Part 3 – Lessons Learned and Deadlines Met. Mostly.
(This is part three of a three-part series. I recommend you give part one and part two a read first, if you have time.)
Wonderful people, I appreciate you sticking with me through the story of my 2020 whiplash and a whole lot of awkward financial talk. Picking right up where we left off in the last post: Thanks to a lot of luck, the randomness of the industry, and some hardcore number crunching, I’d just about achieved full time stay-at-home parent and author status.
There was a transition period in which chaos child was still in some part time summer daycare while I met the most aggressive of my deadlines and settled into stay-at-home parenting, but to be less long winded, we’re going to skip all that and dive right into what the new normal looked like once the dust had settled. My aim here is to share with you my exact deadline schedule and day-to-day realities to give the clearest possible picture of what it’s actually like to juggle stay-at-home parenting (or some other time-consuming commitment) and a writing career that must bring in a minimum amount of income per year.
The schedule ain’t pretty
My daily schedule looks something like this 6 days per week, Monday through Saturday:
4:45 am – Wake up and write. I’m a morning person, it’s fine.
5:45 am – Baby gets up
6:30 am – Partner leaves for work
6:30 am – 4:00 pm – Keep chaos child from killing herself, the dog, or me.
Chaos child naps twice around 8am and 1pm for an hour and a half each time once from ~11am-1pm if I’m lucky and it’s a good day. The second she’s down in that crib, I grab a cup of tea and get my butt in my office chair to write. Uh… usually.
4:00 pm – Partner gets home and occupies the baby while I make dinner
5-6:00 pm – Dinner and bedtime routine
6-9:00 pm – Work a little if necessary and brain will allow (though it often doesn’t). Relax with partner. Shower. Play a video game. Chill.
My partner and I each get one day per week to pursue our own projects. Sundays are my day. My partner takes the lead in the morning, then watches the baby from start of first nap until 4:00 pm while I leave the house to go write. Staying home to write does not work on these days. The toddler cannot handle knowing I’m in the house but she’s not allowed to be around me.
So, as you can see, I work for about 13 hours straight six days per week without a break, then work on writing all day Sunday too. At least on Sunday I get to take a grown up shower and take care of myself with no time limit. Meals are eaten while keeping a one year old from throwing food or choking to death. There is no passive time here. I’m always prepping food, cleaning up the toddler wreckage, reading her books, doing activities, dealing with poop in the bathtub, driving us to the library, taking her on hikes, and a thousand other things. (If you would consider it work for a daycare provider to do something, it is work for a stay at home parent to do it, too.) And the second she goes down for a nap, I have to be at my laptop. I’m perpetually in search of a way to lessen the lag time between baby going down for nap and getting into the working groove. On bad days, those naps are only 30-45 minutes. Switching gears is hard, and there are so many necessary-for-life things that can only be done when baby isn’t around that compete for those valuable blocks of time. It’s a work in progress. And I only have one child at home with me. Stay-at-home parents of multiple kids… I have no idea how you do it. Much respect.
No, really: The deadline schedule is frightening
I’m giving you my actual schedule of deadlines from 2021 so you can have a clear idea of the dance required to balance this many projects. I’m not including quick things that can be done in less than two hours, like giving notes on interior art, responding to proofreader notes, writing cover copy, answering cold reader queries, etc. I’ve bolded deadlines that were for entire new drafts or adding significant word count.
Key: PvP = Player vs. Player trilogy; TOTMY = The One True Me & You; Guardians = Guardians of the Galaxy: No Guts, No Glory
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Quarter 1 (January–March): After lots of prep, I gave my day job notice in early February. Chaos child’s daycare closed for covid exposure 4 times. Somehow I also decided making homemade baby food purees was a good idea on top of everything else?
Guardians full synopsis and detailed chapter outline for approval, plus wrangling necessary assets (General chaos and frequent deadlines from December 2020 to March 2021)
PvP1 first draft (Deadline: February 1st)
TOTMY minor revision (Deadline: February 1st)
PvP1 first revision (Deadline: March 15th)
Quarter 2 (April–June): Began transitioning away from work. My last day in the building was April 30th, though I kept working there in some capacity through mid-May, then continued on as freelance. Chaos child started walking between 9 and 10 months old and insisted on sustaining multiple head injuries per day during this timeframe.
PvP1 polish round (Deadline: April 9th)
Guardians first draft (Deadline: May 14th)
TOTMY copyedits (Deadline: March 17th [pushed from 5/13 due to Guardians])
PvP1 copyedits (Deadline: June 3rd)
Guardians second draft (Deadline: June 25th)
Quarter 3 (July–September): Wrapped up day job freelancing. Chaos child turned 1 and proved to be a prolific climber—yet more head injuries, and a covid scare to boot.
Unannounced Anthology Short Story Pitch (Deadline: July 9th)
Guardians short revision from Marvel and Eidos notes (Deadline: July 19th)
TOTMY 1PPs (Deadline: July 21st)
Unannounced IP project – two story pitches (Deadline: July 30th)
Guardians copyedit (Deadline: ASAP/August 2nd)
Guardians 1PPs (Deadline: August 10th)
PvP2 first draft (Deadline: September 1st)
Unannounced IP novel full chapter-by-chapter outline for approval (Deadline: September 3rd)
Quarter 4 (October–December): The first full quarter with no daycare or day job freelancing. Chaos child’s vocabulary is now bigger than mine and she literally never shuts up. Might have her start ghostwriting for me, if she lives through trying to dive face-first into any available body of water.
Unannounced Anthology Short Story draft (Deadline: October 15th)
Unannounced IP novel first draft (Deadline: December 1st)
Unannounced Anthology Short Story revision (Deadline: December 15th)
PvP1 1PPs (Deadline: January 4th, 2021 [turned in December 2020])
PvP2 second draft (Deadline: January 18th [currently working on])
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I am… hyperventilating a little looking back on all that. When I was IN it, I just kept my head down and my eyes on the next thing. But in hindsight, this was a lot to handle while dealing with a complicated quitting process from my day job. Add in learning how to be a stay-at-home parent and recovering from postpartum depression/burnout/everything.
There were stretches of time where I worked every single day for two months or more without a day off. Maybe longer? I didn’t always track. The chaos definitely caught up with me this year. I rarely need a true second draft since I do so much pre-planning, but both Guardians and PvP2 got turned in with very short word counts that needed significant addition in a second round. Very unlike me. I also had to ask for the PvP2 second draft deadline to be moved, which I hated to do. The only other time I’ve ever had a major deadline moved was when I was newly pregnant and too sick to hold down water or sit up in a desk chair.
You may notice that I didn’t work on any of my own new projects, develop new ideas, or write new proposals to get out on submission. This was a year of survival and meeting existing commitments. Not exactly the romantic ideal of a full-time author, having to completely forego your own ideas and projects in favor of work that pays the bills. Not that I don’t love all the books I worked on this year—I do! All this IP work has been a blast! But I definitely felt some frustration over never getting to work on my own original projects.
Lessons learned and tips to try
As with all advice, especially writing advice: everyone is different. There is no one right way to do anything. What works for me may not work for you. I believe the points below are about as universal as they get though. YMMV.
Know your best working hours. I’m a morning person. I’m useless after 6pm. These are the facts I structure my day around. Even though my biggest chunk of free time is from 6-9pm when the baby is in bed, I can barely string a sentence together during that time. I’ve already been working for 13 hours by then and I just don’t have it. At best, I can muddle through some easier work (first pass pages, research, email, etc.) until 7:30. But this is also the only time all day I can spend with my partner, enjoy real adult conversation, and recharge/refill the creative well with some TV or video games. I’m very protective of those three hours at the end of the night, and I only give them up if my back is really up against the wall.
Negotiate your time, then guard it fiercely. I don’t care if it occasionally comes across as keeping score. You better believe that if I give up an hour of my agreed upon writing time, I expect to get that hour back somewhere else. I hate to nickel and dime my minutes, but every one of them is precious and needed to keep up with this work load. Of course I’m flexible when the household needs it, but as a general rule, I don’t give up my writing time without really good cause.
Know exactly how much time and money you need to live. Time: If you need more space to breathe in your day to stay happy and sane, then make sure you factor that in as you contemplate any kind of major career change. Money: Hopefully I covered this well enough in part 2, but budgeting and knowing exactly how much you need is freeing. It means you have an exact target rather than a nebulous goal, and that makes everything possible.
Arrange your author finances. If you haven’t already, make a separate bank account for your author income. If you decide to go full time at some point, I personally think the safest and most logical approach is to make sure you’re paying yourself a regular monthly salary out of your author account instead of having that money all lumped in with your other finances. It’s much easier to track and make sure you’re sticking to your budget. It also makes tracking down missing payments easier. I actually have two accounts: One I put new payments in and pay my current year’s salary out of, and one high yield savings account that holds pay I’m saving for future years’ salary payments.
Don’t overcommit out of fear. Time is a finite resource. So is sanity. Don’t take on so many projects out of fear of going broke that you then can’t do a good job and meet all your deadlines. This is a very easy trap to fall into. I constantly feel like I have to justify my audacity, like because I quit my day job I have to earn the right to have quit every second of every day. No one is making me feel this way but me. I need to work on it, and I need to feel comfortable turning down projects I don’t have time for. (That said, I can’t imagine turning down anything I’ve taken over the past two years! I love all of these projects. Balance is hard. Following your own advice is hard.)
If you have a village, use it frequently and with gratitude. I mostly do not. Though my parents live thirty minutes away, for a variety of reasons they aren’t an option for regular child care. If I have an emergency, they’ll be there, but they aren’t a source of regular babysitting or anything. I do occasionally get an extra hour or two each week when chaos child and I visit, though, which is helpful and appreciated. If you have more of a village, I hope you don’t feel shy about asking for help when you need it.
Stay at home parenting is not for the faint of heart. I went into it knowing it would be hard and demanding and exhausting, and it has indeed been all of those things. I would definitely not undertake this just for the chance to write, because if it weren’t something I wanted for its own sake, I would have been miserable. Fortunately, I do want it, and I do enjoy it and feel fulfilled. Know thyself, I guess? Or have a contingency plan for if it doesn’t work out.
So, what about 2022?
I’ve made a lot of mistakes, I’ve learned a lot, and I hope to make some changes in the new year. I also have some goals I want to pursue now that I know what life as a full time parent and author is like.
LESSON: I need a 5 day/week writing schedule. Sometimes I really need those baby nap times to do something around the house, take a shower, build that new shelf I bought three months ago or, I dunno, read a book that doesn’t have cardboard pages. I hope to end 2022 with zero 60 day writing streaks. It’s not healthy for me and I can’t keep up with all my other responsibilities. I also struggle to relax and recharge if I don’t have “permission” to not be working. Scheduled break time, here I come!
LESSON: I need better work/life boundaries—but not in the way you think! Most people struggle with work taking over their home life when they make a transition to a work-from-home arrangement. I have the opposite problem, largely because I’ve deprived myself of life in favor of work for years and years, and because I need to have my space in order to be able to focus. It is hard to sit straight down in that desk chair once the baby starts napping and get right to work. I want a ten minute break to sit down and stare at a wall. I want to actually bake something without sweet wonderful chaos child clinging to my leg and screaming. I want to weed the garden, or burn literally everything in my office so I can actually think in there. I am a hardcore procrasti-cleaner. I need to work on some strategies to make sure my writing time is only for writing, no matter what else is on the to-do list. That probably involves making sure I actually have dedicated time to do other things. Productive procrastination is the worst.
LESSON: Keep a better balance of original vs. IP work if possible. The deadlines for IP projects are straight up bonkers. Significantly quicker than other novels, and with much less flexible timelines. Each IP project had to be drafted in about 6 weeks, and the turn-around time for revisions has been near unbearable. In 2021, I was signed on for five IP novels and four of them had to be drafted that year. In an ideal world, I’ll have more original projects in the mix so it’s not all sprinting, all the time. That said, I love doing IP work and I do hope to continue doing it! Just… maybe… a little less, if finances will allow.
GOAL: Clean my goddamn office and keep it that way. So very much easier said than done. My office is the only room in our very small house where the baby is not allowed, so it also becomes the dumping ground for everything we find that needs to be out of her reach. It’s a disaster zone, truly.
GOAL: Stay home until the toddler is in kindergarten. I reserve the right to change my mind if I get burned out on stay-at-home parenting and decide I want to return to a day job, but as of right now my goal is to earn enough publishing income to stay home with chaos child until she goes to kindergarten. She’ll still go to some part time preschool and other programs once she’s old enough, but as of now, this is what feels right to me. There are elements to this goal that are out of my control (whether or not I actually sell anything new), but I can put in the work to make it possible (get new things ready for submission and express interest in more IP work).
GOAL: Prioritize getting new work on submission. Like I said earlier, I’ve loved working on all these IP projects, and they’ve been so fun… but my only regret from 2021 is that I had no time or mental space to work on my own new projects. No other sales, because how tf was I supposed to get something ready to go out on submission with all this going on? I even have a few proposal packages already written that just need revision, but I just couldn’t make it work. I still have commitments for 2022: wrapping up PvP2, wrapping up Unannounced IP novel, drafting PvP3, and a few other little things. I also have THREE books out in the first half of this year, so there’ll be a lot of promo to do! But I am absolutely going to make sure we get something out on submission as soon as I have time.
Final thoughts
As soon as the baby was born, I think this was an inevitable move for me, regardless of my day job misery. I am the absolute last person on earth anyone would have pegged as the stay-at-home parent type. I’d said for years that I’d never do it. It was a contingency of having a kid at all. It never even occurred to me to think anything different could possibly happen. Then that little baby showed up and introduced me to a whole new side of myself. (This does not happen to everyone, but it was my personal experience.) If things had been less bad at my job I might have stuck it out longer, but caring for chaos child full time is truly the best, even when it’s the worst. Even when it’s isolating and lonely because of a never-ending global pandemic. I think I’ve ended up where I needed to be.
There is one thing I know for sure. I don’t regret any of it. Stay-at-home parenting and authoring is not for everyone, but I love it and her more than I ever thought I could. Even if it’s only for two or three years, it will have been worth it to take the (well-planned and cautiously taken) leap.
If you’re thinking or dreaming of quitting your day job to write someday, I hope this series of posts has given you some helpful things to think about. It’s not a move to undertake lightly, and definitely not something I would have done after my first book deal. It was only after I’d gotten more work under contract that I felt secure enough that this might be a career, not a one off thing. Get your financial house in as much order as is possible in your situation, take an honest look at your needs and priorities, and please remember that writing full time is not a prestige thing. It’s one career option and lifestyle choice of many, and you are not any better or worse as an author for not living on your writing income. It won’t make you finally feel happy and successful and like you’ve “made it.” It’s not a finish line. It’s one possible option, maybe even a layover in between day jobs. There is no safety, security, or stability, and there is nothing wrong with prioritizing those things in your life. Giving them up is hard, even temporarily.
No matter what route you take, I wish you health, joy, and whatever your definition of success is along the way.
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