The Worst Kind of Month

Despite all good intentions, getting through the second draft and rewrites of the second book in my Shig Sato mystery series has  been much more time-consuming than I expected

Such intentions led to a writing schedule, churning out 1,000 words a day, monitoring my (still very) anemic marketing for book 1, keeping track of meager sales, but the main thing I realized: getting it all done was a lesson in itself. I’m still learning, still striving, still adjusting to the fact I have to put in A LOT more hours than I am right now. Full-time job? Who cares. Home? Kids? These aren’t problems, they’re excuses. Everyone has things in their life that must be dealt with, If creating a writing life was so easy, everyone would do it.

Then came a death in the family.

The moment I knew I had to stop my life and go be with my family, travel from home for a week and tear my attention away from my job and my writing, was when I realized it should not take a death to sharpen my focus and get the job done. Every moment I spend with my family is precious, and I am glad for the time I spend with them. I wish I could spend more time with them. These thoughts made me think about time, and how I wasted it – days, months, years wasted when I didn’t put in the hours to make my dream a reality.

Being away from home to deal with a family tragedy forced me to realize that despite not knowing how much of it I have, time is the one thing I can choose how to spend. So how will I choose to spend my time? Watching a ball game on TV or staying up late and watching a movie on my tablet? I know I don’t read enough, write enough, spend nearly enough time on my indie author business. It’s the irony of our lives – time is the one commodity we have control over and yet we don’t know how much of it we have. That’s why it’s such a crime to waste it. When I arrived home, I realized I didn’t know how much time I have — but I know how many hours there are in a day, and what I do with them. So I must use them wisely, and make every hour count.

This writing life that I embrace has been a mixed bag of writing, stopping for years, writing some more, sending work off to magazines and agents, getting rejected, stopping altogether, then writing some more. It’s only been in the last seven years that I’ve put in the time to warrant saying ‘this is what I do’ and go flat out.

I’m not worried about the marketing, the sales — I know I will get into that more in the months to come, and that will come along eventually. For me, right now, the writing is the thing. Putting in the time is the thing. Focusing on getting the job done is the thing.

My goal for this year was to write and publish two more Shig Sato stories. One is nearly complete and may be out by December. The other is half-written, and needs a lot of work. I did not put in the time to meet my goal. I know that now.

So now I need to manage my time better, and get some more writing done.

How about you?

Entering Act III

Recently, I read  about millennials finishing college, finding a job, closing in on 30 and getting serious about their life. And they are struck with all sorts of realities: being single means being lonely. Being married means sacrificing. Having children means saying goodbye to whatever life you thought you had. Work is a grind. Life isn’t fair. And friends drift away, seldom to be replaced by new friends. And nostalgia doesn’t seem so stupid after all. (The creators of How I Met Your Mother knew this — and the show lasted nine seasons.)

Turning 30 is big. To me, though, it’s just the end of Act I.

It’s what I’ve come to think about life, and how things go. Let’s say life is like a play, and if a person is lucky enough to get their three score and ten, and maybe a little more, it’s easy to see how it can be broken into three acts.
Everyone’s life is unique, so there are no hard-and-fast rules to this. Speaking for myself, my first act ended at 31. It was the last year I was in New York, working for a newspaper, unhappy with my life, unable to shout down or ignore the voice inside me saying “Go out and see the world, it’s your last chance!”
I had been lucky in the seeing the world bit: Caribbean, Mediterranean, Baltic, North Sea, eight countries in a six month cruise — and then I was ordered to Asia.
It was heaven for someone who knew in his bones that he wanted to write. Not knowing what, or how,  didn’t seem to matter. Working as a journalist seemed to be a good way to get my feet wet. So from traveling to journalism school to newspaper work — and all I could think of was how I missed traveling.

Enter Act II.

I went to Japan, and my life changed in ways I could  not image  ways unimaginable. Simply put, I found myself in Tokyo, working as a copy editor, teaching conversation English, editing English language textbooks, falling in love, and in the blink of an eye, becoming a husband and father. Totally unprepared, mentally, emotionally, financially. One thing I knew was as big a schmuck as I probably was, what I’d be graded on for the rest of my life was ‘was he a good father?’ I spent the next 20-plus years trying to live up to that. My jobs in the newspaper industry really didn’t amount to much because deep down the guy who wanted to write novels battled the guy who was editing newspapers and moonlighting for extra cash and taking jobs every few years to be closer to his son. It was all I could do to muster what little brainpower I had to get through the day. But, time passes, kids graduate high school, then college, and the angst of raising children becomes a memory. Now son and father are launched into the world. He’s beginning his own Act I.

For me, it’s time for Act III. And like the storytelling gurus suggest, there are things from Act I and Act II that are the key to Act III — admitting that I’d rather write fiction than work in the news business, admitting that back-to-back  job loses that resulted in an anxious move to a new town really did turn out well, after all. Realizing surviving long-ago health issues that became to big too ignore will put one in a grateful frame of mind. Coming out the other side of those episodes whole and better helped me decide that, like the old gent in Slomo said,”Do what you want to.”

I hope that everyone, in their own Act III, finds a grateful place, and do what they want to.