12/22/2024
How I Manage Multiple Projects—and Why
This is number ninety-two in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“YOU MUST BE incredibly organized. I’ll bet there isn’t anything out of place in your entire house!” said a potential girlfriend, before she’d ever seen my house. I’d just told her about the various writing projects I have underway and the work I have to do on each of them.
Ah! What part of the myth to shatter first?
Fact: I only invite guests into my little trailer on the day the cleaners have been there, or the day after.
Typically, I eat off paper plates and ‘cook’ in the microwave. I insist on eating with real stainless flatware, though. So, when I finish a meal, the plate goes in the garbage and the fork or other utensils get dropped through a slot in the sink cover. When I run out of forks in the silverware drawer, I open up the cover on the sink and wash whatever is in it. About once a week.
When I run out of underwear (Just bought eight new pair. Hooray!) I take my laundry to the laundromat. It takes almost two hours to wash, dry and fold the clothes, including the most recent set of sheets from the bed. It takes five to ten business days to get the laundry put away.
My ‘office’ is the dining room table, to which I have added a rolling office chair, a 32" monitor, and a detachable keyboard and mouse. Since that pretty much occupies the surface of the table, I use the bench seats for filing my projects, storing my computer bag, and keeping pantry items there isn’t room for in the pantry. Not the big things. Those I keep in the shower.
Yeah, my home is just super organized.
But my projects have to be organized or I will quickly be overwhelmed and catatonic!
I’ll start with this blog. I sometimes get two or three weeks ahead in writing them, especially when I’m doing a series like I recently did on writing through depression and despair. It seems more often recently I manage to squeeze out an hour in an evening on which there are no basketball games I’m interested in, and start writing so I can get the post to my editor to review before I have to actually put it up on Sunday morning. But my blog posts are only about 1200 words long. I can usually get them drafted in an hour.
Let’s pick up with some of my other projects that I have going at the moment.
I finished the first draft of Soulmates (previously called Head Talkers) at the end of October. Pixel, my editor, took the story for the next few weeks and re-read it to note places where it was and wasn’t working. I added those to the email he sent me when he read it the first time. Now, I’m spending about two to three hours each day on the rewrite. I try to get a chapter rewritten each day, but there are days when I get less or more. Let’s say that I work on Soulmates between about five and bed.
The story I can’t wait to get a new title for, but that has to wait until I finish writing it, is still (at this writing) in first draft, but I think I can see the end coming as I approach 150,000 words. Then it will go into hibernation as my editor Lyndsy finishes reading and commenting on it. I’ll pick it up again for rewriting when I get the rewrite of Soulmates finished. I spend about three hours a day on this project. Let’s say I work on it between noon and dinner.
That brings me to my current editing and design project for a popular airplane thriller author who happens to be a retired pilot and a PhD in airplane safety. I’m currently in the proofreading stage of this book which the author knows takes me a while. I focus intently on what I am reading, not for the content so much as word-by-word checking for spelling, punctuation, and word usage. I spend about two hours a day on this project and when I’m finished with the proofreading, then I have to start designing the actual book, which is a fairly complex layout. I do this between breakfast and lunch.
And that brings me to the project I just finished editing and designing for a client, so I can finally bill for it. Some projects seem to take forever and since I also had to navigate the publishing process for the client and it was a complex editing challenge, this was one of those that dragged out for five months. Let’s say I worked on it in my ‘spare time.’
My day sounds pretty organized as long as I don’t care about having any other life, doesn’t it. But I actually do have a life. I enjoy watching women’s basketball, both NCAA and WNBA. My friends and I go out to a show about every two weeks. I try to see my muse at least once a week for breakfast and we text each other frequently. I try to do chair exercises for at least fifteen minutes a day, intended around noon but more likely to be remembered a few minutes before bed. I meet with a writing group once or twice a week, either live or online. And I’ve started more Netflix series that I never got around to finishing than I can even name at the moment.
Yes, there is organization to my day, but it’s what I refer to as barely organized chaos.
Why? Why do I put my 75-year-old body and spirit through this meat grinder?
That’s simple: I live on Social Security. If I had nothing but my Social Security check and my meagre IRA each month, I would be able to survive, but that’s all. Writing and editing provide a nice supplemental income, in the words of the IRS. And if I don’t continue to take on the editing and design jobs, that is a significant bit of supplemental income I’m missing.
If I don’t release a major new book every quarter, my royalty income drops significantly. I did not release a major book in Q4 of 2024, for example. My royalty income for that quarter will be 20-25% of what it was during the previous four quarters. It’s just supplemental income, but it pays for the repair on my furnace.
And if I’m not writing and posting a section of a new work in progress each week, my Sausage Grinder patrons start disappearing. The same is true of my Sneak Peek patrons if there isn’t a new book posting a chapter a week before it’s released anywhere else. Even my Library patrons get a Special Patrons Edition eBook of one of my backlist books each month! That goes into my supplemental income and helps me hitch up my trailer, put gas in my tank, and travel the country.
I need to carefully plan for my retirement from writing and editing. My supplemental income amounts to about 30% of my total income each month. I watch my few investments closely to determine exactly how many months are left for me to live. It’s not a living. It’s writing to live.
2024 was a frightening year in some respects and a very invigorating year in others. I had a medical crisis and a grand adventure. I have important people in my life. So next week, I’ll write about my 2024 in review.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
