I took the first two weeks of November off from my Day Job to be a professional writer. I've never done anything like this before.
Yeah, I've had great swathes of time on my hands before, and dabbled a bit at my writing career, in between doing all sorts of other stuff, but I never approached it then as I am now.
For the past two weeks, I told everyone and especially myself that I was a professional writer.
And then I approached it as a professional would.
Every morning I'd get up, have breakfast, see Their Ladyships off to school, then I would sit down, fire up the laptop and get to work. I made goals, I set targets, I had a deadline imposed on me by someone else and I made myself accountable to them.
And you know what? I got some serious work done. With the exception of the Sabbath and one day I told a friend I'd help her with something, I've been pulling in about 4K words a day. That's serious mojo. I also had time left over to devote to editing other projects and sending out a few things to publishers.
And all done before Their Ladyships got home from school.
First few days was easy. Last few days was hard, as I found myself wanting to rebel against the structure I'd imposed. But yesterday, I gathered my courage, sat down, and did my wordage. Today, same thing.
Next week I go back to work, "full-time school" hours. I go back to squeezing in writing when I can, between the Day Job, the Extracurriculars and the Family. I'm going to miss being a professional writer. I don't know if I'm going to like the fly-by-night moonlighting style of being a writer, even though most of my published mates work that way.
Treating writing as a professional day job was eye-opening.
I've not done the like before, but after a week and a half of serious BIC, I'm thinking that yeah, maybe I can do this sort of thing on a more permanent basis.
I've just got to figure out how to get me some more of that.
