What do you do when your job moves to work from home and you’ve got a book due?

The short answer is that you write the book. But then, there’s more to it than that, right?

Let me set the situation.

Part A: In mid-February, I got my edit letter for COLONYSIDE (Planetside 3) back from David Pomerico, my editor. Short version: It needed a lot of work. He liked the story and the character–in his words, “the bones” were good. But how we got from event to event needed an overhaul. It was a great edit letter. I read it, and immediately I knew he was right, and all the stuff I knew was off but couldn’t put my finger on, I could now envision. But it was a lot. We discussed deadlines, and what it would take to still get the book out on its scheduled release date, and came to me turning it on March 23rd. Given the amount of work, that was always going to be a challenge. To make it work, I scheduled some days off from my day job to devote to the revision.

Part B: Starting on March 16th, my job as a high school English teacher transitioned to online teaching. In theory this gave me more time to write, but as with any major change, it created some initial work, and more than that, it caused a bit of stress and threw me off plan a bit. I’m not looking for sympathy here. There are people who have been impacted way more than ‘a little off plan’ by this. I’m lucky in that regard. I still have a job, and I can do it from home. A lot of people don’t. I’m just stating what it is so that the next part of this makes sense.

Here’s how things have turned out (so far).

We got a warning the week before that we’d likely be going to online teaching. When that happened, I reached out to David and asked him for another week. We pushed the deadline to March 30th. David didn’t even question it. That immediately lowered my stress level, which helped a lot with being able to write. Everyone has their own process, but for me, the pressure of impending doom isn’t a good mindset for writing.

I can’t write in the mornings. I just can’t. For whatever reason, my creative brain doesn’t turn on until after lunch, or, ideally, after dinner. Initially I tried to force it in the mornings, but I ended up spending a lot of time at my desk with not a lot to show for it. Now that I’m teaching online, it works somewhat. I try to focus on schoolwork from 8 to 3 or so, and then transition to writing around 4. It can still be a tough. An entire day at the same desk can be a lot.

But despite the challenges, it’s working. I rewrote the entire book, adding probably a dozen new scenes and reworking a whole bunch of others, and I finished it last Wednesday. The trouble was, that wasn’t enough. I’d turned it into a much better book, but the new scenes were essentially draft quality, and some of the stuff I did at the end of the book necessitated further changes in earlier chapters.

So I took one day off and then started rewriting it again.

This usually isn’t ideal for me. I like to let a draft sit for a few weeks and re-approach it with fresh eyes. In this case, I didn’t have time. And it’s worked out. Having the whole story fresh in my mind really helped me revamp the early chapters to fit with the late ones, and I’ve added a few new plot elements in this final rewrite that really brought the story together. I’d started that with the first rewrite, for sure, but now it just feels tighter. It feels like the story I want to tell. That really culminated last night when I added a twist that gave me the chills. Looking back on my editor’s notes, it’s something he’d questioned…why didn’t this certain thing happen…why didn’t Butler think about this? Now he does, and it happens in an organic way that makes other things make more sense. Everything kind of fell into place.

In the end, this isn’t really how I planned for the book to come together. I did an outline. I had a plan. I think it’s just a more complicated plot than I originally thought, which meant more moving parts. Some of this I can see in the extended word count. COLONYSIDE is now approaching 98,000 words (PLANETSIDE and SPACESIDE were both around 85,000).

But I’m really happy with where I’m at right now. I’ve got about 100 pages left to edit and I’ll be turning this in to my editor on Monday. While it didn’t come together the way I planned, it did come together.

So what have I learned?

Here’s what has helped me with writing while also working from home. I caveat this with the traditional note that all writing advice is subjective, and you should only apply what applies to you. There are a hundred different ways to do anything.

1. Having a schedule helps. It’s easy to lose entire days when you’re not on a set schedule. You look up and all of a sudden it’s time for dinner. I have a set time for school and a set time for writing.
2. Some days will be better than others, and that’s okay. I’ve had days where I’ve edited 50 pages. I’ve had days where I’ve edited 20. Yesterday I only got 17, but I was so happy with them that it still felt like a success. It’s okay if you don’t kill it every day.
3. Make time for other things. When I stare at something for five hours and get one hour’s worth of productivity, that’s not “working for five hours.” Sometimes we want to say we did it…we put in the time…but working from home, one of the benefits is that we get to put our hours in where they do the most good. Sometimes that’s taking a break.
4. Drink water. Really this is good advice pretty much all the time.
5. Be good to other people. Whatever your situation, someone else has it worse. We don’t know what other people are going through, so cut them some slack.
6. Be good to yourself. Change is hard. Creating during difficult times is hard. Maybe you missed your word count goal. Maybe your anxiety has you tied up into a knot and you can’t work at all. That’s okay too. You’re doing fine. You’ll get there.

How is your writing journey going in the time of Corona? Feel free to let me know in the comments.