A Productivity Note

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

This post will be short and sweet because…I’ve gotten a little behind with everything this week.  :) And the odd thing is that this is back to school week, so you’d think I’d be getting tons of stuff done.

But no.  And yesterday, I had to sit down and assess where I was going wrong. Why was I scrambling to finish up writing-related tasks like promo?  Why was supper a last-minute effort? Why did I keep forgetting milk at the store?  What on earth was different?

Well, what was different was that the kids were back in school.  But it’s not quite the same as last year.

Last year…all the years, actually…I’ve driven my son’s carpool to school and back.  I sat in the carpool line and typed half of my word goal each day in that line.  And now—my son is driving himself to school. 

I’m still driving my daughter’s carpool, but not every afternoon.  That school lets out later than my son’s school, too. 

So my schedule changed and that messed me up.

Another place where I went wrong—in the afternoons, I felt so lost by not heading off to the high school to sit in the carpool line that each day this week I asked myself, “What should I be doing right now?”

And the answer each time was: “I have no idea.  Maybe I should check my email.”

Wrong!  Checking email is never the right answer to that question.  :)  Email is a tremendous time-suck for me.

What I did instead yesterday was to make a list of what I needed to do.  I’d made a list in the morning, but I’d checked those things off.  What I need now, apparently, is a separate afternoon list.  So I wrote it up.  The most pressing things were to proofread a teaser chapter that I was on deadline for, find and schedule links for Twitter, and then pull that laundry out of the dryer before the stuff started wrinkling (there’s not a lot of ironing going on in my house).  Checking email was not on this list.

So, for me anyway, even small fluctuations in a schedule have an impact. If I lose productivity, then I need to figure out where I’m going wrong. 

And lists…one list may not be enough to carry me through a whole day.  Because when I finish the stuff on my morning list—heck, I might just pull up my emails and lose an hour or more.

Do you ever have to reassess when to fit your writing in?  And do you rely on lists as much as I do?

Writing and Taxes

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

The business side of writing is my least favorite part.  I struggle to keep up.  And there’s sort of a residual guilt that I’m not doing all I can do to keep my accounts organized.  But I’m trying.

New as of 2013 is an accountant.  I tried…I did try…to do my taxes last February. I’ve done my own taxes for the last ten years.  This time, however, they boggled my mind about halfway through and I also felt a rising panic that I was doing something wrong.  I found a CPA right away.

One of the problems is that my income—never very much, but always nice to have and increasingly relied upon—comes from many different sources.  I’ve now got income coming from two traditional publishers, Amazon, Smashwords, Nook, ACX, and CreateSpace.  My accountant recently asked me financial planning questions.  I ended up giving several apologetic shrugs.  I’m sure this makes her want to drink heavily.

How many drafts until you’re done?

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

I think when writers ask how many drafts another writer completes for a finished story, they’re really wondering whether they’re spending too much time editing or too little time editing.

That’s what happens when you work alone—you have no basis of comparison.

I got this question emailed to me recently and I had to really think about it.  What comprises a draft to me?  In general, how many times do I go through the manuscript before I send it to my editor?

I definitely keep going through it if I keep finding mistakes.  Obviously, if you think it’s not a clean document, you want to keep working on it.  And I continue reading through the manuscript if I feel I could have used better diction or if I think of other ways to improve the story.  But there does get to be a point where a writer is making changes just for the sake of making changes.  You can write the life out of your story and when it’s tough to say if a change makes the story better or worse…it’s probably time to either put it aside for a while or send it out on submission.

What comprises a draft?  To me, it’s a new version of the manuscript with significant changes.  A draft is something, to me, that would make me want to send an updated copy to my editor or beta reader (“No, read this one, actually.  Not the one I sent you.”)

I’d say that I have probably four or five drafts of a story before I turn it in.  That’s mainly because I write in layers and the second draft is where I put in the book’s character and setting description and the third is where I stick in chapter breaks. Then I have another couple of read-throughs for errors, pacing, continuity, etc.  

You can also approach it a different way—a bunch of targeted mini-drafts.  This could take more read-throughs, but each time you’d be looking for specific things: weak scenes, conflict/tension, description that pops, out-of-sequence storyline, grammar, etc.

After I’m done,  I’ll email the story to my editor.  Months later, there will be more editing.  Then it goes to the proofreader…and even more editing ensues.

How many drafts do you usually go through on a manuscript?  How do you know when it’s ready? 

Image: MorgueFile: jppi

Twitterific

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

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Telling a Story in Our Own Voice (or One That Comes Naturally To Us)

 by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Wednesday, I was the only adult in the line of about 100 junior year high school students in front of the counselor’s office.   

The students were all there to have their schedules changed for one reason or another.  My son was next to me, both relieved that I was there and resigned that I was there. His schedule, unfortunately, needed four or five changes to it—sometimes computers stick odd things on schedules.  This computer had.  I was there to lend an air of gravitas to the situation and help him get the schedule in order so he’d have what he needed for these colleges he’s starting to look at (primarily German III and German IV, since they want four years in a single language).

Outlining a Story

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

I’ve been asked a few times lately to write a post about how I outline.

This is something I’ve been reticent to do, since I don’t really think of myself as an outliner.  My outline process does seem to work for me, though, and in the hopes it might help someone else, I’ll share it.  But it’s not pretty.  There are no highlighters or index cards around.  And at times, it seems like the ramblings of a crazy person.

With that caveat, here we go.