Not so long ago I was asked to write a guest post about what a typical workday looks like for me. I thought that you might enjoy reading that too, so I’m sharing it here on my blog as well 🙂
A Typical Workday…
I wake up.
I go back to sleep.
I wake up again for real this time.
Stumble to the kitchen to make myself some tea, and then stagger into my home office and plomp down into my chair.
Honestly, one of the most impressive things I do each day is to make it from my kitchen to my computer chair without spilling that tea because I’m not sure my eyes are ever fully open at that point. When I say I am not a fan of mornings, I am not kidding.
I check the planner which sits on my desk to see what I’m supposed to be working on. If whatever listed there has an associated deadline that is drawing near or otherwise includes some outside urgency (deadlines I make for myself never really seem to have as much as they should) I might actually work on that thing, otherwise it’s a 50/50 chance. But I still like to look and see what’s there.
Then I stare blearily at my email for a little while, putting out any fires but mostly reading and deleting or reading and marking as unread (to deal with later).
As the fog in my brain begins to clear and I start to think about actually getting some work done, I realize that it’s lunchtime.
How’d that happen? I wonder. Again.
While my tummy grumbles, I pop over to the Submission Grinder and try to find an appropriate place to submit at least one of my poems or short stories (usually as a reprint), and then it’s time to grab a food. (I was going to put [sic] there but is that actually appropriate when I fully intended to write the sentence that way so it’s not actually an error? Hmm… something to look up later, perhaps. After lunch! *wink*)
After lunch I’m back at my desk, ready to work.
The precise form that ‘work’ takes varies greatly from day to day. I like to joke that my work life is just a constant state of triage, but there’s a lot of truth in that. I usually have multiple large projects on the go at any single time (though lately I’ve been trying to cut back a bit), so what work I’m doing on any particular day usually depends on which deadline is looming the closest.
It might be that I’m writing the first draft of a novel, or (more likely) a short story. It’s always possible that I have an editing project on the go – either my own or one of my freelance client’s – or, such as with today, I might be writing guest blogs or sending out review requests for a book that is out or just about to go out.
Or I may be looking up the rules around using [sic] but deciding to just leave the bracketed aside as is because ‘eat a food’ is simply a colloquial phrase I use in my everyday life and not an error. Since my intent in using [sic] would have been just to make sure you knew I’d intended to write it that way, the aside works fine. Using [sic] may have implied judgment on behalf of the blog I’m guesting on, and that’s not the case (I hope!).
Whatever it is that I’m working on, I work on it hard for the next few hours. Or I try to. Some days are more productive than others.
My work day ends somewhere around 5pm. Sometimes, if my husband is working late I will too but, generally speaking I’m done by five.
Though, I mean, I say ‘done’ but what that means is that I’m not actively sitting at my desk working on something. I’m usually still thinking about story ideas, or mulling over plot points. In that regard work doesn’t ever really stop, right? Not when your work is about telling stories.
I frequently send myself emails when I’m struck with a cool character idea or book title. There is a giant piece of scrap paper on our coffee table that I use to jot down things as they occur to me (we originally put it there when we were painting minis in front of the tv, but now I keep the habit up, replacing it as it gets full / covered).
And I’m an insomniac, so occasionally on the nights when I absolutely can’t sleep I will get up and be working in the wee hours of the morning while most of the people in my corner of the world sleep.
However… I mean, I titled this blog a ‘typical’ workday, but it’s important to take that with a grain of salt, right? Because every day is different and things vary a lot based on what month it is. For example, most Novembers I do NaNoWriMo (that’s how I wrote the first draft of Blindspots ) so my typical November days have a lot more writing in them than in other months. It’s also the only month of the year that I work on weekends.
So, I guess I don’t know about ‘typical’ but this is, more or less, what my workdays look like. This month, anyway 😉
