Saturday, September 17, 2011

Making Time

This is harder then I thought.

Last night I was supposed to wrap up Nocturne for the review blog, then dive back into the agent search, unwind for an hour or two, and then bed. Instead, my girlfriend called me with a minor personal crisis on her hands. Priorities changed, and I was off to hold her, and listen to her vent, and then put on Bubba Ho-Tep to uplift her spirits. She's important to me, and I'd do it again in a second, but the work didn't get done.

Today I planned to get up early, take care of laundry, deal with some obligations midday, and then wrap up what I was supposed to do yesterday and get on this blog post. It being Saturday, I overslept, and once I got up I was dealing with mother griping at me to clean the bathroom today. So, I took an hour to work on my review, went to that thing, got back, scrubbed the bathroom, and then postponed dinner to sit down and write this. After I'm done with dinner, then it's on to laundry, and... the rest will have to wait for tomorrow. Where I'll also have church and a date later in the day to attend to.

I was unemployed for a while before I got my current job, and I forgot just how much strain it puts on your schedule. In the 5-6 hours between dinner and bedtime each day I have to deal with a lot of stuff, including but not limited to writing, reading, blogging, agent-hunting, and keeping myself sane. Then get up the next day and do it all over again. Wait for the weekends to get a break... and then spend that break doing crap you couldn't get done over the week, because shit happens and stuff came up.

So you prioritize. Work first, queries second, everything else when possible. Increasingly, "everything else" includes blogging and "when possible" means "never". You may think this isn't a problem, but it is. My blogs are not recreation, they're career building. Making intelligent posts and promoting the blog itself is supposed to get my name out there, which will help me to sell my book. Especially if I decide to self-pub after all, because then I won't be able to share the workload with a publisher's marketing division. But the time crunch means I'm unable to promote my blogs the way I'd like to, which holds back my writing career, such as it is. But I keep at it as best I can, because there's nothing else I can do.

I have a feeling there are a lot of very good writers which we'll never know about, because writing is a B.S. career to start. You need to put in full-time hours to make it work, and at the beginning you're doing it for nothing. Hand the average individual a job where entry level pays a big goose-egg and advancement to a better salary requires beating out 1,000 other aspirants, and he'll flip you the bird and become an accountant instead. But the ones that a truly devoted to it hang on, and eventually get there.

... which I suppose means I'm being a whiny bitch. Spending an entire post griping about having to pay the same dues as any published author.

Don't get me wrong, I'll pay them. But there's nothing that says I have to be happy about the situation. Working for free is B.S. by any standard.

And now, I've put off dinner for too long...

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