aroslav: Blog

This is number 118 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.

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OF COURSE I need a vacation! We all need a vacation now and then, just to recharge our batteries and refresh our spirits. It’s only—hmm—eleven months until my next vacation.

Yes, I just had a vacation. In addition to spending the summer with family and friends in Seattle, I took a week to go to Stratford, Ontario to watch six plays. And last weekend, I saw two more plays in the Northwest. I had breakfast out with one friend and lunch with another. I celebrated my sister’s birthday and my daughter’s anniversary. It’s been a great summer.

I’m going home to Las Vegas tomorrow. I need a break!

Isn’t that often the way we end a vacation? We get home and need to rest up.

For me, getting rested up means getting back in the groove of my typical and unexciting routines. In other words, getting focused on writing again.

The past few weeks, I’ve been staying up until midnight (mostly watching silly videos I would normally just skip over), getting up sometime after seven or eight o’clock, and spending hours reading, listening to audio books, doomscrolling, and—yes—writing. My writing pace significantly slowed.

I did manage to get three chapters of my newest WIP, Forever Yours, finished this week. But as I look at my statistics sheet for this year, I find I am twenty-four words a day short of my goal for the year. I set my goal as 2,000 words a day on the average. I’m at 1,976 per day. Not bad, right? Except this is day 221 of the year. That means I’m 5,304 words short for the year. That is quite a bit to catch up on!

Please don’t send me missives regarding the quality of the words vs. the quantity, avoiding burnout, pacing myself, and not being too hard on myself. I know. That’s like my dental hygienist lecturing me each time I have my teeth cleaned on the proper way I should be flossing. I’m almost 76 years old. I know. Her condescending lecture is not going to miraculously change my behavior.

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When I wrote Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) Stocks & Blondes back in 2007, I was challenging myself to write multiple projects at the same time. This required discipline. I was focused on just two projects, but they were very different. In fact, there would be just one brief point at which the two stories crossed.

I arose every morning at five o’clock, made coffee, and retreated to my office for one hour of maintenance. That included checking bank statements, social media, and other miscellany that occupied my mind before the day started. Then I made my wife and daughter breakfast, and returned to the office to write frantically for an hour and a half.

I was employed at the time, so I had to go to work, act professional, and accomplish what I could in the office. At five o’clock, I left work, returned home to participate in family dinner time, including reading to my daughter. Then I would take my glass of wine to the office to write for another hour or two.

I worked on Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) literary piece, The Volunteer for about two hours and at least one more glass of wine. I continued this process for thirty days, at the end of which I had two completed manuscripts. Routine. It was important. I had a rhythm that got me through each day and helped me get two books drafted.

At the time, my creative writing was restricted to November. It was tolerated by my family for that month, but my normal day did not include writing time. In fact, it was six years before I published The Volunteer and twelve years before I published Stocks & Blondes. By that time, I’d begun to understand the rhythm of writing consistently.

By the way, the two main characters in the novels meet by accident on a park bench in Savannah, Georgia, neither really knowing or understanding the plight of the other. The encounter is only a page of each book and shows how differently two people see the same encounter.

Both The Volunteer and Stocks & Blondes are available on ZBookstore as eBooks and in paperback online. On SOL, they are available from author Wayzgoose.

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The point is that I accomplish a lot when I have an established rhythm in my life. Vacations are specifically intended to disrupt that rhythm—to get one out of the groove. And thus, they require a period of adjustment when they are over as we try to get back in the groove.

In the midst of my final week in Seattle for the time being, I managed to get three new chapters of one work in progress completed and half a chapter of my top secret work written. Can’t talk about or share that project because of contest rules. But there is so much more that I’ve not gotten back to yet. I need to get back in the groove, and getting back to my trailer in Vegas will help.

My typical day in Vegas will begin around 6:30 or 7:00 when I get up. I’ll fix my morning brew and spend half an hour on my statistics and social media. Then I’ll start writing. I’ve always been extremely productive first thing in the morning. I’ll work until about ten and then dress to go out for breakfast. I have six breakfast spots that I rotate among, trying something different at each meal. I don’t go out every morning. I do cook breakfast on many occasions, but sometimes the groove can be oppressive. I only ever make one thing for breakfast when I cook at home.

While I’m out, I’ll run any errands I need to make, like grocery shopping, laundry, buying water, etc. Then I’ll return to my trailer and work on client projects for a couple of hours. I still edit and design books for several clients and the little added supplement to my social security is appreciated. That’s not my full-time job, though, so I strictly limit the number of projects I take on.

Sometime between four and five, I stop for dinner. Occasionally, I go out with friends for a burger. Usually, I’m back in the saddle by six to continue writing for two or three hours. Then I’ll watch a women’s basketball game and go to bed by ten.

In those four to five hours of writing time, I’ll pump out between 2,000 and 3,000 words! That’s the benefit of a rhythm.

When I don’t have a client project in the afternoon, I work on editing, designing, and releasing my own books. That’s part of my ‘job’ as well.

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Doesn’t a routine like this get boring?

Of course. That’s why we have vacations!

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Part of getting in the groove is writing this blog. I’ll try to keep regular postings now. Next week, “Tab, you’re it!”