how we'll get the work done

protecting writing time

Hello friends! This is Ursula Fan Club, where I write on a weekly-ish basis about what I’m writing, reading, and seeing in the world. If you’re interested in speculative fiction, climate, ancestral stuff, textiles, living in a human body, and balancing a creative practice with <whatever this is> *waves wildly around*, you’ll probably like it here.

Writing at 5am from my hotel room.

Two things are driving me forward this week.

First, my sense of writing a novel (not being someone who has ever done this before) is that this endeavor is 50% big idea, 50% momentum. Maybe it’s even 10% big idea, 90% momentum. You just need to write, obsessively and incessantly, to get ideas out of your head and onto a page. Work through the muck, sketch and re-sketch an outline, paper your walls with Post-It notes. (I wish I could say this idea was original but I definitely read about “writing a novel is mostly momentum” somewhere this summer and now can’t remember the smart person who said it.)

Second, you must find the best writing time for you and then protect it like a mama bear protects her cub. I have tried writing on Saturday afternoons, propped up in bed as well as evenings after work and dinner when I slink back to the desk I was sitting at for nine hours to sit at some more. These both can and have worked for me, but my favorite time of day to write is early morning, before my person stirs in bed, when I’m the first to see the sunrise from the kitchen table where I set up my laptop and get to work. My workday starts at 8am and I work from home, unless I’m traveling for work (which I do, often), which means that I need to wake up at 5am if I’m going to be at my writing table between 5:45 - 6 and get an hour-ish of writing time in.

I have been a poor defender of my writing time, for many good reasons, but the most consistent interloper is work travel. Meetings, shoots, different time zones, early call-times, team dinners or evening scenes—these all gobble up my time and whatever is spared is spent catching up on sleep. I was preparing for surgery, I was stressed, I was prioritizing consistent workouts; I had my reasons for not writing consistently. You have your interlopers, too—maybe your kids, or a long commute, or time at a gym. In their own ways, these are all non negotiables, not excuses. These things are your life.

Despite and because of these things, I know I must make and protect my writing time because this, too, is my life and where I want my energy and attention to go. This past week, I had a packed work trip to NYC, but at least one morning, at 5am on Tuesday, I woke up and sat at the small desk in the hotel room to write. 800 words poured out of me within 20 minutes. I trust that if I make space for the words, they will come. This is how the work will get done, bird by bird, one morning at a time.

What I’m writing

A scene in my book, an essay about my body.

What I’m reading

Power-reading No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating by Alicia Kennedy for book club today and tomorrow!

This essay by Sam Kriss on the election and the Democratic Party’s incompetence skewered me.

This piece by Alexander Chee on teaching and writing speculative fiction is wonderful. The reading list is especially juicy.

Discovering Cameron Steele and reading this piece about dressing herself in beauty after her mastectomy and reconstruction.

Waiting for Margaret Atwood to drop her Sibylline prophecies on us.