality of my life — from which I could slowly grow my writing career.
So now, I’m back to work in Requiem. I’m nearly finished with the first act and the overall story of the Psalms of Isaak is swinging into its third act. I’ve largely given up predicting how long it will take and have committed myself to just plodding forward. Writing became easier when I changed those expectations.
There are two tools I’ve carried around in the midst of this that have helped me.
One is a prayer that I’ve co-opted from my former days of faith despite my present secular humanist nature. It’s one of those prayers that doesn’t really require Someone to hear it and it reflects something I’ve found to be true. When we have the serenity within us to accept what we can not change, the courage to change what we can and the wisdom to know the difference, we are much further ahead in creating reasonable expectations for ourselves.
And the other is cribbed from Stephen Covey — I think from his book First Things First though he likely cribbed it from somewhere else. We all have within us our area of concern and our sphere of influence. If our area of concern — the things we care about and want to change – are is vastly larger than our sphere of influence — our ability to effect change in our area of concern — then we are doomed to work harder, harder, harder bogged down in the frustration of not ever accomplishing all that we set out to accomplish because we’re trying to accomplish the impossible. The trick is to keep your area of concern roughly the same size as your sphere of influence. These two tools helped a great deal.
There. I hope the additional layer of specificity builds nicely upon last week’s more general post. Next week, I may go even further and talk about goal setting in the writing life and shaping the career you want for yourself.
Unless, of course, y’all suggest something different to talk about.
Happy Saturday! Trailer Boy out.
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Ah, Ken, welcome to parenthood.
Ironically, the kid giving me permission to visit my internal worlds helped. At the age of four, he’d drag my laptop case to where ever I was in the house and say, “Mommy, you’re grumpy. You need to go drink coffee and write.”