The Web Haunt of Ryan K Lindsay

I am a writer. By now you know that, but by day I am a mild mannered primary school teacher. It’s fun and it pays the bills. Score.

For the past five weeks I have been on summer holidays. It’s awesome, I’ve got like 12 hours a day with which to write and all that fun stuff. I write anywhere from 3-5k a day on my current novel, plus other ancillary articles and essays that I work on, not to mention posting here. It’s the most productive time of the year but it appears those salad days are over, for now.

Today marks my return to work. I have an induction conference today, which is going to be deadly boring because I’m new to this territory but have been teaching for six years, so I’ll have to sit and listen to big wigs talk about pay scales and super-annuation, so you can tell I’m not pumped for it. After today it’s work for the year as usual, a gifted Year 5 class and other school jobs, programming, reporting, marking, etc.

For the past year I was simply casual teaching for a year, sort of taking time off from the profession, seriously, and spending more time at home writing. I would leave after 8am and return before 4pm, guaranteed every day. It was great, and I managed to finish one novel, complete two more, and start a fourth in that time, not to mention short stories, essays, etc. It was awesomely productive but this year is going to be different. I’ll be working for realsies, so I’ll be putting my whole heart and brain into it. I can’t just slack off, I’m part of the permanent staff and people will be relying on me to carry my weight.

I’ll have to leave the house before 8am every day to get to work and who knows when I will return. Could be by 4pm, could very well be later. This is going to severely impact my writing time.

So, to help with this, I’m going to severely alter my writing expectations of each day. As I mentioned, in the holidays I can write up to 5k a day, when I’m absolutely firing, as well as other stuff. This year, I have to be more realistic. And as such, here’s my plan.

I will aim to write 1k of words every day on my novel, excluding weekends as always.

I will devote time to writing some other essays and articles for publication. More news to come on this soon.

I will spend a greater majority of my time shopping my completed and proofed first two novels, and I will get my third novel proofed, once I finish this fourth novel.

This should generally work out, except I know I have two different ideas vying for my attention to become my fifth novel. Both ideas I really love, both plot and character, so I’ll see if I can start them or not. I really enjoy writing, it’s the most fun out of the whole process, beats the hell out of planning, proofing, or submitting. I like that act of creation and innovation and would like to keep it coming.

I just have to be realistic about how much of it I will get each day.

Here’s to 2010, a year of different goals, but all working towards the same end. My words on a page, and someone else’s hands on them reading them. Enjoying them.

Posted on January 26th, 2010 by ryan
Filed under: life, Writing