A Day In The Life Of A Writer
November 12, 2009
Yes, I sometimes pick very busy days for my "A Day In The Life Of A Writer" countdown, and here's yesterday, which was rather weird.
5:45. Up and not happy about it.
6:15. Checking e-mail and by 6:30 making my first Facebook entry. Leanne was off work so she did the kid driving, so I sat down with the laptop and finished reading the work I've done so far on my SF novel-in-progress, A Plague Of Stars.
7:30. We drive to the doctor's office. Leanne for a physical, me to give blood, try to get a swine flu shot, nag about prescriptions, and set up an appointment for next week.
8:15. Sit in doctor office trying to catch up on my medical newsletter reading that I'm 3 months behind on. Give blood. Set up appt. No H1N1 available. Read, read, read.
~9:45. Leanne's done, we drive back home and hit Big Boy for breakfast, which neither of us had because of fasting blood work. We're starving. (Whole grain pancakes for her; farmer's omelet for me).
10:30. Home. Jump on the computer, deal with e-mail, edit second galley for technical journal I edit.
1:00. Contact writer for ITW Report, set up e-mail interview. Send off materials to web maven for e-mail newsletter. Respond to various marketing-type stuff with book publisher's PR person. Finish some additional requests regarding figures for an article I turned in the day before.
2:00. Interview a California PhD and expert on cyber medicine.
2:25. Transcribe interview.
3:00. Interview an Alabama PhD and expert on computer engineering and wireless body area networks.
3:35. Transcribe interview.
4:15. Deal with late-arriving changes to technical journal galley. Send off interview questions for an e-mail interview for ITW Report.
5:00. Interview California PhD and expert on wireless body area networks.
5:25. Transcribe interview.
6:00. Go upstairs and work on reading/editing a fiction manuscript for the Mystery Writers of America mentoring project.
6:30. Put cheese on mostaciolli and put in oven. Get garlic bread prepped, then set timer for 10 minutes to remind me to raise oven temp and put garlic bread in oven.
6:55. Leanne and Ian and Sean come home from swim club and Leanne asks me why I didn't put the garlic bread in the oven. I realize that instead of hitting timer, I hit clock, reset the microwave clock to 10:00 and never thought to check. In goes the garlic bread. (And I reset the clock)
7:15. We eat dinner. I do dishes.
7:45. Practice guitar (working on Satin Doll chords and a fingerstyle version of Angels We Have Heard On High).
8:10. Finish reading mentor manuscript.
8:30. Fire up laptop and work on Dressed To Kill.
9:00. Get ready for bed. Read until 9:30ish (Boneshaker).
9:30ish. Lights out.
Hopefully today won't be quite as screwy.
posted by Mark Terry at 4:55 AM
11 Comments:
Interesting. My day runs along the lines of take kid to doctor and for an hour we sat together reading. He's eleven and it's a Star Wars book written for adults. I keep hearing that boys don't read because in kid books the content is boring or childish. I suppose the fact that he is reading this is proof of that.
As my older son's teacher said, "he's a teenaged boy, they want war, blood, and guts."
I would have preferred to be reading fiction, but I'm way behind on these newsletters. I get 4 of them all related to the business of clinical diagnostics, and one of them, that focuses on Medicare and Medicaid, comes every 2 weeks. And I really need to stay on top of this stuff, so it was an opportunity to crank through a couple of them. Not fun, though.
No humpity-bumpity?
I don't humpity-bumpity and tell.
LOL! You skipped your workout. You think I didn't notice? (So kidding.)
Mine's easy. Wake up. Grab netbook wedged between bed and window. Talk to writing partner for 15 min - half hour while surfing Facebook. Then we both write for an hour. Rinse and repeat until noon.
Get out of bed and go to clubhouse. Sit in overstuffed chair and write until five-ish. Fight over who's going to cook dinner and who's going to do dishes. Fight over whether or not meat is involved. (I'm not a a meat-eater, Glenn is, but he shouldn't be eating it.)
Depending on how many words I wrote, I either write until bed, or go back to clubhouse, swim, read in the jacuzzi, workout, and take a shower.
Spy,
Yeah, I missed the workout. We discussed it, but Plan A was: go to doc, go to gym, then home. Probably with a bagel or something between doc & gym.
Then we had to prioritize, so we had PLan B: go to doc, grab breakfast, drop my truck off at the shop, then home. Ran out of time becuz the doc's office visit took so damned long. So...
Plan C, which is what we did. No gym. But I went today and I'll go tomorrow and there's a black belt class Saturday morning we're going to go to & be observed for potential promotion (probably Leanne, maybe me, probably not Ian).
Wow. I don't have much capacity for switching back and forth on projects unfortunately so my workdays tend to be pretty boring. Work on project whatever...period. I did get up early to get the trash out this morning and took the car to be inspected and the oil changed. Needed two tires which I already knew about so that was good. And now I'm back working. Oh, wait. I'm commenting on a blog. Then I'll be working. Absolutely.
I'm usually pretty good at switching gears, although there's often a lazy bump of web-surfing in between projects.
Oh good luck, Mark! Keep me posted. Watching you do martial arts is the only martial arts I get to do. :-)
The foot is getting closer. There's a school that looks pretty good out here.
How is BONESHAKER? I've heard good things...
Boneshaker's good, but the pace is a little slow. Cherie Priest is a beautiful writer, though and it's pretty much got the whole steampunk thing down, plus you throw in zombies, it's hard to lose. It takes place in Seattle in about 1870, I would guess, but in an 1870 where the Civil War has gone on for 10 years, so it's got that "alternate history" thing going on, too. It's fun.
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