About two years ago, I wrote a post about the uncertainty of being a writer, and how you solve that — to some degree, at least — by cultivating instinct. I’ve no doubt that some people are just born with keen authorial instinct, the same way that some people are born with vestigial tails or magic third nipples that, when squeezed, lactate a variety of flavored sodas.

But most of us have to cultivate it. We have to till the soil and grow the plant ourselves.

Nobody can do it for us.

Those writers you think are masters of the craft aren’t created that way. They aren’t supernaturally capable ninja writer-bots. When you read the work of a writer operating at the top of her game, you’re not seeing all the years of failed efforts, of work that wasn’t quite right, of work that was well-intentioned or built off of strong ideas but had slick and wobbly legs like a newborn fawn. It’s like this: imagine you watch someone enter a house in the dark and they move through each pitch black room like she’s goddamn Catwoman or something — no stubbed toes, no bumped hips on furniture corners, no boards squeaking beneath her feet. You think she’s got supernatural powers but the truth is, she’s done this before. This is her house. She walks around in the dark all the time. She knows this place. And it’s not just rote memorization — it’s that she’s so familiar with the shadows of this space, she can tell when they’ve changed.

You see the author operating at a high level and you wonder: why am I not doing that?

The reality is:

You’re only seeing the island, not the heap of volcanic material that pushed it out of the sea.

Put differently?

A house needs a strong foundation.

And the foundation of that house hides forever in the darkness of the dirt.

You’re not seeing all the time it took to craft the instinct necessary to do this thing.

Instinct is valuable because it’ll tell you which way to jump. It’ll give you the sense in the middle of a story that something is off, it’ll tell you if your character will have broken her contract with the reader, it’ll tickle the back of your mind and say that the plot is untenable or this description is too much or hey what’s the deal with you writing all these stories about orangutans that’s really weird, man. Instinct can even help you on the business side of writing, too.

Instinct feels like some sweet Jedi bad-assery. It’s bullseyeing womp-rats. It’s lightsabering shit with a blast shield over your eyes. It’s firing proton missiles into some imperial janitor’s open window as he huffs an e-cig on his a smoke break while some old dead dude whispers in your ear to slake your bloodlust and murder all all those people inside that moon-sized military base. (LUKE BABYPUNCHER USES HIS WEIRD MAGIC TO BLOW UP AN INNOCUOUS GOVERNMENT INSTALLATION. THEY SORTED MAIL THERE, STAR-KILLER. STOP KISSING YOUR SISTER AND HANGING OUT WITH SMUGGLERS AND THEIR HAIRY SEX GORILLAS.)

I think I got a little off-track there.

Anyway.

Point is, out of all the writing and storytelling advice I can give, the one that always floats to the top for me is that you need to cultivate your instinct as an author.

Question is, how do you do that?

ABR: Always Be Reading

A writer who doesn’t read is like a filmmaker who only plays video games. You’re like a chef who only eats protein paste, a dog trainer who only owns cats, a sex educator who’s never done the rumpy-pumpy and in fact is so ashamed of your own genital configuration you only handle your pink parts in the dark and with gardening gloves.

The foundation of your creativity is made of books.

So: read books. A lot of books. Done that one? PICK UP ANOTHER.

ABRW: Always Be Reading Widely

I know. You want to read what you want to read. You love horror, and by golly you want to write horror, too — so you read a lot of it. That’s cool. You should. But you should also read fantasy. And literary. And classics. You should read Joyce. And one or both Brontes. And Toni Morrison. I don’t mean these writers specifically — I just mean, you need a varied diet. You have a comfort zone. That comfort zone has soft, cushy walls. You need to hack into those walls with a machete. Find out what makes them comfy. Leave the sanctity of your padded cell. See what else the asylum has to offer. A limited diet of reading means all you can do is write the same thing you’re reading. You’re a copy machine spitting out facsimiles. You’re chasing someone else’s tail. As I’ve said before: you’re just a literary human centipede.

You don’t like romance? How do you know? Fuck off and go read some. Maybe you still won’t like it. But it’s important to read it anyway. Liking it isn’t part of the equation. Which leads me to:

Read To Understand

Read not to be entertained, but to be enlightened. Read not to be comforted, but to be challenged. Read to be disturbed, bewildered, saddened, disgusted. Read to understand.

What I mean is: every book is a nut you must crack*. When you read something, understand what it is you think about it. And why you think that. What is it about this book that works? That doesn’t? Why does it make you feel a certain way? Why has it failed to make you feel? Think of it as a pocketwatch. You need to bust it against a rock like a hungry otter and gaze at the inner workings. Read critically. Read to dissect. Read to digest.

*heh, nut

*heh, crack

*heh, nut crack sounds like butt crack

*I’m so sorry

Hey Now, No Need To Be A Book Snob

A story is a story is a story. Whether it is contained in an erotic novel, a middle-grade horror tale, a children’s picture book, a television show, a video game, a comic book, a comic book movie, a documentary about making a comic book movie, a Chick tract, a roleplaying game told by five people at a table, a story you overhear at the hair salon — these are all stories. You aren’t just a writer. You’re a storyteller. The mechanics of language are one thing. The architecture of story is another. It’s all important. You can’t just go ankle-deep. You gotta sink to the bottom. You gotta submerge. Disappear into all the stories.

Ask Critical Questions

Why do I like this character? What’s wrong with this plot? Why is this working? Why is it not? Could I write that sentence differently? Better? Worse? I could (should?) probably do a whole blog post about the important questions writers might want to consider as they read a book — but in this case I’ll just say: the goal is to take all the little parts of the story, dice them apart, and look at their constituent pieces. How do they hold up separately? Or as a whole?

Write A Lot

Is it Stephen King’s one million words? Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours? Chuck Wendig’s six shitty trunk novels and four billion tears spilled onto the dry dead earth of literature and publishing? Choose whatever arbitrary number you like, but the idea remains the same —

You do this thing by doing this thing. You learn to write first and foremost by jolly well fucking writing. It’s the same advice I gave to my toddler son on how to urinate outside:

Just point your thing and let it go, man.

Did I Say You Could Stop Yet?

Whoa, whoa, hold up, you’re not done. You don’t just stop. You don’t hit an arbitrary word count and the meter goes ding! — you do this again and again. You write and you write and you rip the words out and you slam them down onto the paper and you keep doing it until your heart explodes and the Reaper takes you to whatever reward waits hereafter. (By the way: Hell for Writers is a smelly angel whispering an ever-worsening Amazon Rank in your ear for all of eternity.)

Our toddler has this thing where, when he tries something the first time and isn’t immediately performing that task at superhero levels, he gets really frustrated. So we have to keep drilling into him: practice, practice, practice. Yes, there exist those who can sit in front of a piano without ever having seen one before and end up playing a perfect concerto the first time, but those people are called ROBOTS and they must be destroyed before they learn to like the taste of human meat.

What I’m trying to say is:

The writing doesn’t end. And really, why would you want it to?

Art Imitates Art

Sometimes, you have to write like someone else before you can write like yourself. We mimic. We imitate. We practice as if we’re other people. I know, it gets boring, but another toddler story (the childless amongst you are probably rolling your eyes but ha ha ha this is my blog, suckers): our tot, B-Dub, approaches new situations sometimes as if he’s a Transformer. He was having a hard time in his swimming class until he learned to pretend to be one of the Rescue Bots — see, in the show, the firetruck named Heatwave recently learned to manifest a second vehicle form: a fire boat. So, the tiny human was able to pretend he was someone else, and it gave him a lot of confidence. It wasn’t the toddler having to be brave, it was someone else, and he got to try new things — and get better at them — by pretending to be someone else.

You don’t really want to end up as an imitator, but a lot of this whole “cultivating your instinct as a writer” thing is very much about the journey, and not just the destination.

No, Really, Go Read Writing Advice

Writing advice gets a bad rap. Here’s the thing, though — it’s all in how you treat it. If you treat it as gospel? You’re dead in the water. If you treat it as a challenge to the way you think: you’re a winner who wins, and what you win is a cheeseburger slathered with the sweet relish of instinct.

Okay, I feel like that was a very Guy Fieri-ey metaphor, so let’s just move on.

What I’m saying is, each little snugget (snippet + nugget) of writing advice is something for you to pick up and examine. Each offering is a challenge — is this reasonable? Does this work for you? Or is it a hot armload of horse-hockey? Sometimes, to understand how we do things, we need to understand how other people do things. Maybe because we’re looking for ideas. Maybe because it helps us clarify our own understanding of why we personally reject that way.

Fail Without Fear

We don’t learn a lot through success by itself. That sounds strange, but it’s true. I throw a basketball at a hoop and — swish — first time in? I don’t know what the hell I did. But I get one shot in and nine missed, I start to see how I can do that better. And suddenly, I start making more baskets. We make sense of our efforts through failure.

Success is only seen clearly when compared with our fuck-ups.

Rejection is a part of this. Writers despise rejection because it hurts us; but that sting so keenly felt can also be clarifying when we let it. Whether this is rejection by a friend who reads it, by a publisher, by an audience, by a reviewer: rejection is meaningful. Not always individually (“UR BOOK SUCKS, TURDLINGER! GO EAT A BUTT” is probably not all that valuable a critique), but as a whole, rejection can do a lot for us. Even at its most basic level, it toughens our heart against the slings and arrows of future rejection, allowing us to grow and move past it without dissolving into a puddle of briny tears for four days. (I only weep for two days, now. #blessed.)

Talk About It

Sometimes? Sometimes you just have to talk about it. Go out to a movie, go get pie with friends. Read a book? Get online to chat about it. Have a story problem? Go talk to someone. Talking about The Work — ours and everybody else’s — helps us hone our writing knives and story swords.

Instinct isn’t something that happens overnight. It comes as we demonstrate our skill. It grows as we explore our talent. It shines brighter every time we fail and then examine our failure. It lives in the background, a voice that starts out too quiet to hear but with practice and conversation and debate and every sentence written and every book read… it gets louder. Until soon it’s yelling in our ears, telling us things we already know but about which we were too naive to listen.

* * *

The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do I write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? How do I start? What the hell do I do?

The best way to answer these questions is to ditch your uncertainty and transform yourself into a Kick-Ass Writer. This new book from award-winning author Chuck Wendig combines the best of his eye-opening writing instruction — previously available in e-book form only — with all-new insights into writing and publishing. It’s an explosive broadside of gritty advice that will destroy your fears, clear the path, and help you find your voice, your story, and your audience.

Amazon

B&N

Indiebound

Writer’s Digest

I like that terribleminds has kind of become an inadvertent writerly community. People gathering around the campfire, burning their old trunk novels, weeping into cans of beans about this rejection or that bad review. As such, this seems like an opportune time to once more check in with you ink-fingered key-slingers and see:

How are you doing?

How’s the writing going?

Tell us some good news.

Trouble us with your problems.

Let’s talk about it. Let’s talk to each other about it.

Got a grievance? Air it.

Got good news? Celebrate it.

Progress reports: starting now.

Last week’s challenge: Charlie And The Whoa What Now?

Colors.

COLORS ARE PRETTY.

*paws the sky*

*touches a tree*

*drops acid, dances around in a whirlwind of colors that do not exist*

Ahem.

Anyway.

This one is pretty easy.

I want you to write a story using a title that incorporates a color into it.

I don’t care which color, but if you require a RANDOM COLOR TABLE:

1. Pink
2. Feldspar
3. Olive
4. Azure
5. Auburn
6. Fuchsia
7. Coral
8. Ochre
9. Vermilion
10. Cobalt

So, your title could be THE COBALT KNIGHT or AUBURN JONES AND THE REAPER’S URN or whatever. Only requirement is the incorporation of a color into the title. Otherwise? It’s rules as usual: 1000 words, due by Friday, 8/22, noon EST. Post at your online space. Link back here in the comments. Game over.

Water’s warm, so: jump in.

I love editors. Editors are the unsung heroes of the Book World. They’re the ones with their arms plunged into the meaty stink of various drafts, reaching into the pink slurry in order to stitch up ruptures and rearrange vital organs and make the whole monster work. Without editors, all writers would probably descend into a pit of writing pamphlets consisting only of profane emojis.

Freelance editors are an awesome variant of the editor — though, tricky, because a lot of folks out there call themselves editors and will gladly take your money and then just-as-gladly either do nothing for you or instead take the cash in order to tell you what you want to hear. So, it’s nice to hear from recent Angry Robot editor Bryon Quertermous, who has once again returned to the Wide World of Freelance Editing. Here he is with ‘five things you can learn from a freelance editor.’

* * *

When Chuck initially offered me this space after the publisher I was an acquiring editor for closed my imprint, I submitted a whiny, altogether off-putting piece that Chuck kindly pushed back and suggested I rethink. [Hey, I just want the best for ol’ Bryon. Or Byron. Wait, what the hell is his name again? Quartermouse? Qwertymace? Whatever. — cw] After some time to clear my head and figure out what I was looking forward to in this next phase of my career I realized how happy I was to be back to editing on a freelance basis rather than in a corporate environment. That joy has nothing to do with bad corporate experiences, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every job I’ve had working for publishers big and small, but in all of those instances my main loyalty was to the company, not to the writer. As a hired gun, paid for by the writer and serving at the writer’s mercy, I exist for one purpose: to bring the manuscript as close to the writer’s perfect vision of it as humanly possible and that’s a freeing feeling.

So in the spirit of freedom and independence, I present today, five things you can learn from a freelance editor (or as it’s known in my document file: five reasons my fee is really worth it).

1. WHAT YOUR STORY IS REALLY ABOUT

If I had to pick one common element from all of my editorial letters, this would be it. Whether it’s elevating a minor character to a starring role, suggesting a single novel is actually a trilogy (or vice-versa), or suggesting that maybe your contemporary romance is actually a perfectly structured romantic suspense novel, authors aren’t always the best judge of what type of book they’re writing. They almost always know what they want to say and what they want the reader to feel and why they’re writing the book, but the delivery of those key goals is usually not as defined.

If you have the luxury of putting your manuscript away for months to clear your head and take a fresh view, that’s great. But most writers don’t have that luxury (or that much discipline) so bringing in someone who thinks like an author and respects the vision like an author, but has the fresh eyes and training of an editor is the next best thing.

2. GETTING PERSONAL IN WRITING IS GREAT; GETTING TOO PERSONAL ISN’T

One of the big problems I had with the original version of this piece was finding the balance between making it personal and keeping within the bounds of common decency. For a book to really work well, part of the author’s soul has to be on the page. Even authors like Chuck who write multiple books a year across multiple formats and multiple worlds find a way to put a piece of themselves in even the silliest or outrageous projects. But finding that balance isn’t easy.

The best fiction, like the best dialogue, presents a hyper-stylized version of reality that keeps all of the good parts and excises the repetitive and boring parts. A good editor will dig deeper with a string of questions to the author to help find the interesting core of personal anecdotes or find ways to combine multiple boring real elements into one fabulous fictional element. They’ll also point out the points where the personal elements you’re incorporating go against the vision you have for the piece. Going back again to this piece, Chuck knew my main goal for writing this was to show off my editing experience and skills and get more work out of it. He pointed out several places where good personal writing was damaging the mission of my piece. He also pointed out places where I was flat out wrong.

Which brings me to…

3. YOU’RE GOING TO GET SOMETHING WRONG

Authors are also a really smart lot by and large, but they tend to be specialists and tend to be hyper-focused on individual projects. Editors are able to see the bigger picture because they haven’t spent months or years researching the topic or novel like the author has. They’re coming to it as your readers will, with the same questions and desire to be entertained AND informed, but with the added skill of being able to help you fix the spots where you goof up.

As with personal details, including enough research in a novel to keep the reader informed and educated as well as entertained without bogging them down in footnotes and graduate thesis-level description is a tough balance. Again, a good editor will do this tactfully through a series of questions (do we really need four pages to describe how to turn on the Demon Laser Sword?) to help the author realize the overload on their own. This also includes spelling and grammar. Editors are vigilant with the dictionary, the Chicago Manual of Style, and other resources at hand to make sure that the prose comes across clear and easy to read without being hampered by silly grammar or spelling errors.

4. THE BEST OPTION FOR PUBLISHING MAY NOT BE THE ONE YOU THINK

Most of the freelance editors I know, myself included, have worked with Big Five publishing houses, smaller publishers, and everything in between and still follow what’s going on in the industry. A good portion of my editorial business is publishing consulting and helping authors find the right publishing fit for their story.

Once you have a great novel polished to a sparkly sheen, a freelance editor with great knowledge of the current publishing scene can help you figure out the best path for your individual story within your publishing life plan. If your goal is only to find an agent and be published by a traditional publisher, an editor will help you find ways to make your unique vision fit within the boundaries of the commercial fiction marketplace. But traditional publishing isn’t the best path for every author or for every book. An experienced and skillful editor can offer suggestions for alternatives to traditional publishing whether that be self-publishing, POD publishing, or dropping the project completely and moving on to something new.

5. NOW YOU KNOW SOMEONE IN THE BUSINESS

For those looking to be traditionally published, contacts and networking can be immensely helpful in cutting through the red tape. Hiring an editor with a wealth of contacts in the industry can help elevate great manuscripts in the slush piles and offer a stamp of validation when competing against the thousands of other unsolicited manuscripts agents and editors receive every day. While no ethical editor will ever guarantee that hiring them and working with them will guarantee representation or publication (one of the best novels I’ve ever worked on in my career still hasn’t sold and it crushes me daily), there’s no denying that a well-placed email or note can help a great manuscript get the best opportunity for success possible.

Even those who want to bypass traditional publishing can still benefit from a freelance editor with great contacts. One of the biggest complaints indie writers have is how hard it is to get their books noticed. In addition to contacts with editors and agents, most top freelance editors have contacts with bloggers, book reviewers, and influential readers who can help spread the word of a book.

So when considering whether to hire a freelance editor and how much you’re willing to pay for the service, think about what you’re looking for. Do you just want someone to make sure the commas are in the correct place and you haven’t used their, they’re, or there wrong, or do you want a skilled and well-connected partner who can help you fully realize the vision of your project  and provide access to reach the largest audience possible for that project?

Bryon Quertermous has over a decade of publishing experience that includes work with traditional stalwarts, such as Random House, as well as more cutting-edge operations like Harlequin’s digital-first imprint Carina Press. His most recent position was as the commissioning editor for Angry Robot’s crime fiction imprint Exhibit A Books. He’s worked as a freelance editor for New York Times bestselling authors and published the award-winning crime zine Demolition for four years. His first novel, Murder Boy, will be published in 2015 by Polis Books. Rates, testimonials, and recent editing projects can be found at his website, right here.

An e-book is nothing. It’s 1s and 0s. It’s wizard farts and cyber-dreams.

An e-book is everything. It’s a container for pure story. Like the traps they use in Ghostbusters, except instead of catching specters it catches characters, narratives, ideas, lies that tell truths.

An e-book is a book, which is to say, it’s not a book at all. A book is a physical thing.

An e-book is ether. An e-book is frequency.

You might own an e-book. You might not. Maybe you’re just leasing it, like a jet-ski during the summer. Maybe you’ll read it. Maybe you’re just collecting them. Could be it goes in the pile. Guiltless and invisible. All of us, gluttonous e-book hoarders.

An e-book costs nothing to make. But it costs everything to write — a story, after all, always costs yourself, or part of yourself. And an e-book costs a lot to edit. And design. And market. And of course the story must be procured and the author secured and all of these cost dollars and cents, or bitcoins, or dogecoins, or e-chits, or book-ducats. But of course, e-books cost nothing to make.

Some e-books are big. Some are small.

Some are good. Some are great.

Some are transcendent.

Some are total dogpants.

Some are good stories formatted well. Others are formatted impeccably, but suck with great gusto.

Some are written by authors you love.

Some are by authors you hate.

Many — most, even — are by authors you don’t even know.

It may take you two hours to read an e-book. Or two days. Or two weeks.

Maybe you pick at it for two months, two years, two lifetimes, two nevers, two forevers.

Maybe you re-read it again and again. Maybe you can’t get through it the first time.

Going to the movies costs $10. Maybe $20. Or more.

Buying a movie costs about the same.

Renting a movie is half that.

My wife will tell me a story for free.

Broadcast TV is free, too, though of course I pay for cable. Quite a lot of money per month. And then there’s Netflix, too — eight dollars a month for everything I could every want to watch, as long as everything I want to watch is about 5% of everything I really want to watch.

A video game is sixty bucks except when it’s an app then it’s three.

Or a buck.

Or free (but with a hundred-thousand-dollars for all the in-app purchases).

This blog is free.

A coffee is a buck, or two, or five-plus if it’s fancy.

I bought a pint of ice cream the other day that was over ten dollars.

It probably won’t take me an hour to eat it.

(Realtalk: I could hoover that fucker into my body before the lady at the store gives me change.)

A whole pizza is ten bucks, too. Maybe fifteen. Maybe the pizza should be more expensive. Or perhaps the ice cream should be cheaper? Lobster weighs less than a pizza but costs more.

The Internet costs me quite a lot of money every month but weighs nothing. No trucks have to deliver it. Nobody has to turn a crank or clear the line of debris.

My Hyundai costs less than a BMW which costs less than a Lamborghini but they’re all just metal and rubber and zoom-zoom juice. For the price that I paid for my Hyundai I could probably buy a bunch of bicycles. Like, a shitload of bicycles.

I don’t know what e-books should cost.

Everyone wants to tell you what they should cost by comparing them to everything else even though nothing else really compares.

They want you to price them based on their cost to produce, as long as “cost to produce” doesn’t figure in all the actual costs to produce them.

Maybe an e-book should be five bucks. Or ten. Or fifteen.

Or whatever the author wants. Or the publisher. Or the retailer.

I seriously don’t know what e-books should cost.

If nine-ninety-nine is the sweet spot, then one might suspect that the bell-curve neatly allows for $4.99 at the edge same as it would allow for $14.99, but of course, I’m a writer, not a mather.

Picasso, if the legend is true, once drew a hasty sketch on a napkin at the behest of a cafe patron and was then asked to sign it and then he told the patron before handing the sketch over that it would cost said patron $25,000. The patron complained, saying, “But that only took you two minutes to draw!” Picasso replies with, “No, it took me my whole life.”

But what do I know? I’m no Picasso. I’m not even Robert Picardo.

Robert Picardo is pretty cool. I don’t know what he costs.

An iPhone costs me over $600, but only about $200 to build.

My son cost nothing to make, but boy, the lifetime contract is pretty expensive. If he’s ever gonna go to college, I better start farming all those book-ducats and e-chits right the hell now.

I really, truly, totally don’t know what e-books should cost.

But I hope we figure it out soon, so we can shut the fuck up about it.

Maybe we can just let the market decide.

Or maybe someone else will decide for us and the market will decide anyway because the market does what the market does. Because the market hungers, like if H.P Lovecraft and Adam Smith had a squirming squid baby that smells like ATM receipts.

Maybe the question really isn’t “what’s an e-book worth?”

Maybe instead we should ask:

What is a story worth?

Maybe that’s the question that matters most of all.

I don’t know that answer, either.

I suspect nobody does.

And now, a guest post by a really amazing author: Tom Pollock. Tom wanted to talk about how he maintains both a writing career and a day job at the same time, and that felt like a very useful perspective, indeed. I don’t necessarily agree with everything here — if I’d taken some of this advice to heart, I suspect I’d not have the career I have at present, but I’m also, er, fortunate enough to have never liked any of my day jobs all that much. The only day job I ever wanted was to be a full-time author — but some of what Tom is putting out there is vital for those who want to keep their current work while writing on the side.

So, with that all said —

Everyone say “Hi, Tom!”

* * *

Maybe this is a place to mention this, but I’ve always felt a little weird about giving writing advice.

This isn’t just because, as Patrick Ness so rightly puts it, ‘no-one can tell you how to write, they can only tell you how they write’ it’s also because I can’t even tell myself how I’m going to write the next book. Every time I start a novel it feels like the first time.  I’m sitting down to write my fourth one right now, and it still makes me feel like a nervous virgin who’s just realised he forgot to take off his socks before his trousers.

I know one way I’m not going to write it though: full time.  I’ve written three novels in three years around a day job that I really like, and I’ll do the same with this one. People sometimes ask me for practical tips on how I fit it all in, so here’s how:

(Disclaimer: your mileage may vary and your domestic circumstances may differ from mine. In particular, I am aware I have no kids. Still, I hope some of this is useful to you.)

Plan your time.

This is the biggie, if you take nothing else away from this post take this. If you’re effectively trying to do two jobs at once, then time is likely to be your scarcest resource, and like any scarce resource, you’ll need to budget. Plan your week ahead, know when you’re writing.  Have a routine. Compartmentalize like a fiend.

For example: I write on Monday nights, Wednesday nights and during the day on Sundays. The rest of the time I see family and friends, eat cereal, rage against the dying of the light, answer email, eat more cereal, make terrible puns on twitter and watch Netflix.

I find it helps (though it’s not essential and I understand this can be tricky) to have a general idea of how fast you write, so you can know how much time you’ll need. I turn out about five hundred words an hour when I’m first-drafting. That’s roughly two-hundred hours to a first draft. Writing eight hours a week, which is more or less what I do (two hours each in the weekday evenings and four on the weekend) gets me to a 100k first draft in six months, another six for revision and that’s a finished novel in a year.

Yes, a lot of people write every day. You can if you want to. You don’t have to. I don’t.  A lot of people (like my gracious host, Chuck) write more than one book a year. You can if you want to. You don’t have to. I don’t. (Spoiler: this will be a running theme.)

Stick to your plan.

Once you’ve got it planned out, do it.

If your buddy Alex asks you if you want to go see Guardians of the Galaxy on Wednesday? Sorry matey, I’m writing. I find getting out of the house to write helps here. Work has its own place, writing has its own place too, and when I’m at home I’m at home: off duty. This keeps me from being tempted to pretend I’m writing while I’ve got an Elementary marathon on in the background.

It’s not just your writing time that’s sacred, either. The point of compartmentalisation isn’t just to keep writing safe from the rest of your life, but to keep the rest of your life safe from your writing time, this helps with…

Don’t let writing turn you into an asshole.

If you’re anything like me then about three months into the book, a nasty, Gollum-like voice will whispering inside your head. It’ll suck its breath in through its broken teeth like it’s reluctant to give you bad news and then it’ll say something like:

‘I hate to tell you this Tom, but there are only so many hours in the day, and you’re already spending so many of them at the day job. You keep seeing on Twitter how everyone else is writing every spare second of every day (I mean, even Stephen frickin’ King says you need to write every day, and he’s Stephen frickin’ King).  What if everyone else is getting ahead because you’re not focussed on your game? Everyone’s talking about how tough the market is right now. Maybe it’s time to make the writing the priority, even ahead of some of the people in your life. They’ll understand right? This is your dream. Everyone has a right to follow their dreams. Hell, if they don’t understand, maybe they don’t deserve you.’

Do not listen to this voice. This voice is a massive dick, formed out of your own paranoia at falling behind some imagined curve and cloaked in just enough statement-of-the-obvious to make itself look reasonable. Yes, there may be times when you need to prioritize, and you know what? Prioritize the people. They’re more important.

For one thing, you can afford to — you’ve got a day job covering the income. For another, you won’t actually get any more done if you’re worrying about how you’ve fucked up all the human connections in your life. The fact that writing is not the a1 priority in your life does not mean you won’t get it done. So stop panicking and bake a goddam cake for the real love of your life.

Enjoy it.

Internet legend Ze Frank put it best: ‘life isn’t just a sequence of waiting for things to be done’. You are entitled to expect to have fun. Not that every minute at the keyboard will be as 100% pleasurable and frustration free as an orgasm on MDMA. It won’t, but on average, overall you ought to enjoy it, and find it satisfying. And if you don’t? If for some reason you’re labouring away at a pastime you hate because you’re invested in the idea of being a writer, but detest the activity? It’s okay, you can stop. You kept your day job, remember?

Frankly, everybody who writes, day job or not, ought to be having fun with it, otherwise why bother? But this is one of those areas where keeping the civilian occupation can be a positive boon. If you aren’t looking for this book to pay your gas bill, it frees you up to write whatever the hell turns you on. It pulls some of the teeth out of the ‘is this commercial enough?’ vampire.

Aaaaaaand that’s all I got. I assume a lot of you guys are writing around day jobs, what helps you cram it in?

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Inventor of monsters, hugger of bears: Tom Pollock is a long time fan of science fiction and fantasy who steadfastly refuses to grow out of his obsession with things that don’t exist. His Skyscraper Throne Trilogy (The City’s Son, The Glass Republic, Our Lady of The Streets) has been shortlisted for the Kitschies Golden Tentacle and British Fantasy Awards. The Skyscraper Throne is probably the most urban fantasy you’ll ever read. The first volume The City’s Son, is about a teenage graffiti artist sucked into a world of runaway train ghosts, glass-skinned streetlamp spirits, wolves made of scaffolding, and demolition gods with cranes for fingers. Things get weirder from there.