Sixty-nine degrees at 3pm on August 4th? Really? It was supposed to get up to 85 today, but, no. Wasn’t to be.

Disclosure: it doesn’t really bother me, other than in a vague, existential “I’m supposed to be having summer because I’m in the northern hemisphere” sort of way. I just like pretending to be annoyed.

A question about the backstage aspects of the writing life, via e-mail:

How much of your time as a writer is spent not writing? As in, all the other things in your professional life that are related to writing and selling your work, but not the actual writing itself.

It’s hard to say, either as a flat declaration of time, or as a percentage relative to the amount of time that I do writing. For example, at the moment I’m taking a little bit of a break from major work; I finished my last major project in early July, will be starting the next one on August 17, and between then I’ve mostly traveled and have written small things, like the AMC column. So in a period like this, obviously “everything else” takes up a significantly larger percentage of the time. But once I start the next project, as a percentage they’ll go down. Overall, however, it’s a substantial portion of my time, and sometimes, too much of my time is devoted to things that aren’t writing. And I’m not always happy about that.

I can make a couple of general observations:

* I’m not at the point where I am so famous that I simply can’t keep up with the outside stuff. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with it last year and considered getting an assistant, but that was primarily a matter of my tremendously crappy time management skills, which I’ve since made it a priority to improve. I’ve gotten a bit better at those skills, which has been helpful, although I think I still have a ways to go in that department. But the fact is learning how to apportion your time gives you more time. It’s also cheaper than hiring someone. If I do get to that point where it’s no longer practical for me to do everything myself, I would hire someone, but I figure I have some distance before that’s genuinely an issue for me.

* That said, I am at a point where I get a lot of fan e-mail, personal and business requests, and am asked to do a fair amount of stuff aside from writing. One way of dealing with fan e-mail for me, quite honestly, was by joining Twitter and Facebook, since I know lot of the folks who would otherwise write fan mail now simply follow me on one or the other of those two (it’s also more fun for me to play with). And of course having Whatever here, with its comment capability, also serves that same purpose for fans who want a bit of personal contact (although to be clear it’s not Whatever’s primary purpose). For the personal and business requests, most of the time it just means I’ve gotten better at saying “no” to stuff in the last couple of years, and making sure people understand that it’s not meant to be a personal slight, I just have to be careful to what I commit to because my time is limited.

* It’s also a fact that the further one goes along in the writing business, the more one appreciates working with competent folks. For example, my fiction agent Ethan Ellenberg does a great job dealing with most of the business aspects of selling my work, taking the time I would have to take dealing with it and freeing it up for me to do other things. To be clear I am indeed actively engaged in final business decisions about the work, and it’s important for me to be so, but the advantage of having Ethan there is I don’t have to be fiddling with the business stuff before that point. And that’s a huge advantage to have. As another example, I am blessed with having a wife who has a hell of a practical business sense and a desire to handle that end of things, so once again that’s more time I can spend on other things, like writing.

* There are still things I’m learning as to how better manage my time when handling this other stuff, however. At one point in my career, I was engaged in a rather long negotiation regarding a major project I hoped to do, and in the end it fell through for various reasons that are none of your business (sorry). I was rather mightily annoyed, for a number of reasons, but most relevant for the purposes of our discussion here because during the negotiations I avoided working on any other potential major projects. The rationale for this was that once the negotiations for this project were through, I would need to start on that project immediately, and I didn’t want to leave something else half-finished.

This seemed to make perfect sense at the time, but the fact of the matter was that at the end of this negotiation, all I had to show for it was being generally pissed off, and a three-month smoking crater in my schedule during which I got nothing substantive done, which meant a not-insignificant loss of income and writing time. And as easy and convenient as it would have been simply to blame the other party for that loss of time and money, the simple fact of the matter is they weren’t the ones who decided I shouldn’t do anything else substantive with that time, it was me. It was a mistake, but the nice thing about being me is that I generally don’t have to make a mistake more than once to learn from it. The bad news, of course, is that there are yet other mistakes that I still have to make, in order to learn from them. Such is life.

* At this point, the major time suck away from writing for me is travel, because I find I don’t get any writing done at any point when I travel, and travel is not just the time on an airplane and being someplace else, it’s all the stuff leading up to it, and it’s a day or two coming down from being away when I get back. Going away for a weekend convention ends up being five days out of my schedule. For Worldcon, I’ve written off nine days. You can see how it adds up.

One way I dealt with it this year as was to notice that my major travel came in “clumps” and to schedule downtime around it. For example, beginning mid-July I ended up having roughly three weeks of travel (meaning the travel and the time preparing for it) interspersed over six weeks. So I worked my writing schedule to have a major project done by July 15th (which it was) and then not start the next one until August 17th. This gave me project deadlines, which I actually prefer having over open-ended time to complete something, and it also let me do all the travel I needed to do during that time ,without being stressed about having unfinished work hanging over my head. While my travel schedule this year just happens to lay itself out like this, I think intentionally scheduling my workload this way in the future might make a bit of sense. We’ll see how the next couple of years go.

In any event, the point is, yes, as time goes on, “the other stuff” of writing does end up taking a fair amount of your time. It’s important to recognize that if unchecked, it’ll go ahead and eat up all your time, leaving you very little time to do, you know, writing. So be prepared to deal with it.