We have a Sonicare toothbrush — one of those rechargeable ones that vibrates, like, a trillion times per second and essentially buzzes plaque and tartar into submission. (That might not be exactly the science behind the technology, but that is certainly what it feels like.) The toothbrush has a built-in timer that changes the tone of the buzz every thirty seconds, to let us know it’s time to abuse a different part of our mouths (top front, top back, bottom front, bottom back, or whatever) and so we generally brush for about two minutes every morning and every evening. (Stick with me; there is a point to this.)
If we do the math, two times a day at two minutes per brushing comes to twenty-eight minutes per week, or 1,460 minutes of brushing per year. That’s twenty-four hours and twenty minutes. So, put another way, each year, we spend the equivalent of one entire day brushing our teeth. We can do calculations like this for all sorts of things. I do a workout each weekday morning before I take my morning walk. That workout lasts about forty minutes and I do it five days a week (except for when I’m traveling). So, that’s 200 minutes a week for, let’s say, forty-five weeks out of the year. That means I spend the equivalent of slightly more than six full days a year working out, just so that I can eat a bowl of ice cream at the end of the day and not feel too guilty about it.
But for the purposes of this post, let’s stick with the toothbrushing example. Assuming, of course, that you’re still reading. Certainly by now you’re wondering what the hell this is about.
Allow me to explain.
Speaking with beginning writers at conventions (as I did at ConCarolinas a week or so ago) I often hear that they are ready to start work on a novel, but they worry about carving out time in their already-busy lives for a big project. Such an endeavor feels overwhelming, frightening, impossible.
And in part, this is the fault of professionals like me, who talk about our work habits and, perhaps, create unrealistic expectations that writers with less experience then apply to themselves. I write full time. I demand of myself that I write 2,000 words per day. I am asked often how long it takes me to write a book, and the honest answer is that it takes me about three months, which is pretty quick, I know. Writers who are at the outsets of their careers should not necessarily expect to do the same.
Because I didn’t always write this fast. For the first ten years of my career, I was pleased to complete a book a year. And that pace is much easier to maintain than you might think. Let’s do a bit more math.
We’ll begin with the assumption that the book we’re writing will come in at around 100,000 words, which is the approximate length of most of the Thieftaker books, the Chalice War books, and the Fearsson books. Epic fantasies tend to be somewhat longer; YAs tend to be shorter. But 100K is a good middle ground.
Let’s assume as well that at most we can afford to devote an hour a day to writing. And in that hour, we can only expect to write one page — about 250 words. That pace may sound way too slow, and you may be saying to yourself that at that rate we’ll be writing forever.
Well, no. At that pace, even allowing for missed days along the way, we can be finished with our 100,000 word novel in a little over 13 months. If we can up our production to five hundred words a day just on weekends, we can be done in closer to eleven months, under a year.
Feeling more ambitious? Say we can write for ninety minutes each weekday, and can manage to average 500 words a day, while taking our weekends off to recharge. Well, now we’re writing 2,500 words per week, and that novel will be done in less than nine months. Willing to write on weekends, too? Now we’re down to seven months.
I can go on, but by now you get the idea. Applying the toothbrush principle — which says simply that small efforts on a daily basis add up quickly — we can transform the very idea of writing a novel from something daunting — a challenge that feels too huge to tackle — into something manageable, doable.
Now, to be clear, I am not suggesting that anyone exchange brushing their teeth for writing. The day is long enough to get both done. And four out of five dentists surveyed tell us that the world will be a better, fresher place if we all continue to brush our teeth . . . .
Have a great week!
I have written a lot of books and stories over the years. The truth is, I love all of them. I can tell you a hundred things I like about every book I’ve published, and I believe if I could convince people to read each of them, the books would be very popular. But the fact is, as is true with most authors, some of my books have done far better commercially than others. And, as it happens, the ones that have tended to do well are those that are most easily and succinctly described. The Thieftaker books are my most successful. How do I pitch them to interested readers? “These are magical mysteries set against the backdrop of the American Revolution.” The new series, the Chalice War, is also easy to describe — “It’s a modern urban fantasy steeped in Celtic mythology.” These books, I have found, are as easy to sell as the Thieftaker books, and that is saying something.
The three books of the Case Files of Justis Fearsson and the Radiants duology might well be my favorites of all the books I’ve written. They are exciting, emotional, filled with great characters, and paced within an inch of their lives. But they are far more difficult to describe in a single sentence than other books and, likely as a result, they have never done as well commercially as I hoped they would.
I’ve been thinking of this a lot recently because I am in the process — finally! — of reissuing my Winds of the Forelands series, which has been out of print for several years. The books are currently being scanned digitally (they are old enough that I never had digital files of the final — copy edited and proofed — versions of the books) and once that process is done, I will edit and polish them and find some way to put them out into the world again.
I feel that way about the second and third books in my Case Files of Justis Fearsson series, His Father’s Eyes and Shadow’s Blade. These books are easily as good as the best Thieftaker books, but the Fearsson series, for whatever reason, never took off the way Thieftaker did. Hence, few people know about the Fearsson books, and it’s a shame, because these two volumes especially include some of the best writing I’ve ever done.
Same with the Islevale Cycle trilogy. Time’s Children is the best reviewed book I’ve written, and Time’s Demon and Time’s Assassin build on the work I did in that first volume. But the books did poorly commercially because the series got lost in a complete reshuffling of the management and staffing of the company that published the first two installments. The series died before it ever had a chance to succeed. Which is a shame, because the world building I did for Islevale is my best by a country mile, and the plotting is the most ambitious and complex I ever attempted. Those three novels are certainly among my very favorites.
Very early in my career, when my first book, Children of Amarid, was the only one I had out, I responded publicly to a online review from a less-than-delighted reader. Amazon was still a novelty (no pun intended) as was the notion of online reader reviews. (Hard to imagine, right? That the idea of readers offering reviews of the books they’d read should have been new and different and even a bit odd?) I don’t remember what the reader in question objected to about the book, nor do I remember what I said in my public response. The original book is out of print now — only the 2016 reissues are available on the site, so our exchange is lost to the ages. All I know is that someone criticized the book, I didn’t take the criticism well, and I took it upon myself to write a reply and post it to the Children of Amarid Amazon page.
Some years later, soon after the release of Spell Blind, the first book in The Case Files of Justis Fearsson, another Amazon reviewer panned the book because my book was “a blatant rip-off” of Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books, “a ludicrous case of copycatting.” For the record, I didn’t copy Dresden at all. I had only read the first two books of the series, and the “copycatting” the reviewer claimed I’d done amounted to using tropes of the genre, not elements of Butcher’s work. And so I responded to the review, wanting to set the record straight.
My “What matters?” series of posts will conclude next Monday, after a Monday Musings post this week that straddled the personal and professional a bit more than usual. In the meantime, I am using today’s Professional Wednesday post to begin pivoting toward the impending release of my new series, a contemporary urban fantasy that delves deeply into Celtic mythology. The series is called The Chalice War, and the first book is The Chalice War: Stone. It will be released within the next month or so, and will be followed soon after by the second book, The Chalice War: Cauldron, and the finale, The Chalice War: Sword.
I finished the book and showed it to my agent. She liked it a lot, but thought it needed work. She was right, of course. But by that time, I had signed the contracts for Robin Hood and the Thieftaker books. Not too long after, I finally sold the Fearsson series to Baen Books and so had that trilogy to get through.
But I never forgot my Celtic urban fantasy, or its heroes Marti and Kel. When I had some spare time, I went back and rewrote the book, incorporating revision notes from friends and from my agent with my own sense of what the book needed. I rewrote it a second time a couple of years later, and having some time, started work on a second volume, this one set in Australia (where my family and I lived in 2005-2006). I stalled out on that book about two-thirds of the way in, but I liked what I had. By then, though, I was deeply involved with the final Thieftaker books and the Fearsson series. And I was starting to have some ideas for what would become the Islevale trilogy.
About seven years ago, I received out of the blue, an email from the actor Bronson Pinchot, who is probably best known for playing the role of “Balki” in the sitcom Perfect Strangers. He was, by then, enjoying a successful career as a voice actor, and he was writing to me because he was about to return to the studio to begin recording his reading of the second Justis Fearsson book, His Father’s Eyes. He wanted to know what I had thought of his treatment of the first book in the series, Spell Blind, and if there were things I wanted him to do differently with the second book.
I was thrilled to get the email, and also impressed by the care he was taking with my books. But I wasn’t really able to give him the feedback he was after. “I have heard great things about your performance from friends, as well as from online reviews,” I told him. “I’ve listened to the sample on the Audible site and very much like your take on the character’s voice. The truth is, though, I am incapable of listening to others read my work. It has nothing to do with your performance, or any one else’s, for that matter, and everything to do with hearing the flaws in my own writing, which I find excruciating.”
As it happens, I have from Audible the MP3 CD of the third and final book in the original trilogy, Shadow’s Blade. Since I also had in my immediate future two seven-hour drives, I thought I would go ahead and listen to the book. How bad could it be, right? Even if I hated what I heard (to reiterate, I wasn’t worried about Pinchot’s performance, but rather my writing), I could take solace in knowing that I was now seven years and at least eight novels more experienced than I was when I wrote the book.