At the end of this post I have a list
of my four main projects and how far I’ve gotten on them. But for
those who are interested I will first give an explanation of how I’ve
managed to become a part-time writer.
Over the past two years I’ve been
working on two novels, a non-fiction philosophy book, and a computer
game. These are all huge projects. Someone once compared writing a
novel to swimming across an ocean. This description is certainly
accurate. That I’ve made any significant progress on these projects
is due to support from both my wife and my employer. Every morning I
get up at 5:30 a.m. and write until 8:30 a.m., including weekends and
most holidays. The makes me effectively a half-time writer, as I’ve
been for about a year now. Getting to this point was not easy.
When I first quit grad school and
returned to Utah with my wife and son, I had the desire to write but
I knew finding employment was my first priority. In early 2012, after
landing a steady job in tech support, the idea struck me that perhaps
the main function of sleep was to conserve calories, and that if I
ate an additional meal in the morning I could get by with five hours
of sleep, and win three hours of writing time between 5:00 am and
8:00 am.
My hypothesis was probably incorrect.
Over the course of the next several months I made tremendous progress
on my second novel (Poisons the River Anigrus
– unpublished), but exhausted myself physically and mentally and
ended up quitting my job because of wrist problems. The next nine
months I spent as a middle school science teacher, which left almost
no time for writing. Finally, in spring of 2013, I was hired on as a
programmer with a normal 40 hour work week. I knew that sleep was
essential, and I didn’t want to sacrifice too much time with my
wife or kids, so I limited my writing to 1.5 hours every morning. It
was during this period that I made most of my progress on First
King of Montana.
The reason I focused all my energy on
my post-apocalyptic novel was that I felt it had the best chance of
making it big so I could become a full-time writer. This way of
thinking depended entirely on a faith that my ideas were good enough
that if I just applied myself wholeheartedly, a career in
professional writing would automatically open up and provide plenty
of cash.
This faith was gradually
worn down to a faint hope. I was writing science-fiction. The
bestselling science-fiction novel of all time was Dune.
Frank Herbert had spent ten years writing it and was rejected by
dozens of publishers before being picked up by a small motorcycle
magazine that could have easily botched it. He was lucky enough to
win the Hugo right away, but it still took ten years of spectacular
international sales before he could quit his job and write full time.
More recently, Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game
has been a bestseller and an award winner, but Card warned in his
how-to-write books that science fiction writers can never expect to
quit their day jobs. The average money a person makes per novel is
about $3000-5000.
I
already felt that I was sacrificing some of my deeper philosophical
themes to write First King,
and after a year (I don’t know why it took this long) it finally
struck me that I was going about the whole thing backwards.
Realistically, writing a novel was by far the worst and most risky
way one could go about achieving financial independence! And why did
I want financial independence in the first place? So that I would
have more time to write. The basic illusion underneath all of this
was that writing a novel was a good way to make more money in less
time. But the opposite is the truth.
What I
actually needed was to reduce my daytime work-hours so I could
increase my writing hours. With this clearly in mind as the goal, I
was liberated to consider endless possibilities. Whatever career paid
the most per hour, that needed to be my new direction.
With
some research I found that software development was already one of
the best fields to be in. Freelance developers could often work just
half the year. So I started looking into starting my own business.
Oddly
enough, no sooner had I started looking than I spotted an opportunity
and pounced. A friend from college had helped start an stock-trading
company that needed good computer programmers. He told me, “For
26-weeks out of the year we need someone to monitor our systems and—”
“Perfect!”
I said.
“—the
rest of the year we would need you do full-time software
development.”
“Sorry,
I guess I’m not interested then.”
But we
kept talking. He kept offering me more money but I kept telling him
that I only cared about time. I told him to half his proposed salary
and half the proposed hours and he would have a deal. He agreed and
managed to convince the other partners in the company that this would
work.
So I
incorporated myself, registering a one-man LLC, and was suddenly an
actual free-lancer. I would be on-call for two weeks, working 60
hours a week, and then off-duty for two weeks, during which I wrote
40 hours a week. The one downside to this was that by the end of each
pair of weeks I would be either burned out with work or burned out
with writing.
Eight
months later my last employer called and told me they needed me back.
I refused to listen unless they agreed to a reduced-hour schedule.
Again and again I had to tell them I wasn’t interested in more
money, only more time. So we made a deal and now I’m back with my
original company, and I have a better schedule: 32 hours a week of
work and 20 hours of writing.
I
tell this story because I think that it’s important for writers—and
anyone with personal goals—to know that it is possible to push back
against corporations for the most valuable resource that people seem
to have forgotten about: time.
We keep sacrificing our time for more money when we don’t really
need more stuff, but more solitude, more togetherness, and more
creativity. Solitude, togetherness, and creativity don’t need
money, they need time.
Let me share a glimpse the fruit of the
leisure I’ve fought for:
Project I: Wisdom’s Thousand
Jilted Lovers
Description: A philosophical novel.
Half the chapters are semi-autobiographical, based on the story I
told in the first few dozen posts of this blog. Interleaved with
these are chapters I’m calling “vignettes” short stories based
on the lives of scientists, philosophers, poets, and mystics. The
theme of the novel is overweening love of wisdom and the tragic
alienation it engenders. Along the way I develop my own philosophy of
value and evolution.
Work done so far: (1) first draft
outline complete, (2) first draft manuscript complete, (3) second
draft outline complete, (4) second draft manuscript 20% complete.
Progress to Final Completion: 53%
***
Project II: The First King of
Montana
Description: A post-apocalyptic novel.
Washington D.C. has been destroyed in a war of independence waged by
Mexico allied with rebels in the Southwest. Jack, a marine returning
to Montana in defeat, finds his state in the grips of tyranny and
anarchy. He is forced to confront a dysfunctional democracy and unite
a fragmented populace made up of Amish, Mayans, white-supremacists,
and assorted nihilist thugs—and give them something to believe in
now that comfort is a distant memory.
Work done so far: (1) first draft
outline complete, (2) first draft manuscript 30% complete, (3) second
draft outline 60% complete.
Progress to Final Completion: 45%
***
Project III: The Cultivation of
Wisdom
Description: A
non-fiction philosophy book. I am trying to follow in the footsteps
of Aristotle and lay out a full system of philosophy. My current
outline calls for the following chapters: “Cosmology,”
“Philosophy,” “Logic,” “Physics,” “Systems,”
“Evolution,” “Ecology,” “Civilization,” “Mysticism,”
“Metaphysics,” “Story and Myth,” “Religion and Value.”
Work done so far: (1) 5-page outline
complete, (2) 50-page outline complete, (3) first draft
“Introduction” complete, (4) first draft “Cosmology”
complete, (5) first draft “Philosophy” complete, (6) first draft
“Logic” in progress.
Progress to Final Completion: 25%
***
Project IV: The Eldar and the Fallen
Description: An
ecological-sandbox, fantasy computer game. The idea is to have a
persistent world with about 1000 characters split into several
tribes. Fantasy elements like magic and magical artifacts will also
be included. The characters can fall in love, have children, forage,
farm, wage war, and enter political relationships. Ten thousand
animals and a million plants will also have the basic functions of
eating, reproduction, and death. Ecological balance is essential to
the game. When a tribe or hero becomes too powerful, it throws the
ecology out of balance. The idea is to help your tribe survive and
not succumb to the destructive seductions of power.
Work done so far:
I’ve successfully generated a world, including trees, grass, rocks,
and water, that to have your character walk across takes about 2.5
hours. I use pseudo-randoms seed to store the unique local
landscapes, so that the entire world doesn’t have to be represented
in computer memory at once. A few variables (climate, vegetation)
suffice to keep track of what can change off screen.
Progress to Final
Completion: 18%
***
It has been fulfilling to finally sit
down and plan out these projects, and to carry them so far. Without a
looming sense of urgency to “make it big” I can focus on quality.
I really don’t care if any of these projects become bestsellers.
What I do care about is writing something that is truly inspiring and
can stand the test of time.
Working on a single project too long,
I’ve found, can be unhealthy. So my fallow time has fallow time so
to speak—I let myself spend half my mornings meditating, thinking,
reading, writing blog posts, or writing short stories for fun. Next
week I will post one of the fruits of this—some ideas for a
university of the future.
