The Great February Reset

by
Scott D. Parker

Do you know the best thing about February is? No, not the holiday. Valentine’s Day is one of my least favorite holidays on the calendar. It has always felt manufactured, like if the folks who sold flowers, chocolates, and greeting cards all got together and invented a holiday to increase their bottom lines.

Actually, one of the best things about February is the chance to reset on any habits you might have already broken.

I suspect you’ve seen all the historical data that tell us many people stop doing their New Year’s Resolutions sometime around 14-19 January.  That's just two weeks. Typically we think of resolutions like going to the gym or talking a daily walk to help us exercise or stop eating a certain food or abstaining from alcohol.

Those are all well and good, but often, we creatives want to start a habit and, in some ways, that can be more difficult, especially if we’ve fallen by the wayside prior to New Year’s Day.

But here’s the thing: a New Year’s Resolution is not a one-and-done. It’s not like if you fall off the wagon sometime in mid January you have failed for the entire year. Let’s not judge an entire 365-day cycle by the actions of a 14 or so days.

I’m a firm believer that every new month is an opportunity to get back into a habit or reinforce one you started the previous month. I resolved to write a 1,000 words a day in 2022 (or reach 365,000 words for the year). I’m happy to say that my streak is intact, but boy, some of those days were a slog, especially with a day job.

In fact, I battled with myself over just how important a streak like this is. To remind myself of the power of streaks, I need only look at the small calendar on the fridge. I had fallen away from taking vitamins every day so I needed to start that back up again. I did the Jerry Seinfeld thing where I put an X on the calendar for each day I took my vitamins. Eight days into the new year, I forgot. Boom! Busted up my streak and my January has a hole in it. Irritation.

But my writing streak is alive. My writing resolution is alive. I hope your resolutions are alive, too.

If they’re not, dedicate the month of February to creating a new habit. It’s only 28 days long, an even four weeks. Chances are high if you maintain that new habit until 1 March, you’ll be good to go. But if not, then let March be your new start date. Heck, let each Sunday be a start date. Just start. Then continue. The rewards will flow to you.

New Week's Day: Resetting Your Life One Week at a Time

by

Scott D. Parker

Sunday mornings have become like New Year’s Day.

For most of 2021, Sunday mornings have developed their own rituals, and the end result has been weekly resolutions.

Monday through Friday have their own schedules. I wake usually between 5:00 and 5:15 and set to work on the latest story. Since last Monday, I’ve been re-reading and reviewing a collaboration with a fellow author. I should finish that up this week and I’ll send it back to him for a final polish and publication soon. When I’m working from home, come 6:25 am, I have to stop the personal work to get ready for the day job. Now, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’m going back to the office so that getting-ready schedule is back by half an hour.

Saturdays are the fun mornings. I still wake earlier than everybody else in the house—7:15 or so—in order to have the quiet all to myself. I head on out to Shipley’s do-nuts and buy the same two do-nuts I’ve been eating for over forty years—cherry iced and cherry filled. It’s my big indulgence every week. Coupled with coffee and scrambled eggs, I eat breakfast and watch something no one in the house wants to watch. It was WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier during their runs and, for the past two weeks, it’s been the first two films of the Fast and the Furious franchise. Yeah, I’m just getting around to them. After the family wakes, I head on outside for lawn mowing and whatever else needs doing before jetting off to Trader Joe’s.

And then there are Sundays. I’m a church goer and always have been. During the pandemic, my Methodist church streamed the services live and I shifted from the 11:00 service back to the 9:30 service. That gave me time to participate in the service and then catch The Brady Bunch on MeTV. I’m returning to church in person now, so I’m back to the later service.

But before I get ready for church, I wake around 7:15 and have the quiet house to myself. It’s not like Saturdays. I’m not waking to watch something. I’m waking to read and work. I do a chapter of the Bible everyday—reading through the Apocrypha for the first time ever—and then I start working on my personal projects.

That’s not all I do on Sunday mornings, however. Sunday mornings have become a time to reset. Part of the morning is to review the emails that have accumulated over the week, the ones I didn’t instantly react to, the ones I set aside thinking at the time they were important but didn’t have the time to address them during the other six days of the week. With a clearer head, I will either read and respond or realize I could have deleted them earlier. It’s amazing was a culled email inbox will do for the mind.

Soon after the mind’s cleared, I think back on the past week. How did it go? How well did the personal projects do? How about those day job assignments? Also, the personal interactions. I live with my wife and nineteen-year-old son plus two dogs and a cat. Did any of the humans get into a disagreement over something? What great thing did we do this past week? How’s life going? How well did I eat? How much exercise did I get? Was there anything I wanted to do but didn’t? If so, why?

What these questions do for me is center my mind. I constantly analyze my life to find ways to improve on it. Diet and exercise is a big motivator now that I’m in my fifties. Also the writer life and career. The personal stuff with my family is often a day-to-day thing, but on Sundays, I consider the week as a whole.

Almost always, when the time comes for me to shower and get ready for church, my mind is cleansed. More importantly, however, I have a new set of drivers for the week ahead. Resolutions, if you will.

Like this week. I am going to eat as little processed sugar as possible and just see how the body feels. Also, I plan to complete the review of the collaboration and then get back to my latest book. I’m going to make my day job work better by striving to complete certain assignments in a more streamlined manner. It’ll improve my efficiency and I’ll get more projects out the door. I’m also going to resolve to leave the common areas of our house free from my own personal clutter. I’m talking the latest magazine folded open to the page I’m reading. Ditto for the history book I’m reading, the novel, and the comics I bought at Houston’s Comicpalooza over the weekend. I’m going to do one small thing that’ll help not only myself feel better about the house, but also help the wife and boy.

These weekly resolutions enable to me tweak habits and experiences along the way. New Year’s resolutions are fine and important, but they often get forgotten by the end of January to say nothing of May, September, or December. When you shrink the time down to a week, I can easily remember last week. It gives me the chance to adjust things along the way. And it serves as a positive reminder that if events of the coming week foil my plans, I’ll have another New Week’s Day the following Sunday. That reassurance is a key factor in always picking me up each Sunday morning and helping me face the coming week.

Have you tried weekly resolutions? You should. Pick a day and make that your New Week’s Day. Then you get to make some New Week’s Resolutions and see how you do. I suspect you’ll find the results more than satisfying. And, if you need more incentive, you’ll also get a New Week’s Eve

100 Days: The Summer of Productivity

by

Scott D. Parker

Here in the US, every new president is judged by what he does in his first one hundred days. It harkens back to 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt entered office in the midst of the Great Depression and accomplished a dizzying amount of laws and regulations in a little over three months. Every subsequent president is measured by that same yardstick even though most haven't experienced the dire circumstances FDR faced. Still, everyone does it and it has become standard. In fact, it shaped President Biden's early agenda, with his administration's efforts all focused on that date.

For us creatives, having bookends by which to measure our creativity is also a good thing, but how often do we start something on any given day and then have to mark a calendar at our desired end point? Often, we literally count days on a paper calendar and do the math in our heads.

But summers provide us with obvious an obvious beginning and an obvious ending. Memorial Day kicks off the summer vibe while Labor Day concludes it. What happens in between is defined as 'summer.' It doesn't matter that summer's heat extends--at least here in Houston--into September and October. What matters is a codifed set of days that counts as perhaps the best time of the year. Yeah, the holiday season is great, too, and it is the most wonderful time of the year, but over the past decade or so, I have really started to enjoy summer. The low-key vibe, the refreshing cocktails, the grilling of anything, the summer movie blockbusters, the beach reads. It's just a great time to kick back and just take it easy.

It is also a time to work and be productive.

For those of us for whom their creative job is second to a day job, our productivity is parceled out among our day job responsibilities. It's why I wake in the 5am hour on weekdays to write and, when I'm at the office, write during lunch on my Chromebook. While doing the creative thing isn't that different during the summer than any other time of year, with a definate beginning and end, the summer season has, by default, a running clock. A countdown if you will. Labor Day can be your deadline. It's real and set in stone and everyone knows it.

So that's why I have, in the past few years, used summer as a time of greater productivity. Often I start and end something fresh. This year, however, I'm still laboring over my current work in progress, so the primary goal of summer 2021 is to complete that manuscript. And publish my next novel. 

Those are my tentpole objectives in the Summer of 2021.

What are yours?

Note: You get a 100 days if you start today. It's 99 if you start tomorrow and 98 if you start Monday. I'm not counting Labor Day as a work day. That'll be a day of celebration for completing that which you accomplished this summer.

The Lunch Hour

By

Scott D. Parker

There’s a reason why some of us stop writing a project when we encounter a barrier. But there’s also the reward when you just start forging ahead: The flow.

This past Monday, I started my latest book. It’s the sixth adventure of my Calvin Carter, Railroad Detective, series. I’m launching it in January and I wanted to have all six books completed before I start advertising, mainly because I wanted to be able to include all six covers in the campaign. Plus I want the ability to make and keep a promise to readers of a new book every other month.

For whatever reason, after I completed the fifth novel, the sixth one was difficult to crack. I had chapter 1 done and notes on how to proceed. But other writing projects kept getting in the way. It happens. Life happens. We all know it. And a large part of the life thing for me was my day job. I had a contractor job and lots of uncertainty. The commute was an hour each way. I’m a 4:30am writer so I tried valiantly to keep that schedule. I did, for the most part, but two hours in a car began to wear on me to where 4:30 slid into 4:45 and then edged to 5:00. With a hard stop at 5:20 to get me and my boy ready for the day, it didn’t leave a lot of time to write.

Now, since August, I’ve got a  new job! Salaried position writing for an oil and gas company. The co-workers are great, the work is stimulating, and the commute is down to about 25 minutes each way. I’m much happier going to the job. Even my boy noted I’m happier nowadays—which was weird because I’m usually really good at leaving work stuff at work. Guess I let a little of it seep through. Speaking of the boy, his school day starts later. I now don’t have to get him up until 5:50 am. You can do the math there. Even if I sleep in until 4:45, that’s a solid hour of writing before the day even begins.

Additionally, I have a lunch hour. The best thing about being a contractor was working through lunches Monday through Thursday and being able to leave at noon on Fridays. Well, that’s not an option now…but I love the alternative better. Now, armed with my boy’s half-working Chromebook—literally, only half the screen works and company wifi prevents me from accessing Google docs—I find a nice, quiet space in my building and dive into the words.

I’m almost instantly in the flow. You see, as of Monday, I was all in on this story. Whatever was blocking me had vanished. Not sure what it was, but glad it is gone. And while I have more overall time to write, I’m still locked into certain time frames. Mornings from 4:30-5:50 and lunch hours from 12:15-1:00. [I call and chat with the wife every lunch hour, too.] With hard stops on both writing sessions, time is at a premium.

Perhaps that fact serves as a catalyst for the writing flow. Perhaps knowing, subconsciously, I have limited time and I want to get as many words as possible down—my record so far is 1681 words at lunch—to move the story forward, all barriers are removed. Not sure. But it’s a gas.

Another benefit? With two separate writing sessions averaging approximately 800 words each, that’s about 1600 words a day. Sixteen hundred words over 31 days is just at 50,000 words. That’s a book.

Lunch hours. As if you needed any other motivation to use them for writing, here’s another one. Use the time you have, and it’ll pay for itself in the long run.

Switching Things Up

By
Scott D. Parker

Remember a few weeks ago when I mentioned how awesome it was to finish a book before the last day of the month in order to have a break? Well, I achieved that goal for March this past Tuesday. Not sure what happened here but I wrote the shortest of the three Calvin Carter books but actually took two days longer. I’ll just chalk that up to the mushy middle when I needed to right the ship and the story.

Anyway, I finished the story in my early morning pre-work session. I went to the day job floating on a cloud as I always do when I complete a novel. All day long, I didn’t think about writing at all. Ditto for Wednesday. I mean why would I? The next novel would be started until today, 1 April.
But something happened on Thursday. I got the itch. Not to write the next Carter book. No, I start those on the first day of each month. But I wanted to write something.

So I pulled out a novelette I had set aside late last year and re-read it. I made the corrections—implementing some writing techniques I’ve incorporated in writing three novels this year—and then I got to the part where I left off. Now, it was time for new content.

This novelette, however, has a different style than the Carter novels. A more pared down prose than the occasional flowery language I use when writing about the former actor turned railroad detective Calvin Carter. I had to remember the style and match it

I wrote nearly 2800 words over the past two days on that novelette. It was a great exercise, writing something completely different. It was still a western, but the style was different so it felt like a nice break, even though I still pounded the keys.

It made me wonder if other writers do this frequently. Cleanse the palette so to speak.

How about y’all? When y’all take a break, do you simply not write or do you write something completely different than the piece you just finished?

By the time this goes live, I will have started the fourth Calvin Carter novel. Unlike the previous three—in which I discovered the title along the way—a working title presented itself as I cast about for the plot. I immediately wrote it down and named the Scrivener file thusly: Calvin Carter and the Brides of Death. I’ll see if it holds.

When Things Go Awry, Spreadsheets Are Your Hero

By
Scott D. Parker

I finally had to figure out what mysterious object my western hero was hunting for…and it took out an entire writing session to accomplish it.

For those not following along with my writing this year, I’ve embarked on a new series featuring Calvin Carter, former actor and current railroad detective. I wrote his first book in January (Likely titled Calvin Carter and the Empty Coffins). I wrote his second in February (Calvin Carter and the Hell Dragon). For his third outing, I wanted a treasure hunt story. Something Carter could go after a la Indiana Jones or any type of adventure hero, but still within the context of an investigation.
So far, all of these stories have been written into the dark. That is, without an outline ahead of time. I have a vague sense of where the story is going but, at least for this initial draft, I’m the first reader…and the storyteller. And it’s a blast! At least for this kind of story, I may have hit upon a winning writing strategy.

When I began Carter’s third case, I merely called it “Calvin Carter and the Treasure Hunt.” I had no clue what was stolen. But I knew that I’d figure it out along the way.

I just didn’t figure that an entire morning’s writing session would be sucked up doing it.
I wrote six entire chapters, all with nice action scenes, gun fights, and corpses. I managed to get all the way up to the moment when one character tells Carter that there was a burglary in a museum. That was where I ended my writing session this past Tuesday. The next scene, scheduled to start at 4:30am on Wednesday, was the scene every treasure hunt story has: the explanation of the thing that was stolen and that needs to be recovered.

So far this year, my subconscious brain and my Creative Voice have worked in sync. If there’s an issue, I get to mull it over all day at my day job and by the next morning’s session, things are figured out.

Not so with this one. What the heck was stolen? What did Carter have to find?

I spent the entire hour this past Wednesday figuring it out. The end result was not only a McGuffin but the likely title of the book*. At the time, however, after a productive hour of research, I also realized I had written exactly zero new fiction words. I have an extra fifteen minutes I get to write after I’ve got my boy to the carpool and before I have to get to work myself, and I blew threw a healthy 535 words, but I was officially “behind” in my mind.

Until I opened my work tracking spreadsheet and breathed a sigh of relief.

You see, I’ve keep track of word count and time taken every day this year. I have two months of data detailing two novels written. And I saw, quite clearly, that there were a few days in January and February where the word count for a particular day was substantially less than other days. Moreover, some days—weekends and holidays—I have extra time to write and produce more words. It all averages out.

The other cool thing about a spreadsheet with historical data is that I can compare a given day with the same respective day in earlier months. For example, it took my five writing days in February to reach the 10,000-word mark. (I don’t count January because I started with 11K from a previously abandoned book.) By the 8-hour mark in both February and March, I had written just over 13,000 words. I was perfectly on track. I breathed a sigh of relief.

So if you are ever wondering what possible benefit having a spreadsheet for your writing could be, this is it. In addition, if someone ever asks me, “How long does it take you to write a western?” I have the data to answer with certainty.

If you don’t already keep a spreadsheet, I would recommend you do so. You’ll be amazed at what the numbers can reveal about your productivity.

*Oh, and the McGuffin and title for the third book? Calvin Carter and the Aztec Sword.

Breaking Ain't Bad

by
Scott D. Parker

Sometimes you just need a break.

For the past few years, I’ve committed my writing self to writing streaks. The first one was from late May 2013 to early February 2014, something like 256 days in a row. I had another streak—I think in 2015—where I wrote some sort of fiction every day. But here’s the little secret: not every day was good. Some days will be good—I had an 8,000-word day once!—and some days will suck horribly: a sentence of 10 words? After awhile, keeping the streak alive was more important than what I was writing. The streak became unbearable.

And, more importantly, unsustainable.

I used to think that taking a break in writing was a waste of time. Of course, I told myself, I could keep up my writing day after day. All I had to do, thought I before I embarked on these two streaks, was to swap out what I wrote.

I’ll admit that what I ended up writing was a series of novels. I likely should have thrown in some short stories to lighten the load, but I didn’t. Who knows what could have happened had I done that. Well, I wouldn’t have arrived at my new philosophy.

Starting this year, I set an ambitious writing goal. It was based partly on word count but also on more products. As I wrote in my first column of 2017, the only thing we writers can control is what we produce. I wanted to write a ton of words that formed a ton of products. But more than anything, I wanted to develop a sustainable writing production schedule.

Much to my surprise, that included breaks.

I finished my first book of 2017 on 26 January. That was a Thursday. I told myself that sustainability was key so I gave myself permission not to start the next book until 1 February. That was the following Wednesday. I had nearly a week off from writing.

And it was great. I slept in past my usual 4:30 a.m. weekday alarm, and on those mornings I didn’t, I woke, sipped some coffee, and read. It was fantastic.

February, however, is the short month. I very much wanted to complete the second book—which I started enthusiastically on 1 February—before 28 February. Why? Because I wanted that break. I loved that reward of having accomplished something and the downtime that came with it. I ended up writing over 14,000 words from 24-26 February, but I put “The End” on the Book #2 last Sunday afternoon.

And I had my break. Shorter than January, of course, but still a break. And I started a new book on 1 March.

Two books, each written in 26 days with a full-time job. Both hovering around 62,000 words (they’re westerns so they may actually be a tad long) and both took about 36 hours of actual pounding-the-keyboard writing time. All, frankly, with little major effort except last weekend’s marathon push to get Book #2 completed. (BTW, tentative title for #2: Calvin Carter and the Hell Dragon.) Now, if the pattern holds, then around the last weekend of this month, I should be done with Book #3 and I’ll have earned myself a welcome break.

Is this method sustainable? To date, yes. Is it easy? Mostly. Waking at 4:30 a.m. isn’t always fun, but getting the chance to sit and have an adventure with Calvin Carter is a blast! But I never knew just how important having a break from writing can actually be. It gave me the enthusiasm to get back to a new blank page with and write with gusto!

I’ve learned, and I will be incorporating breaks into my writing life from now on.

What about y’all? Do y’all work in breaks from writing?

Tracking Your Productivity So You’ll Know How Long a Story Takes

By

Scott D. Parker

If someone were to ask you how long it took you to write a story or a novel, would you be able to tell them?

In the business world, we’re often asked to present an estimate for how long it will take to complete a project. That estimate is can sometimes be the one aspect of the estimate that either awards the project or kills it. I’m a technical writer by day, and I’ve been doing it for 17 years. Even now, I sometimes struggle to offer a detailed estimate based on the given parameters that you know will change in the course of the project. Only time and experience and the number of years I’ve been doing that kind of work has enabled me to come close to a proper estimate given a particular set of criteria.

This year, I decided to apply that mentality to my fiction writing. I’ve toyed with the idea of tracking my hours before—only once, actually—but decided it was time to do it again, this time for the long haul. I’ve got a number of challenging goals ahead for my writing life in 2017 and I think it best to know just how long it takes for me—a full-time day job person and, by default, a part-time fiction writer—to write a novel or a short story.

I began the new novel on New Year’s Day. It was developed from a story I set aside while I focused on other stories, but I’ve now returned to it. The only time I have most days is the one hour starting at 4:35am. Every other Friday I have off. Throw in Saturdays and Sundays and I’m looking at four days a week with one hour to write and three days in which I have at least an hour, if not more. Some of the workdays I have slide a few hundred more words in, but, by and large, I’m writing this book at an hour per day.

What am I tracking? Naturally Words Per Day and Words Cumulative. I have to know how much I’m writing. Beyond that, time. I track the time in minutes, in hours, and in cumulative hours. With those pieces of data, I can get my spreadsheet to calculate the Average Word Count Per Hour and a rolling Seven-Day Average.

What has all of this data revealed to me? As of yesterday, thirteen days after starting the new book, I’m up to 33,000 words. Throwing out the first two days of writing (since it was filled with material already written), my best word count day was Thursday. I had jury duty and a few extra hours to write. Yesterday was pretty good, too, since it was an off day. My lowest, ironically, was last Saturday, but I had a bunch of household duties to perform. And the total time used to date is 18.33 hours.

You want to know the real kicker? My average word count per hour for the work days is around 1966. Yesterday and Thursday, I produced more words, but my average was 1801 and 1824 respectively. How’s that for odd? More time to write, certainly more words, but the pace was off. My wife has a theory that I subscribe to: in my 4:30am regularly time, I have a hard stop at 5:30 to get ready for work and get my boy ready for school. Likely my creative brain is firing on all cylinders during that time.

What is the end result of this data? Simply this: as a full-time day jobber and part-time writer (so far), I’ll be able to have the first draft of a novel completed in a month. Yes, it’ll need work after that, but the draft will be done. Projecting forward, it will be likely that I could have a completed first draft of approximately 55,000 words in about 30+ hours. 

Now, with that kind of data, I’ll be able to predict how much time other novels will take. I’ll still need some additional data, but having that in my hand reminds me of the cold hard fact of writers like me who are not as lucky to be writing fiction full time: Yes It Can Be Done. And with relatively little time taken away from other things. And if I can do it, so can you.

How about y’all? Do y’all track your time?

Take Control of Your 2017 Goals

By
Scott D. Parker

You can do anything you put your mind to.

Now that 2017 has begun, most of us have made resolutions. I know I have. Most of the resolutions we make are with ourselves: lose weight; start exercising; stop eating sugar; take up a hobby. Many of us fail at these resolutions by the time February starts. Why? Because we don’t have a plan and we don’t take control.

The same is true with our writing lives. Who here states that writing a book in 2017 is their resolution? Or here’s another one: who here states that getting a book in the Amazon Top 1,000 is a goal? Well, of the two examples here, which one is actually in your control?

And then it’s back to you. Bummer? Not in the slightest!

Next month, I’ll be starting my third year as an independent author. Yeah, I’d certainly like to sell more books in 2017, but that’s entirely out of my control. I can do things to improve my chances of selling more products, but that’s all I can do. Marketing is a tricky aspect of the book industry, one with tons of nuances, trials, errors, and lessons learned. But no matter how much you may tweak ads or decide where to run them, this part of the business still involves other people.

But there is one aspect that is completely and utterly in your control: Content Creation.

There are no barriers to create as much or as little content as you want. And here’s where math is your friend. Your life is literally so busy that you can only manage 15 minutes a day to write that novel you’ve dreamed about writing since you were a teenager? I bet you can write 250 words in fifteen minutes, don’t you? If you write 250 words a days starting today, in 300 days you’ll have your 75,000-word novel complete! (That’s 3 November). If you boost your productivity to 500 words a day, then you’ll be done with the same book on 6 June. Think about that: by the start of the summer, you’ll be done writing your book!

Yes, you can do it.

You just have to decide if that’s what you truly want.

It’s what I want. So I decided that 2017 will be the year I create more content. I have a word count number in mind, but I’m not going to state it here today. Suffice it to say, the number is generous. But as nice as a large word count may be, it is product that I’m more interested in making available. In 2017, I’d like to substantially improve the number of short stories, novellas, and novels under my name. That is a goal that has only one obstacle: me. But I’m completely on board with the idea. I rarely have arguments with myself.

The only obstacle I actually have is time. I have a full-time day job that isn’t fiction writing. It’s technical writing, but that doesn’t count. I have a family I enjoy spending time with, so I have made the decision to sleep less. Ever since the time change back in November, my work days see me rising at 4:30am. Yeah, really. Sometimes, it ain’t easy, like on Wednesday when I snoozed a bit. You know what the end result was? Less time to write. Only 45 minutes before I have to start getting ready for work and my boy ready for school.

That sucked.

So, yesterday and Thursday, I was up at 4:30 and at the computer by 4:35. I got my hour in and the word count showed it. Do I still wish I had more time in the day to write? Absolutely, but I don’t. So I took control, found an area where I could write, and did it.

Control is the key. Thrive in the areas you can control, and let all the other stuff slide away. You’ll find yourself much more productive and, over time, much happier.