Guard Your Time

I was on vacation a couple of years ago when I got an email from a former critique group partner. At first I couldn't even recognize his name, but I opened the email because it was kind of familiar.

 It started by praising my suggestions in the past as the most valuable he'd ever gotten (I don't remember being brilliant, but okay) and then telling me the great news. He'd finished his book! It wasn't one of the ones I'd seen, but a new one. He'd had many health issues, so it had been very hard to write, but he'd pushed through.

I looked again at his name, and then I remembered. That guy! He'd turned in sections of different stories as part of this one novel-length group I'd been in. He had argued with me about every point I ever made. I don't think he ever changed anything in response to my suggestions, and later on, he stopped participating. Except now he wanted my help.

Okay. I mean, I blog for QueryTracker, and I teach query-writing workshops, and I've done what I consider mentoring. I can see why he might think I'd do this.

Without asking anything about my life, he then explained that he wanted me to read his novel, edit it, and tell him how to publish it.

Mmhmm. Of course you do.

Here's where I will now jump in and admit I did the next thing wrong.

What I should have done was deleted the email right here and never thought about it again. Let him think I was dead or that I was so special that I'd forgotten everyone I'd met on the way up to stardom (pardon me while I laugh a bit) or that my personal secretary had deleted the message by accident.

I should have guarded my time, so I'm going to pass this on to you, dear QueryTracker readers: guard your time. You have been given twenty-four hours every day to spend on an assortment of activities. Your writing (and associated efforts) take time, so you need to budget your time.

Critiquing other writers is an excellent use of your time. Interacting with other writers is going to help both you and them by creating relationships. You'll form loose partnerships with other writers and discover how much you have in common as well as what makes you different. You'll learn and they'll learn. You'll encourage each other. You'll inform each other.

But at the same time, note that some people are not going to give as much as they expect you to give them. They think it's fine to join a query-letter critique forum and immediately post their critique, their synopsis, and their first five pages, then never comment on anyone else's submissions. When they have what they want, they leave. With those folks, they don't want a give-and-take relationship, so it's okay to back off.

Anyhow, I made a mistake and answered this guy. I said I was sorry to hear he'd had health problems but glad to hear he'd finished his book. I pointed him toward QueryTracker.net as a resource for finding literary agents.

And then I told him (Dumb, Jane. Dumb) that I'd look over his first three chapters, but not the whole book. I told him I didn't have time to do an edit, but I could give some overall comments based on the first three chapters. Besides, I explained, most of the errors a writer makes will evidence themselves in the first three chapters, so that would be enough.

He wrote back and sent the whole book.

"Once you start it," he said, "you will want to read the whole thing."

(Imagine my "What the hell?" face.)

I opened the document. It was 300,000 words.

I'm going to repeat that: three. hundred. thousand. words.

The first chapter alone was forty pages long, and it was filled with all the same mistakes he'd been making a decade earlier. So I guess I'd given him the most valuable feedback anyone ever had, but that doesn't mean he'd opted to follow it.

And this is the second thing I'm going to point out about takers. It's not just that they don't give back when a community generously shares with them. Of course we all start out as information-sinks rather than information-sources. That's the nature of learning.

The difference is that someone who wants to belong to a community comes to that community with an attitude of participation. They want to work.

They want to grow. So they look hard at where they're falling short and focus on those areas. They keep reassessing, and they keep retargeting their efforts.

The taker who shows up and says, "Fix my query so I can get a bestseller" isn't willing to put in the effort. The person who sits around for an hour or so trying to think of who in their critiquing past might know how to get a book published, then launches their book in that person's general direction even when that person says no, isn't willing to put in the effort. And this interaction showed it.

Why? First, no sense of what the market will bear. Three hundred thousand words is three times longer than most publishers will consider from a first-time author.

Second, no evidence that he'd in any way tried to improve his craft. The only thing he'd changed in a decade was his subject matter.

And third, he'd invested nothing in trying to restore a realtionship with the person he was culling for a favor that would involve at least a hundred hours of her time. Just, "Get me published."

Since chapters should be ten pages long rather than forty, and I'd volunteered to read three, I read the first ten pages and skimmed the next twenty. I sent him some suggestions, starting with removing all the unnecessary stage directions and repetition, removing the head-hopping, and beginning where the story actually began. I rewrote a 550-word paragraph to show how you could do it at half the length.

He never replied, proving how right I'd been to guard my time.

Reading that book would have taken weeks; critiquing it would have taken even longer, and what would have been the result? Would he have pared that book down to a slimmer volume or maybe a trilogy? Or would he have decided I was just an ignorant hater and looked for someone who would snap their fingers and publish his work?

Guard your time. Nurture relationships with other writers who are interested in you and your work as well as their own. Trade critiques, and when you find brilliant critique partners, invest your efforts in working with them. In fact, seek them out by reading their work and approaching the ones who seem like a good fit.

And grow. Always grow. Never be afraid of working hard, but keep in mind that a lot of that effort has to go into your own writing.

---

Jane Lebak is the author of Honest And For True. She has four kids, eleven books in print, two cats, and one husband. She lives in the Swamp and tries to do one scary thing every day. You can like her on Facebook, or visit her at her website at www.janelebak.com.

No Such Thing as "Right Now" (Things I've Learned Along the Way)

I work full-time as a retail pharmacist. Over the years, I have developed a sort of mantra that I use to remind customers and coworkers that sometimes waiting is necessary. When there are more customers than staff, odds are someone will have to stand in a line. Sometimes, the lines are grumbly and complainy but I value safety over speed--and I'll find myself gently resetting their expectations.

Usually, I turn to the phrase "You can get it right or you can get it now. But you can't get both."

Rushing through a task increased the risk of producing faulty work. In my career, that could be dangerous. That's why I work at one speed—the RIGHT speed.

I owe it to the health and safety of my patients.

Eventually, I realized that this philosophy also pertained to my writing career. When it came to writing and producing stories, I needed to combine the correct combination of craft and time to ensure that the story is the best it could possibly be before releasing it.

After all, I owe it to the satisfaction of my readers.

You can get it RIGHT

By exercising your writer's brain, you improve your craft. By improving your craft, you write better stories. Those are the stories you want to give your readers: the stories that are crafted so well that it leaves a reader gasping. Stories that leave you gasping, knowing you could not have done it any better.

But stories like that do not spring forth fully-armored from the foreheads of most mortal writers. We deliver our book babies the regular way—slowly, over time. The idea gestates and builds mass and definition. We nurture the characters and allow them to grow and develop and mature. We ponder their stories and we use all our craft to create a miniature, perfect world.

And a story is not done until it's done, rightly so.

You can get it NOW

We all know there are extremely prolific authors out there who seem to churn out titles. Their names seem always to be in the spotlight, along with the words "new release".  It's ingrained into our writer's mentality that the first rule of success is: write a book, release it, write another. Making it big with a breakout debut is less likely than getting struck by lightning while winning the lottery. One of my favorite author mentors once said, in part, that you need 4 to 6 books before you can begin to reach critical mass.

A quick look at Amazon reveals that not every book is a 100k word magnum opus. Short works and serials are tempting outlets for authors looking to build their lists quickly. Readers are happiest when the stories they love keep coming.

And it's no hard thing to get your 4 to 6 books these days. If you have the time to type and the vision to get your stories straight, you can bang those books out.

But you can't get it RIGHT NOW

Most writers can't sit down and crank out perfection in a single draft--not even shorter stories. Plain and simple: good things take time.

Those prolific authors that turn out title after amazing title are professionals. Yes, many of us are tempted to try and keep up with them. Sure, it's possible for less-experienced writers to rapidly turn out titles—but often it's done for the sake of expediency or impatience. And those are terrible reasons for a writer to publish anything.

Many times, the proofing process is skipped—the editing stages, the critique stages, the sit-and-think stages. If an author plots and outlines a story and possesses a knack for clean, tight first drafts, this might not be a problem—but those people are the exceptional few.

The danger is today's ease in publishing: anyone can hit the PUBLISH button at any moment, and living in a world of demand and impatience and instant gratification, there's a misleading belief that there's no time like the present.

Did you ever stop to consider that the prolific authors may have spent a ton of time getting their stories perfected, waiting until they had a sizable product list before releasing them in more-or-less rapid succession?

And even that bit of advice from my mentor author—you need 4 to 6 books before you reach critical mass—wasn't entirely complete. She said it takes 4 to 6 books...and then 4 to 6 months before you can start to see a shift toward critical mass. It takes time.

An impatient author can easily skip that last part. Don't you do that.

Do the RIGHT thing. You owe it to your readers.

Balancing Your Writing Career

When I first started writing fiction, I’d never heard of Twitter or Facebook. And blogging, what was that? I had three young kids, but I was able to carve out enough time to write. All my free time went to the novel I was working on.

And then I discovered blogging. I didn’t blog much at first, and I only followed a few blogs. That was around the time when Carolyn, Elana, Mary, and Suzie started up the Querytracker Blog. I learned tons from them, and went on to follow a few agent blogs. And over time, I discovered that I needed to become more involved in social media, because if I was ever published, I would be responsible for a lot of my own promotion.

Flash forward to today. Now like most writers, my days aren’t just about writing my current WIP (work in progress). I have to spend time playing on my favorite social media sites. I say playing because that’s what it should be. It shouldn’t be work. It shouldn’t be all about promotion. It should be about having fun. Connecting with friends. Making new friends. Making new connections with bloggers who might one day review your book and sign up for your blog tour or release day blitz. Chatting with fans. Fangirling over your latest book boyfriend (that you didn’t write). In a recent Romance Writers of America conference panel I sat on, the participants all agreed that it is the connections we’ve made on the social media sites that helped us the most when it comes to promotion. Whenever we have news to share, our writer friends, book blogger friends, and fans are more than happy to tweet, retweet, and share our news via the various social media sites.

Now that’s great, you might be thinking, but I barely have enough time to write my book, never mind hang out on the various social media sites. This is especially true if you have a family, a full-time career, or both. And once you’ve signed a publishing contract, it’s only going to get harder, because now you have to write the next book as well as do developmental, line, and copy edits on the first book. Later, you’ll be proof reading the book while writing your next book and while doing developmental (or line or copy) edits on book two. Oh, and let’s not forget that you also have to write those guest posts for your upcoming blog tour, create picture teasers (if you write a genre in which readers LOVE picture teasers), or writing other types of articles that will help promote your book (whether it be fiction or non-fiction).

Tips to Balance It All

1.  The best thing to do to prevent your brain from exploding is to create a (flexible) schedule—and try to keep to it. Remember, Twitter doesn’t count toward your daily word count. Nor does commenting on Facebook (as much as we wish it did).

2.  If you have anything promotional you need to tweet throughout the day (for followers who weren’t on Twitter when you first posted it), you can schedule them on a site like Hootsuite. This way whenever you’re on Twitter, you can stick to having fun stuff and save time.

3.  Turn off the Internet if you have a habit of getting distracted and usually end up spending more time on it than you should.

4.  Set a timer, or else your quick five minutes on Twitter could end up being thirty.

5.  Assign specific days for certain social media sites. Maybe you love Twitter and aren’t a huge fan of Facebook, but understand the value of your page.  You could tweet daily, but post Monday and Wednesday on your Facebook page (as well as visit the pages you follow and comment on those posts).

6.  That will make things more manageable than forcing yourself to do both every day.

7.  With your writing, set up a schedule and stick to it. Determine what the bigger priority is and focus your time on that (without neglecting the other tasks). Hint, the project with the deadline is the biggest priority. If you have two deadlines plus you have to write blog posts for your upcoming blog tour, then divide your day into manageable chunks and assign each task to be worked on then (e.g. edit in the morning and write blog posts in the evening).

It’s not always easy to balance it all, but it’s the reality of our job. And make sure you reward yourself each day for accomplishing what you set out to do.

Do you have any additional tips for balancing the responsibilities of our writing careers? Do you find it easy to do or do you, like most writers, struggle with it?

Stina Lindenblatt @StinaLL writes New Adult novels. In her spare time, she’s a photographer and can be found at her blog/website.  She is represented by Marisa Corvisiero, and finds it weird talking about herself in third person. Her debut New Adult contemporary romance TELL ME WHEN (Carina Press, HQN) is now available. LET ME KNOW (Carina Press) will be available Sept 1st, 2014.

Writers and Resolutions

Over the holidays, I moved my writing space to a big broad table in our living room. The table had been my grandmother's and previously kept by my brother. A few months ago he redecorated and decided he wanted it gone. For sentimental reasons, I took it home.

Not that I needed another dining room table, because I really didn't have room for it. After months of alternatively burying it under coats and moving it from spot to spot, I finally placed it in a window alcove of my living room. Success. My houseplants were happy, my Keurig carousel was happy and, best of all, my laptop was happy.

Unfortunately for me the table is once again buried--this time with piles of paper. I'm getting ready for tax time. (I just heard a collective groan!)

As I separated my receipts, I saw just how much I'd spent in 2012 to promote my novel. It never seemed like a lot as I purchased business cards here, a promo tour there, but once the receipts were added and stacked and beheld as a whole, I realized how much money I'd spent. However, that wasn't what really stunned me.

What hit me was the time I'd spent. I saw dates on emails. I saw receipts for magnets that I pass out just about everywhere I go. (I get a kick when people snap photos of them and tag me on Facebook.) I realized how many hours I spent on social networks and blogs, chatting and promoting and introducing my work to new readers.

Don't get me wrong--these are all worthy activities. These are things that authors should be doing, if we want to expand our audience.

However, I saw all the time I'd spend promoting and realized it was time away from what I loved--and that's writing.

I may be a published author now, but I've always been, first and foremost, a writer. I love seeing words on paper. The stream of thoughts that move from the brain to paper. The creation of actual stories out of images and ideas--that's what I really love to do.

While promoting gets my stories out, it does seem like I spent more time on promoting than I did on writing new ones.

Yesterday morning, I sat in my writing space, looking out over the stacks of paperwork and receipts. I did a mental tally of 2012 and remembered each activity--the blog tours, the emails, the weekend at Balticon and I thought; 2012 was a pretty good year.

Then I looked at the small pile of papers that had gotten tossed in the tax folder by accident. On top, was a stapled stack of manuscript, my WIP--a short-for-now story about wizards and gods and destruction.

A new story. It made me smile.

Yes, 2012 was a great year for sure but I decided that 2013 would be even better because I finally made my New Year's resolution…

I'd make more time for writing.

Too Much (Wasted) Time On My Hands

I took a good hard look at how I actually spent most of my "available to write" time and realized I wasn't spending all of it arranging blog tours or sending out Tweets. I can't add extra hours to the day and I can't quit the day job but I sure can trim the fat. Promoting my work didn't take time away from writing…not writing took time away from writing. There is plenty of time to spend writing if I streamlined my other activities.

I can accomplish more by I thought I'd share my own battle plans for making more time for writing.


1) Get organized…but don't re-organize

If you are like me when it comes to buried desks and tabletops, then you know the importance of organization. Straighten up, throw it out, put it away. Reducing clutter will reduce stress as well as reduce distractions. However, don't re-organize. A complete drastic change will trap you in an hours-long endeavor and then you won't have time for anything else. Don't get carried away. The key is to manage, not re-design. A little time spent cleaning up my writing space ensures I'll keep my butt in that space, doing nothing but writing.

2) Turn off the tube

I admit my biggest time distraction is the television. Usually I get side-lined by a Bollywood epic (we are talking three hours of sub-titles. Doesn't leave room for anything but staring at the screen) or a Ghosthunters International marathon. My main excuse is that I keep the TV on to keep me company while I'm home alone, letting it play while I manage the housework or work on promotional activities. Funny thing, though: as soon as the kids get home from school, I find myself lamenting peace and quiet to get some writing done. DUH! Off goes the TV, out come the words.

3) Set goals and deadlines

I am a champion time-waster (as is evident by how long it actually took me to complete this post.) I can lose entire days if I'm left to my devices and, were it not for deadlines, there are things I might never get done. My biggest weapon against procrastination is a desk calendar. Simple as that. I use a month-at-a-glance calendar and mark my tasks down. For me, it helps that I mark non-writing deadlines and meetings down, too. I know the horror of putting off an article until the last minute only to realize that I had a Boy Scout meeting the night before my article was due. Setting goals and making deadlines--even arbitrary ones--keep me moving forward instead of standing still.

4) Make a to-do list

When my children were younger, I learned a vital lesson in parent survival. Never go to the grocery store without a list. When I go into the market freestyling it, I spend money on things I want and not necessarily what I need. Inevitably I end up with less money--and less time, as well, when I have to go back for the vital groceries I forgot to buy the first time around. The list keeps me on task and reduces aimless wandering through the aisles. Eventually, I realized this was a good way to streamline my writing activities. I list out the things I want to accomplish: next week's QueryTracker article, a short story that's laying half-finished on my desk, updates to my blog or Goodreads page. Seeing those tasks on paper make them substantial, real, necessary. If I kept my to-do lists in my head, they'd flutter off like the rest of my butterfly thoughts. Besides, I like crossing things of my lists when I complete them. Each one is a victory, and you folks know the value of each victory, no matter the magnitude.


I'm Resolved! Are You?

Hopefully, I will accomplish one main goal: streamline my activities to maximize my time to write. I don't have to reduce the time I spend promoting in order to get more writing done.

As is evident by the time and effort I put into promoting my work, I view my writing as a business. Perhaps I just need to adopt the attitude that all writing time is business time. If I'm on the clock, I better get the work done.

I plan to use these tips to increase my writing time. Do you have a favorite time management tip to share? Leave a comment for the rest of us. Some of us need all the help I can we can get.


Happy New Year, QueryTrackers. Hope you find a worthy resolution of your own and wishing each of you a year of many words.




Ash Krafton is a speculative fiction writer. Visit Ash's blog at www.ash-krafton.blogspot.com for news on her urban fantasy "Bleeding Hearts: Book One of the Demimonde" (Pink Narcissus Press 2012).