Parenthood changes your life. It’s natural to rail against this change, to try to retain your ‘old life’ as much as possible, but it’s like being caught in quicksand or a spider’s web – struggling only makes things worse.
There are many ways a person can measure the toll parenting takes on the ‘regular scheduled program’. For me, the most telling figure has been in the time it takes to complete a novel.
My first full-length published work, Ghost Kiss, ran to about 90,000 words and I knocked that off during a three-month period when I was between jobs. The first draft of Invasion at Bald Eagle was more than 100,000 words and I completed that in about four months.
The last novel-length manuscript I completed before my daughter’s birth in August 2013 was 67,000 words and it took me about three months (my day job had become incredibly demanding and sometimes I just couldn’t face more keyboard time in the afternoon). In October 2014, I had an idea for a novel and got started on it almost right away.
As of May 2017, (about a year after my son’s birth), I had written 65,000 words. That equated to 3421 words per month. In On Writing, Stephen King recommends two-thirds as many words per day.
A necessary change to my daily commute had upset the productivity apple cart. Pre-parenthood, I had trained myself to put out approximately 500 words in either direction while riding the train to work. Once I became a dad, however, the daycare drop-off and some unexpected work requirements made it essential to drive, and five uninterrupted hours of composition per week dissipated overnight.
Now, I should add that I wrote something like ten short stories during that period as well. But that only reinforces the point I’m making. Finding the time to cap off 2000 or 5000 or even 10,000 words is still possible, but a novel requires much more focus and commitment. When you can’t get those 5000 words on the page every week, the job begins to seem insurmountable.
If you’re cut out to be a writer, though, you’ll find a way – just as water finds a way through solid rock. I began to use lunchtimes and downtime to beaver away at the manuscript and the final 17,000 words came out over the next two-and-a-bit months. Hardly prolific, but a major improvement on the 75 words per day I had managed to that point.
Following a very quiet year, the engine of my writing career has begun to rumble into life again. I have two stories scheduled to appear in the coming months, two more shortlisted (including one at a market I have been trying to crack for the better part of 20 years), and I recently received a request for the full manuscript of an earlier novel that I’ve been tinkering with for what seems like forever. I am also making a second appearance in Andromeda Spaceways, this time as an interviewee. Be sure to pick up issue #68 for some insights into my writing process and an unsolicited review of John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes.
Writing fiction sometimes feels like trudging the Kokoda Track during heavy rain and a certain amount of discouragement is inevitable. But when you reach your destination (or one of them; an author’s career has waystations rather than an end point), it’s all worth it.
It just takes a little longer to get there, these days.