Inhuman Swill

davidlevine is another sf writer who's recently transitioned to full time. His LJ might have some pointers.

Also check out mindyklasky. She recently went full time.

The first best part of my day goes to fiction, and lately I've been spending it in a local cafe with paper and pen and the laptop, too. Then I go home and deal with the business-stuff--e-mails, submissions, whatever. Regroup, shower, and non-fiction happens: at the moment that means lecture-writing for a new course I'm teaching in January.

On a "bad" day, productivity-wise, I only get that first 90-120 minutes of fiction time. On a good one, I get another window in the afternoon.

On a really good one, like today, I ignore the correspondence and the non-fic until I've put in 3-4 hours on the novel, and then I do whatever catch-up feels appropriate. I bought some of that extra time by fiddling with teaching stuff on Sunday, though.

I'm not sure my input will be at all useful, since I don't write fiction and I am entirely deadline-driven, but:

I try to keep something resembling business hours. Most days I'm at my desk by 9 and I stay there until 4 or 5, with a coffee break at about 2:30ish.

I work in my office, which is actually the entryway to my apartment, unless I take the laptop to the coffee shop. Sometimes I just need a change of scenery.

If I have an imminent deadline, I don't have any choice but to plow through. Caffeine is my friend. If the deadline isn't that day and I'm feeling stuck, I go for a walk or browse at the bookstore or run errands (groceries, laundry, whatever) to get my brain out of the rut, or I switch to another project. Sometimes stuckness spreads to all writing, not just the particular thing on top of the stack; when that happens, I give myself the rest of the day off if I can. (Fortunately, that doesn't happen much.)

Does that help?

8am-noon
1500 words a day.
500 words before breakfast.

I mostly work in the little conservatory at the back. I can't function without daylight.

Key tip: set a do-able target and then stop. If the target is too high, you depress yourself. If you run too far over, you don't have a place to start the next day (and in my case it tends to come out of next day's work). The aim is to leave the desk with a sense of achievement, *and* with something you want to write when you get started next morning.

Im definitely mood-addict. Like now, its about two hours that I had to start writing, but Im still surfing the web. I can write 8 pages for 1 hour and 20 lines for the whole day. It depends. I try not to persist, but sometimes I have problems with deadlines.

You might find this blog interesting:

http://dailyroutines.typepad.com/daily_routines/

The thing about Kafka: "As he recognized, the truth was that he wasted time." Talk about the purest distillation of my writer's "schedule."