The Regular Life of Being An Author

A day in the life . . . on deadline.

This weekend, an author friend and I were chatting about work, as usual, and the posts/videos/updates of us and our author colleagues going off to events, publishers, fancy dinners, etc.. We chatted briefly about the post I wrote a few months ago, What Happens When You Aren’t Your Publisher’s Chosen One, and how hard it is to describe just the . . . regular life of being an author.

What work days can look like really varies, depending what book-creation stage we’re in. Right now, I’m on deadline for MY SALTY MARY, and I have a few other deadlines about to rise up from the depths, so I thought today would be a good day to share a day in the life post.¹

6:30am: My alarm goes off at 6:45, but annoyingly, I woke up early. Ugh! But I got up and had coffee with my husband before he went to work. We also stared at the bird feeders. Hush was once again upset that birds are allowed to exist at all. I also caught up on my different groups and read through some newsletters.

7:30am: After my husband left for work, I got more coffee and sat down to write the intro to this post while eating instant oatmeal. Like a grown up. And then I looked at the birds more, played fetch with Hush, and I read a few more newsletters, including this one describing the history of Earth Day. (The other day for you, today for me.)

After a couple of newsletters, I watched videos on YouTube and knit an inch or so on the socks I’m working on. (One video was this one about black holes. And I didn’t watch this one today, but Climate Town has a new one up about food waste.) I also did some chores — spot cleaning the floor, putting away laundry, and dishes.

9:00am: Technically the start of my work day.² My agent asked me to tell her what my next project will be by the end of May, since I’ve been vacillating between a couple of different options. I did some thinking about Option B (the one I had less stuff for) over the weekend, and this morning, while washing knit socks,³ I wrote most of a query-letter style descriptions for it.

In this time, I also got a video posted to Instagram, looked at my feeds for a few minutes, and ate an early lunch, because work with the Lady Janies starts at 11 my time (9 theirs) and to minimize breaks we take, I need to either eat lunch early or wait until later. (Reader, I do not want to wait to eat.) So, food and part of a YouTube video. (More science, obviously.)

11:00am: Time to get on video chat with the Lady Janies and work on MY SALTY MARY. We started off by talking about what we were going to try to accomplish for the day — both production wise and story wise. It helps for us to be on the same page about the story and characters when we dig in, especially when we are in intense revision mode and might have an AH HAH moment when we’re not on video chat.

Since we’re doing revision before we turn in the book, we read out loud to each other, pausing to make edits as we go.

2:45pm: A quick break for lunch/snacks. I finished the video I was watching earlier.

3:00pm: Back to work!

5:30pm: End work with the Janies. Usually I try to end at 5, but we needed a little more time to finish the chapter we were working on. Then, after hanging up, I took care of some work around the house and caught up with my husband about our days.

6:45pm: Time for dinner, TV with my husband and cats, and some weaving. Then it’s winding down for reading and bed. (I am currently reading YOUR PLANTATION PROM IS NOT OKAY by Kelly McWilliams, out soon!)

---

This has been a fairly typical day for me over the last couple of months, with some variation as to what I do before my call with the Janies. For example, Wednesday I spent the morning (even before “work” hours) making graphics and promoting the preorder sale at Barnes and Noble. And today, Thursday, I have been working on finishing this newsletter. (Yeah, it’s been sitting unfinished for days!) I also have some stuff around the house to take care of. Sometimes I talk to my agent. Sometimes I answer emails. It depends what is most pressing.

If this sounds less exciting and intense than you expected it would, well, that’s fair.

While there are deadlines that have required a lot more of me, it’s not actually healthy to do that all the time. It’s not sustainable. And I will always push back against romanticizing working 20-hour days to meet a deadline.⁴

Yes, sometimes deadlines can be like that. Even for this book we’re working on now, I’ve worked weekends and evenings to make sure I kept up on my share. But I still went to bed at a reasonable hour. I still took care of myself. I didn’t miss meals.

This — what I shared about my day — is really typical, even when an author is on deadline.

As for the more glamorous stuff my friend and I were talking about? Sure, there are periods where I travel, attend events, hang out with other authors, interact with readers, sign books, go to the publisher’s offices. That’s the public side of being an author, the side that gets Instagrammed or filmed for TikTok.

But mostly, being an author is sitting down at the computer for several hours a day and getting the book written.

Are you interested in more Days in the Life style posts? Perhaps for different phases in the book-writing process? Let me know!

1. It was actually Monday that I did this, a few days ago.

2. A while ago, I decided that maybe working 14 hours a day every single day wasn’t actually healthy, so I stopped working weekends (unless a deadline was getting crunchy). And then I stopped working in the evenings (again, unless a deadline was starting to make me sweat). And then I tried to stop working first thing in the morning . . . sort of.

But as you can see, I started writing this newsletter before my “workday,” and even when I’m not doing newsletter stuff, I usually take/edit some videos for social media promo or whatever is needed coming up. And obviously I was thinking about book stuff over the weekend. But since it’s not sitting down getting eye-strain from staring at the computer, it barely counts.

3. Some of my socks are knit from superwash wool, which is supposedly okay to go in the machine, but not all of them, and I’m not sure which ones anymore, so I just don’t take chances. They go in washbins in the bathtub with some wool wash, then I put them on the drying rack to dry. It doesn’t take too long, and it gives me a chance to see which ones have holes/need mending, and decide if some of them spend more time in the mending pile than they do being worn. There’s this one pair that has developed a new hole every time I’ve worn them; I blame the yarn. I think I’ll just . . . let those finish falling apart and then figure out if they’re safe to use in some other way. Do birds like using bits of wool in their nests?

4. Which is a real thing I did for AS SHE ASCENDS and then I said never again. It was awful. After that, I swore that I would just ask for an extension if I needed. Which is why DAWNBREAKER is this fall, not a few months ago, as originally planned.