What it all boils down to is the decisions people make, most especially the decisions they make about how they spend their time and, to a lesser extent, their money.

For instance, the first category includes a gentleman who complained of not having enough time to write. “What do you do in the evenings after work?” I asked. He said he either watched TV or went to the bar with his friends, and no, he couldn’t possibly cut an hour out of either thing. “What do you do on Saturday morning, then?” He said he was an avid body-builder and that was his time at the gym. “OK, how about the afternoon?” That was for catching up on the TV he’d missed when he was out at the bar with his buddies; he had everything set up to tape his favorite shows. Saturday evening was late night at the bar (no wonder he needed all that time at the gym!) and Sunday was for more TV and the occasional catchup with family. It boiled down to about thirty hours of TV every week, and he absolutely, positively could not give up any of it, and he had a Netflicks queue about 300 movies long for if he ever ran out of TV to watch.

That man doesn’t want to be a writer; he wants to be a professional TV watcher.

The first category also includes a young woman with an equally crowded schedule, except hers was taken up with voice lessons on Monday, art class on Tuesday, photography Wednesday, community theater group Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings (when there was a performance; other days when something was in rehearsal); outdoor photography sessions during the day on Saturday, and a desperate round of weekly life maintenance (laundry, shopping, housekeeping, prepping for all those other activities) on Sunday. And another whose week was similarly crowded with volunteer activities, and another with a social schedule that simply would not quit, and even one person who’d gone to great lengths to “balance” everything – photography class Monday, gym on Tuesdays and Thursdays, volunteer at the food shelf on Wednesdays, dinner with friends on Friday, one of four monthly meetings or events on Saturday (church committee, investment club, knitting group, family outing), life maintenance Sunday.

Those sorts of stories are common and fairly obvious, at least from the outside (the folks who overschedule themselves like this never seem to realize that they can’t get more time without stopping something). But there are also a few older writers who “want to retire,” but who keep cranking out stories and articles as if it’s a habit they can’t break. And one who claims in one breath to want to retire, and then in the next complains that he/she has no ideas for the next story and feels twitchy for not writing. If you’re retired, the whole point is that you’re not writing…at least, that’s what I always thought (which is why I’ve never felt much inclination to worry about retirement in the traditional sense; my “retirement fund” is basically there for late-life medical conditions that would actively prevent me from continuing to write, because that’s what it’s going to take to stop me).

But there’s another level of anti-writing decision-making that’s one up from the folks who can’t give up their TV or who’ve overscheduled. It’s the level of major life decisions that end up making it easier or harder to do other things (like write), and it’s a lot less obvious and a lot more complex than just overscheduling.

For instance, you have the folks who’ve embarked on a career path doing something they hate because it pays well, and then discovered that it pays well because you have to put in 80-hour weeks. Between time on the job and hating what they do, they’re too physically and emotionally exhausted to do much of anything else with what little “free time” they have. Or you have the first-time homeowners who didn’t realize in advance how much time and money they have to put in on maintenance and yard work.

When a person decides to do anything that takes time, the time has to come from somewhere else. “Somewhere else” means “something that you’re doing now that is less important than the new thing you’re adding to your schedule.” If one thinks about it in advance, one can make reasoned decisions based on what one is willing to give up in order to have the new thing. If one doesn’t think about it, one ends up with more to do than one has time for, and something has to go. Quite often, it’s the writing time that gets cut “temporarily” (as if there’s ever going to be more than 24 hours in a day). Which, logically, says that writing time is less important than whatever you’re doing instead.

Actions, they say, speak louder than words…but quite often, if one doesn’t think about the consequences, one ends up saying something completely different from what one intended.

For those who are interested in the glamorous, exciting lives that writers lead:  I have spent the last three days doing every stitch of laundry I could find anywhere in the house. I am currently waiting for the plumber to arrive to unhook the ten-plus-year-old washer and dryer, so that they can be hauled away when the replacements are delivered tomorrow. They don’t get hooked up until the new floor is down in the laundry room, though, which won’t happen until at least next week. And then they get to repair the ceiling, which will be much easier without the new machines in the way (hence the frantic laundry-doing, in hopes of minimizing the number of trips to the Laundromat during (re)construction.) Then I get to go to Home Depot to pick up some widgets. Doesn’t that sound glamorous and exciting?

Which brings me back around to another writing balancing act (several, actually). Everybody has daily life to do: cooking, laundry, cleaning, house maintenance, etc. For writers, it’s perilously easy to put off doing the words in favor of sweeping out the laundry room before the repair guy arrives (it’ll only take a minute), doing the dishes (they have to be washed some time, so why put it off?), sewing that loose button back on (it’s been bugging me for days, but I only seem to think of fixing it when I’m standing in the middle of Target, so now that I have thought of it, I’d better seize the moment).

It’s especially easy when the writing isn’t going well; it feels so much better to be doing something actually useful instead of just staring at the blank page/screen and muttering balefully under one’s breath. And if one is yet to be published, or doesn’t actually have a deadline at the moment, it’s even easier to justify. After all, there’s no guarantee that whatever words one manages to painfully extract from one’s backbrain will sell, so why not do something more obviously productive?

The problem with thinking like this is that if one does, one generally arrives fairly quickly at a point where no writing happens at all. Not only that, but “I’m not getting any writing done today, so I might as well do X” turns into “I can’t write today, because I’ll be more productive if I do X” and then to “X is more important to get done than writing, so I can’t write today” and finally to “I can’t write.”

The solution to this is fairly obvious, if notoriously difficult to implement: sit down and write anyway, whether or not you feel like it, whether or not there’s other stuff to do, whether or not you feel worthy or competent or whatever else you think you need to feel. Writing isn’t about how you feel; it’s about getting words on the page. You have to figure out how for yourself, but really, making time to write and guarding that time from everybody and everything else including yourself is ultimately what works.

The other balancing act is the one involving the characters in the story. They, too, have daily lives and need to cook, do laundry, etc. The convention in most fiction is to skip lightly over all this daily maintenance, because really, who wants to read about someone doing laundry? At the other end of the scale, there are writers who feel that giving the readers all the dramatic details of cooking and laundry makes the characters “more real” (or perhaps it’s “more realistic;” I’m never sure).

And of course, they’re both right – for elastic values of “right.” Which is to say that it depends on the story, the characters, etc. Every story has a unique balance point between showing the main character cleverly breaking into the museum and showing the main character lovingly chopping onions for the stir-fry. In some cases, even one scene of onion-chopping would be too much; in other stories, the right balance means spending several pages having the main character wax lyrical over the proper way to chop onions.

And once again, it’s up to the writer to figure out where that balance is and what the most effective way of achieving it is.

Writing comes in phases. Very long phases, but phases nonetheless. There’s six months to a year of writing the first draft, then weeks or months of revision (depending on the author’s process). Then another few weeks or months for editorial revisions, possibly in two parts if the editor separates major revisions from line editing. Then there’s one to three weeks of copyedit, and another one to three weeks of galley proofing. And then there’s the non-writing publicity stuff that happens after the book is out: autographings, appearances, and so on.

All of it can be considered “working on the book,” and given how long the whole process takes, I’m not sure anyone could make a living writing if they waited until the book was out and all the publicity was finished with before starting the next one. So in that sense, I think nearly every professional author works on more than one book at a time. It isn’t terribly easy at times, especially when you have one book that’s just been published (so you’re doing publicity), another that’s at the editing stage, and a third that’s just starting the first draft. For one thing, it can be hard to psych up to talk about the just-published book that (for you) is two or three years old, when what you’re really excited about is the thing you just started working on.

What most folks seem to mean by the “working on more than one book” question, though, is “do you work on more than one first draft at a time?” That’s a much clearer and easier question. For me, the answer is “rarely.” Partly because I don’t have time – it’s hard enough to squeeze in work on one first draft while also doing editorial revisions and pushing the latest release.

Time is only part of the difficulty, however. The other part is the problem of shifting gears. I tend to write single-viewpoint books, which means I get into my narrator’s head (and into his/her world) pretty firmly. (I was recently asked in a crit group meeting why I had phrased something a certain way, and for a minute all I could do was stare at the questioner. Because it’s what the narrator would do, it was what she’d say and how she’d say it given her background and upbringing; there simply wasn’t any alternative. It took me a minute to back out of the character’s head and see what the objection was, and then get my author hat on and figure out if I could come up with a more acceptable alternative. And that was weeks after I’d finished the draft.)

Being that solidly in one character’s head makes it difficult to change gears and get into a different character/narrator’s head. I can make the switch – I’ve had to do it on occasion – but it takes time. And I’m not talking a couple of minutes here; I’m usually talking a day or two, sometimes more. That means that I lose somewhere between several hours and several days of writing time every time I switch from one project to another. I can’t afford it.

Switching also means that I’m trying to keep two totally different plots and worlds straight and maintain their consistency. Since my brain isn’t large enough to hold even one novel at a time, let alone two, this means I spend a lot of time rereading what I’ve written – more and more as the first drafts get longer and there are more things to keep straight. To some extent, I do this anyway, but it takes longer and there’s more of it if I try to run two projects at the same time. It’s bad enough when I’m revising or copyediting one novel and trying to write another.

Even with the Frontier Magic books, which have the same narrator/viewpoint and take place in the same world, it was more of a problem than you might think. It’s much easier than you think to put in too much or too little mention of a particular bit of important backstory when you’re copyediting Book 2 (in which the incident happens) but writing the first draft of Book 3 (in which the backstory needs to be clear for those who won’t have read the prior book, but not driven into the ground for those who just read Book 2 and have the incident fresh in their minds).

I have, however, occasionally managed to work on two different first drafts at more or less the same time. It’s never lasted for very long; I think the best I did was four chapters each of two books before one of them took off and I committed to it, dropping the other and coming back to it later. I don’t really count the bits and pieces of noodling that litter my hard drive (I have several dozen first pages and a smaller collection of first chapters that haven’t gone anywhere…yet). Those are just things I toss off when I’m playing around with ideas, when I’m between books and trying to decide what to write next.

There are, however, folks for whom working on multiple first drafts is the norm. Some of them can’t stand the down time between scenes or chapters or event horizons, when their backbrains are working on coming up with whatever comes next but they’re not actually writing, and they are capable of switching off to something else without disrupting that delicate unconscious process. In other words, they can write a chapter of their space opera while their backbrain is working on their fantasy, then switch to writing the fantasy while their backbrain works out what comes next in the space opera. I rather envy them; it seems like a marvelous way to be insanely productive…or maybe that’s just insane.

Other folks have an attention span such that working on a single story gets boring after a few scenes or chapters. Switching to something else for a bit allows them to come back to the first project with fresh enthusiasm. Of course, that presupposes that they do come back; I know far too many people who think they work this way, when all they’re really doing is producing one set after another of first-six-chapters. There’s a difference between rotating from project to project to keep your interest fresh, and writing story after story up to the First Veil where it gets hard and then abandoning them for the next exciting new thing.

If working on multiple projects at the same time sounds interesting, by all means try it, but do be honest with yourself. If you’re ending up with lots of first-four-to-six-chapters and no middles or endings, then empirical evidence indicates that this is not the method for you.

Everybody gets overstressed at some point, and the result can be quite dramatic in terms of productivity (and if it isn’t, you frequently end up paying for it later). There are a bazillion books out there on how to manage stress, and they all say the same things and they’re all right: exercise, eat right, take care of yourself, take a break, take a walk, meditate, talk to people about it, find ways to reduce it if possible (move, change jobs, change the locks on the house or the phone number, etc.), see a professional if it gets to be too much. The trouble is that they’re all long-term solutions, and we’re a quick-fix society…and most people don’t even start trying to deal with stress until they’re already in over their heads and sinking fast.

But it’s like writing: nobody else is going to make you write…and nobody else is going to take all the stress out of your life for you. You have to work at it yourself. Some of it you can get rid of permanently; some, the only thing you can do is to change your attitude. And sometimes, it’s a matter of remembering your priorities. Much as we all love it, writing a book is not the most important thing in the world. Not compared to, say, getting your kid to the emergency room when she’s fallen out of a tree and broken her arm, or taking care of your elderly mother who has dementia, or calling the plumber about the flood that’s happening in the basement right now. Sometimes it’s OK not to write for a while.

It can be hard to admit that there’s just no time for writing right now, especially when your backbrain is nagging you to Get This Story Down Immediately. You have to be honest with yourself about whether writing is part of your coping mechanism (in which case it may be worth it to make the time, because it will help reduce the stress) or whether it isn’t (in which case you need to not-write, or you will just make the stress worse).

On the other hand, if your frontbrain is what’s telling you that It Is Your Job/Duty To Do Revisions Today, or that You Cannot Waste This Valuable Writing Time Just Because You’re Stressed … tell it to go take a hike. You don’t have to write when your Mom is in the hospital or your kid is running a temperature or you’re worried sick about layoffs or the roof just blew off in a tornado. You can if you want, but you don’t have to.

Be warned that which hand you’re using may well change with the circumstances. Most of the time, writing is part of my coping mechanism, but when my mother was dying and just after, I lost a good six months or more of writing time because even the thought of dealing with the plot was the very last straw that I couldn’t cope with on top of dealing with the estate and everything else. And it took a while to realize that trying to make myself write “in order to cope” (which had always worked before) was the exact wrong thing this time.

People aren’t machines…and even machines need down time for repairs and maintenance.

The statement means different things to different people, but the most common meaning is “There are a lot of other things in my life that are more important to me than writing, so those are what I spend my time on.”

For professional writers, writing time is too often eaten up by the things required to manage a writing career. By the time you’ve spent time on fan mail, emails to your agent and editor, studying up on the latest twist in the Google settlement, keeping track of which publisher is going out of business or being acquired or just having difficulties (and checking whether any of your backlist is affected), blogging, tweeting, twittering, checking Facebook and MySpace, reviewing writing-and-book-related chat lists and mailing lists, reading enough to at least pretend to keep up with the field … even if there’s time left in the day, it’s hard to muster the energy, let alone the inclination, to produce new words, even if one doesn’t have a family or a day job on top of all that (and many professional writers have both).

For the not-yet-professional writer, the list is a little different, but the basic idea is the same. Work, family, friends, hobbies, and general daily life can take up all the time there is – those things do, in fact, take up all the time there is for everybody who isn’t a writer, after all. Sometimes just getting the laundry done and meals on the table in addition to a job is about all there’s time or energy for.

But. Nobody gets more than 24 hours of time in a day, or more than 7 days in a week. That prolific professional who has six novels coming out next year (and four the year after that, and five more the year after that) has exactly the same amount of total time as the much-admired writer who produces one novel every eight to ten years, the newly sold author who’s trying to juggle editorial revisions and copyedit and galleys while producing his second book, the as-yet-unsold writer who’s struggling to persuade herself that her writing will sell one day in spite of the latest rejection letter, and the one-of-these-days-when-I-have-time “writer” who hasn’t produced two sentences in thirty years on account of having “no time to write.”

It’s not about having time. It’s about making choices.

There are some people whose choices are constrained by circumstances: they have responsibilities (toddlers to care for, elderly parents requiring assistance, family members or friends requiring help during a critical or chronic illness), or their own life has gone pear-shaped due to illness or financial problems or some other disaster. Their time is spoken for and scheduled to the max, and piling on guilt for not-writing is just adding to their stress. I lost months of writing time before and after my mother’s death, first due to helping Dad cope with her illness and later due to the time, energy, and stress of handling her estate … and I don’t feel one little bit guilty about it, even though I missed a major writing deadline three times as a result. Sometimes, you just can’t.

Most of us, most of the time, are not actually in a situation like that, however. Most of us have, during any given 24 hour period, some number of minutes that we can choose to use this way or that. Fifteen minutes relaxing with a cup of tea, or fifteen minutes cleaning out the junk drawer. An extra half-hour of sleep, or half-an-hour of exercise. An hour watching TV, or an hour mowing the lawn (one more day won’t hurt, really…). All that is necessary is to pick some of those minutes, and to choose to use them to write.

“All” I say, but it’s actually a hard choice for many people. Because all of everyone’s minutes are already full of something – hardly anyone I know can look at their last month and point to an hour where they just sat and did nothing at all. Choosing to write means giving up on doing something else – watching TV, socializing, surfing the Web, sleeping, reading … something has to go. And it has to not be replaced immediately by something else that isn’t writing – giving up an hour of TV in order to mow the lawn may be a Good Thing, but it doesn’t get the chapter written.

A popular choice for many writers is to select one end of the candle to burn a little extra on – either they get up half an hour or an hour early and write first, before anything else, or they stay up half an hour (or an hour, or several hours) late to write after everyone else has gone to bed. Each method has obvious disadvantages; either one can leave the writer short on sleep, and it can be hard to get up (or stay up) when you’re tired. If you have family or roommates, sooner or later they start asking you to do things for them “since you’re going to be up anyway,” and if you give in, your writing time quickly vanishes under the weight of all those daily more important things to do.

The temptation to put the writing off until tomorrow and mow the lawn (or whatever) today is strong and endless. Unless someone you care for, or you yourself, is going to die, be in pain, starve, or go to jail if the not-writing thing doesn’t get done, resist. Do the writing and put the whatever-it-is off until tomorrow. If you don’t defend your writing time – even from yourself – no one else is going to.

It didn’t arrive.

We didn’t realize this for a week, because I was being restrained and not asking “Where the $#%@& are the revisions requests you promised me on Monday?” and he was being restrained and giving me time to think about them because they were fairly substantial (we’ll get to that in a minute). By the time we got that sorted out, I was down to two and a half weeks of revision time instead of four.

This was important because those two and a half weeks included a) my turn making tea for the girls (six of us have been doing this every other month for…over twenty years, for sure. Between cooking and cleanup, it’s a big production and eats up at least three days, counting the day of the tea itself), and b) a drive down to Chicago and back to take care of Dad’s paperwork and bills for the month, which took about four days but only ate two because I took the laptop and worked while I was there.

Fortunately, I didn’t have much in the way of questions; David is an excellent editor, very clear in explaining what he wants and why, and he’s also usually on the same wavelength as I am (meaning, he doesn’t ask for totally off-the-wall things like “Why don’t you put in some explosions? I like explosions.” or “What this needs is a completely new plot twist that has nothing to do with anything else in the story…put it right here, where it will wreck the pacing and twist the main plot totally out of shape.”)

Unfortunately… Well, I did mention that these were substantial revisions, didn’t I? By my standards, anyway. Among other things, I ended up needing a whole new chapter (containing a whole new character, because it’s really hard to do very much dialog that’s only tagged “one of the men said.” I needed somebody for my characters to talk to).

And of course David put his finger right on every single place where I’d hoped I could avoid dealing with some bit or other, or where I knew it needed a bit more but I’d figured I could skate by with what I had. I couldn’t even really argue.

So after I’d read the letter and the comments through once, I sent him an email and we worked out the new title and discussed a few aspects of the story that hadn’t been clear. To him, anyway; I knew the answers, but they hadn’t gotten down on the page. (One of my besetting sins is that I either over- or under-explain; I can’t seem to get the hang of making things clear without actually saying them straight out, so they come out cryptic instead of…well, instead of that thing Megan Whelan Turner does, where the reader figures it all out for themselves and feels clever). While we were discussing, I mulled things over. And made tea.

Mulling is a necessary part of the process, and very important. It doesn’t look like writing; indeed, it usually happens when the writer is doing other things (baking scones and making chocolate silk pie, in this case). Anyway, once tea was over and cleared off, I got started on the actual writing part, with two weeks left and a trip to Chicago coming up.

How I do revisions is, I look at the big ones, and if any of them look easy, I start with those. None of the big ones looked easy, this time. So I did a first pass, knocking off the little changes to get rid of as many comment balloons as I could and feel like I’d made some progress. ”Little changes” are usually stuff like deleting unnecessary adjectives or changing a word choice. Every so often, I’d go back and write a few sentences or paragraphs of the new chapter. Then I hit the short scenes, again alternating with the new chapter. The nice thing about revising is that every time I get stuck, I can skip to some other part of the manuscript and work on that for a while. The unfortunate part of revising this way is that it leaves all the hardest bits for last.

On Thursday, I emailed my editor and asked whether Production was really going to be working on my book all weekend, or was the deadline actually Monday morning? David assured me that Monday would be fine, so Production was off the hook for the weekend, and I was on. Until 9:01 last night.

The manuscript is now 10,000 words longer than it was when it started. It has one entirely new chapter in the middle (I hope I didn’t miss anything when I renumbered all the rest of them), four or five completely new scenes, and a whole lot of new paragraphs scattered throughout. The last chapter got taken apart and totally rewritten; so did two of the mid-book chapters. This is all a lot harder than it sounds, because when you add a new chapter, you have to revise about half a chapter before and half a chapter after to make the transition into and out of it work properly. Same thing for new scenes, and even new paragraphs.

So it’s done (until the copy-edit comes, anyway), and I am going to take the day off and play computer games. And then get back to work on the next one.

Most people who want to be professionally published figure out pretty quickly that the submission process is the poster child for hurry-up-and-wait. You get your submission package together (meaning, whatever the publisher says they want, in whatever format they say they want it – portion-and-outline, full manuscript, hard copy, electronic, carved onto the back side of a replica of the Rosetta Stone…whatever). You run around getting packaging and postage together, collecting publishers’ addresses and editors’ names. You send it out.

And you wait.

Weeks. Months, sometimes. Years, even – it took over a year for my very first rejection letter to arrive, and I found out later that at that time, that was a really fast response for that particular publisher (they were three years behind on their slush reading. They’ve caught up since then…).

The thing is, everything else in publishing is like that, too. You get your acceptance letter, and there’s maybe a flurry of email with the editor, and some tearing around to get an agent before the contract comes (if it’s your first sale and you don’t have an agent yet), and then you wait to get the contract. Once you get the contract, there’s a flurry of negotiations (most of which happens between your agent and your editor, but since it’s your book, you have to make the final decision about any compromises), and then you sign the thing and send it back.

And you wait.

Weeks, sometimes months, later, the check arrives. Some time after that (weeks or months, again), you get a revision letter from the editor. There’s another little flurry of activity – emails, usually – while you try to figure out how much of it you’re willing to do and which bits are deal-breakers for either side, and then you sit down for a couple of months of revising.

At least this time you have something to do.

You send off the revisions and, you guessed it, you wait. If you are lucky, this time you actually find out how long you are going to be waiting, because the editor tells you when the book is scheduled, and you can back up the next set of hurry-ups from that.

Eventually, about six to nine months before the book is due to hit the shelves, the copy-edited manuscript arrives. You then have somewhere between two days and two weeks to hurry up and review all the changes, corrections, and queries the copyeditor made, and accept, reject, and answer them. Invariably, a really good copyedit job that you can just sail through, nodding your head, will arrive with the maximum two-week deadline for returning it to the publisher, while the hatchet job where the copyeditor decided to change “Yellowstone National Park” to “yellow stone national park” will arrive with a two-day deadline (usually just as you are leaving the house for a week-long business trip).

You go over the copy-edit, send it back, exchange a few emails with your editor about any additional clarification that’s needed.

And you wait.

One to two months later, roughly, the page proofs or galleys arrive, and once again, you have between two days and two weeks to turn them around. This time, you’re checking for typos and places where the copy-edit changes didn’t make it through to the final print version. Again, the proofs invariably arrive at the worst possible time. If you’ve really been humming along (or if your publisher is very slow), you may get proofs for one book and editorial revisions for a different one both at the same time, or even galleys for one and copy-edit for a different one (which is a real nightmare, because they both have similar, very short, not-very-flexible turnaround deadlines).

And then you wait for the book to hit the bookstores, wait for the reviews, wait to find out if they’ll buy your next book…and the cycle continues.

Publishing is not for the impatient.

People have to make time for the things they love, because otherwise they never have time to do them. This is as true for full-time writers as it is for everyone else.

Up until 1985, I had a traditional day job, as a Senior Financial Analyst at a major corporation. I wrote five novels during my last five years at that job, on lunch hour and coffee breaks and weekends (when I got coffee breaks and weekends – it was a more-than-40-hours-a-week job for quite a few months out of the year). Since then, I have had a non-traditional day job:  managing my writing career. As I have said over and over repeatedly more than once with considerable redundancy, writing professionally is a business…and running a business, even a very small one, takes time.

From answering fan mail to data entry for my tax records, I have to do dozens of writing-related things that are not actual writing. By far the biggest chunk of time goes to the cluster of activities I lump under “publicity,” which encompases everything from the aforementioned answering of fan mail to updating my web page (which people will note I haven’t done in far too long) to scheduling appearances like autographing. And I do relatively little in this regard, compared to a lot of more socially ept and publicity-aware writers, because I basically hate this part of my job. (Most of it; blogging comes in here, and I like that.)

The second big chunk of time goes to selling. Not to the public – to editors. Yes, I have an agent, and she takes care of most of it, but she still has to come to me with ideas and suggestions and expressions of interest and the very occasional actual offer. Movie deals that fall through (I’m not sure there is any other kind, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding) can eat months. And there is a sporadic low-level stream of little things – notifications of anthology openings, requests to write the introduction to this book, requests to do a blurb for that one (which is several hours gone right there, since I never blurb without reading the ms. first), requests for blog interviews or newsletter articles, requests to donate copies of my books to this or that charity auction - all of which take time to read and answer even if the answer is “No, I’m sorry, I don’t have time right now.”

And then there’s the financial stuff – mainly just tax records and royalty statements, in my case. I gave up on actually selling my own books years ago, because even just the paperwork for collecting and paying sales tax was too much, and on top of that there was tracking for cost of goods sold. It wasn’t worth the effort. But a lot of writers do sell copies of their own books at events or when they’re on the road or just out of the trunk of their cars to random people they meet.

Then we finally get to things that are more directly related to actual writing, like research (of which a lot more is necessary than many people believe). Research falls into two categories:  stuff that is related to current WIP (currently the journals of Lewis and Clark), and stuff that is not related to anything…yet (I just bought a book on the history of pirates that falls into this category, as did Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany. I mean, what fantasy writer could resist that title?).

The deceptive part of all this is that it rarely all shows up at once, which means it is easy to discount or overlook just how much time it all takes. If one doesn’t allow for it, though, one can end up with less time to write after quitting a traditional day job than one had beforehand.

I’m not actually complaining…well, no, OK, I am. I’m on my third deadline overrun, and I really need to make this one, or else, so yeah, I am complaining. But I still love my job, warts and all. I just don’t actually have all that much more time to do the production part of it than I had back when I had a day job.

I had a conversation with a would-be writer once that went something like this:

“I don’t have time to write,” he said.

“What do you do in the evenings?” I asked.

“I have a really hard job; I’m toasted when I come home, good for nothing, so I watch TV. I’m not really capable of doing anything else by then.”

“OK, if you say so. What do you do on Saturdays?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s when I catch up on all the TV shows I recorded during the week. There are eight or ten hours that I miss watching because they’re on simultaneously with my favorites, and Saturday is the only time I have to see them.”

“Can’t you take an hour out to write?”

He looked horrified by the idea, and made it quite clear that he couldn’t. I shrugged. “So, watching TV is more important to you than writing.”

“No, no, of course not!” But he wouldn’t give up even one hour of his TV to write. Actions speak louder than words, and his were at top volume.

This is what is really going on for lots and lots of “I-wish-I-coulds”. They don’t really want to write; they want to have written. Well, so do I want to have written, but I don’t expect the Word Fairy to show up in the night and put 100,000 words of Pulitzer-Prize-winning fiction on my computer when I’m not looking. The only way to have written is to spend a lot of time actually writing first.

Everybody gets 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If writing is really important, people will find or make the time for it, the same way people find time for their work, their families, their volunteer work, their beloved hobbies, and whatever else is important to them.Yes, including TV.

And yes, most people hit a patch where they really don’t have time to write – they have an elderly parent to care for, a full-time job, and a kid in the hospital. Or they are in the hospital. But you know, those aren’t ever the people who come around complaining at me about what great writers they could be if they only had the time.

And let’s not even mention the phone calls. Oh, and the three-inch stack of mail Pop forwarded for me to take care of, only some of which has been dealt with as of this writing. Or the mess the cat made in the office. Or the two toilets that have started dripping (one of which adjoins the bedroom. Is there anything more irritating than that drip, drip, drip sound at three in the morning?)

Needless to say, I didn’t get much writing done.

Today, I am taking my laptop to the coffee shop, where the phone, at least, cannot find me (well, except for the security service, because they have my cell number), and where the irregularities of the Internet connection will not be so much of a problem. Isn’t the writing life glamourous and fun?