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Originally Posted by toddhicks209
I just happen to work the equivalent of a full-time job through self employment and blend in book writing. I put in a little time of writing here and there and don't come close to your volume.
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lol, well, volume on a rough draft isn't a problem for me. I can slam ideas down on paper fast when I'm first starting a story and, if creativity and time permit, I can burn out a 100k word novel in about two weeks. The crunch is when I do the editing and cleanup afterwards. That takes upwards of 6 months and countless passes through the book before it's to a level I'm happy with. But since there's really no really way to denote "productivity" in editing vs writing, as any number of things could snag you up and slow down progress, I like to use my rough draft writing speeds as a marker of book progress for the average person.
That's why I quoted those numbers.
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Originally Posted by gmw
A few years ago I was airing my grievances in this regard and Nancy Fulda observed:
This certainly seems to match my experience. |
Yeah, that sounds a bit like me. I work as a systems administrator and my job every day consists of finding what broke, why it broke, what needs to be done to fix it, etc. Some of it involves coding, some of it involves outthinking the problem, or in some cases fellow malicious humans, etc. So I can completely relate to that experience. As such I do better writing work on my off days than I do on my off time during the week just because, by the time I get home I want nothing to do with any computer. I just come home, crawl in bed and crash till morning where I get up, rinse, repeat. haha. It's really only on my days off that I get any writing done, and not necessarily every week. Some weeks my weekends consist of just sitting around and letting the brain idle for a change. :P
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But while programming tugs at the same creative resources, it doesn't fill the same need nor offer the same satisfactions, and so my compulsion to write sits frustrated until I can make time to get back to it.
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Agreed. To me, programming is no different than systems or network administration. It's work, but it's not relaxing. It's probably the stress that comes from that struggle to perform. Oddly, for the brief time in which I tried to make a business out of my writing I found myself feeling the same things about my writing. But since switching to doing it entirely for fun and just giving away my books, it's again become a fun, relaxing, enjoyable hobby that helps me with decompressing after work.
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... And then I add to it by spending time here on MobileRead complaining about it all.  I can hear a tiny violin somewhere playing a sad tune just for me.
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Preach it, brother! Preach it! I just wish I had the freetime anymore to be able to do that. I'm only here right now because I'm on my weekend. (I get Thurs and Friday each week as my days off. ^_^)