I had plans for today, plans that involved some interesting and actually useful work.<\/p>\n
But \u2013<\/p>\n
Our boiler sprang a leak. Even with the mains water turned off, it went on leaking through the night. Finding an engineer who could come out today (for a non-insane price) took the first half hour this morning. The engineer is coming at 3.30, and that\u2019ll eat the last part of the day.<\/p>\n
And \u2013<\/p>\n
I have a vast number of kids: four, in theory, but most days it seems like a lot more than that. And one of them, Lulu, spent most of the last couple of nights with, uh, a stomach upset. Of the intermittent but highly projectile variety.<\/p>\n
So \u2013<\/p>\n
Not masses of sleep. And today\u2019s interesting work plans have been kicked into next week.<\/p>\n
Which bring us to \u2013<\/p>\n
You. Life. Books. Writing.<\/p>\n
The fact is that even if you\u2019re a pro author, life gets in the way of writing all the time. Because writing isn\u2019t an office-based job, almost no writer I know keeps completely clean boundaries between work stuff and life stuff. Life intrudes all the time. Indeed, I know one author \u2013 a multiple Sunday Times top ten bestseller \u2013 whose somewhat less successful but office-based partner always just assumes that she\u2019ll be the one to fix boilers, attend to puking children, etc, etc, just because she\u2019s at home and not under any immediate (today, next day) deadline pressure.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s a top ten bestseller we\u2019re talking about. Most of you aren\u2019t in that position. You\u2019re still looking for that first book deal. The first cheque that says, \u201cHey, this is a job, not just a hobby.\u201d<\/p>\n
So Life vs Work?<\/p>\n
Life is going to win, most of the time. And it\u2019ll win hands down.<\/p>\n
The broken boiler \/ puking kid version of life intrusion is only one form of the syndrome though. There\u2019s one more specific to writers.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the not-yet-pro-author version of the syndrome, in one of its many variants: You have one book out on submission with agents. You keep picking at it editorially and checking your emails 100 times a day. But you also have 20,000 words of book #2 on your computer and though, in theory, you have time to write, you\u2019re accomplishing nothing. You\u2019re just stuck.<\/p>\n
That feels like only aspiring authors should suffer that kind of thing, right? But noooooooo! Pro authors get the same thing in a million different flavours, courtesy of their publishers. Your editor quits. Your new editor, \u201creally wants to take a fresh look at your work, so as soon as she\u2019s back from holiday and got a couple of big projects off her desk \u2026\u201d. Or your agent is just starting new contract negotiations with your editor, and you are hearing alarmingly little for some reason. Or you know that your rom-com career is on its last legs, so you\u2019re looking to migrate to domestic noir, but you don\u2019t know if your agent \/ editor \/ anyone is that keen on the stuff you now write. Or \u2026<\/p>\n
Well, there are a million ors, and it feels like in my career I\u2019ve experienced most of them. The simple fact is that creative work is done best with a lack of significant distractions and no emotional angst embedded in the work itself. Yet the publishing merry-go-round seems intent on jamming as much angst in there as it can manage, compounded, very often, by sloppy, slow or just plain untruthful communications.<\/p>\n
So the solution is \u2026?<\/p>\n
Um.<\/p>\n
Uh.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know. Sorry.<\/p>\n
The fact is, these things are just hard and unavoidable. Priorities do get shifted. You can\u2019t avoid it. The emotional strains of being-a-writer \u2013 that is, having a competitive and insecure job in an industry which, weirdly, doesn\u2019t value you very highly \u2013 are going to be present whether you like them or not.<\/p>\n
There have been entire months, sometimes, when I should have been writing, but accomplished nothing useful because of some publishing drama, which just needed resolution. No one else cared much about that drama, or at least nothing close to the amount I did, with the result that those things often don\u2019t resolve fast.<\/p>\n
Your comfort and shelter against those storms? Well, like I say, I don\u2019t have any magical answers but, here, for what it\u2019s worth, are some things which may help:<\/p>\n
Of those six, then cultivating that happiness is the single biggest gift you can give yourselves.<\/p>\n
And the gin, obviously.<\/p>\n
Harry<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had plans for today, plans that involved some interesting and actually useful work. But \u2013 Our boiler sprang a leak. Even with the mains water turned off, it went on leaking through the night. Finding an engineer who could come out today (for a non-insane price) took the first half hour this morning. The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n