For seven days, no sounds left my mouth. I lost my voice trying to be a writer. (Medical illustration of a human mouth by Duncan Kenneth Winter. Part of an unpublished manuscript on medical illustration written by Winter. (Photo credit: Wikipedia))

I LOST MY VOICE. Not my writing voice, the real one, which I desperately need to nag my husband (Noel, milk; Noel, oven!, and to sing Raffi songs to my bored toddler at the grocery store. I could barely manage a whisper: Baby Beluga…

My son thought it was funny. My husband thought it was fantastic.

The voice loss, I think, came about either because I went to bed with wet hair and left the window open, or because I was coming undone. I didn’t just have too much on my plate, I had gone back for seconds and thirds and had acquired two or three plates, plus a few dessert bowls.

At this stage in my life, I can’t afford the luxury of just being a ‘writer writer.’ Unfortunately, my family needs to eat and my son has a particular fondness for cheese, the $14 bars made by Armstrong Cheese. So, in an attempt to earn an income over the last four weeks, here is a snapshot of what I’ve had on the go:

• A copywriting business. Yes, opened Read Head Copywriting (website coming soon) so I can put some hormone-free, grain-fed bacon on the table.
• Son with a throat infection and five-day fever. He wouldn’t let me put him down…for days…even when I had to pee.
• A government-sponsored business plan development program, in which I spend 35 hours a week working on the business plan (for said copywriting business) in exchange for ‘support’ (money and workshops).
• A contract to re-write almost 300 course descriptions for the local community college’s continuing studies brochure. First Read Head contract. Yay?
• Revisions to the screenplay(a film adaptation of my memoir) . Just here and there and mostly over the phone.
• Teaching a 15-hour business writing course.
• Launch of an events listings/entertainment articles website, for which I’m meant to write a handful of articles and type all the listings, and the website hates me. Gah!
• Blog. Alas, this and something that starts with ‘s’ had to give.

I get a bit nauseous just looking at the list.

And I’m still naive enough to dream of a day where my to-do list for the day contains just one of those items. I’ll step out the back door with steaming coffee in one hand, papers in the other, and a pen in my teeth. My knees will bounce down the knobby hill towared my writing cabin. I will enter some time after six in the morning and spend the day writing in that musty scent of summer and wood. I will write something great. It will definitely be about someone else, because after a memoir and a screenplay about me, I’m a bit sick of myself. So, a biography perhaps or maybe even a work of historical fiction.

By then I’ll have not just a working voice but also a scary voice, and my children won’t dare disturb me.

And by then I’ll have not just a working voice but also a scary voice, and my children won’t dare disturb me. I’ll emerge some time in the mid-afternoon, when school buses are starting to round the streets and the sun is on other side of the house, still in the daydreamy haze of my characters’ lives.

I imagine my son and a friend building a fort at the edge of the fence, under a willow tree. As I lock my writing cabin door, his sand-faced friend will ask, “What does your mom do in there?” Benny will shrug. “She talks to herself.”

If you are not yet a famous author, what kinds of day jobs do you have to get by? How do you manage making money with making manuscripts?

Sometimes I think I'm superwriterwoman, balancing teaching, Tweeting, child-rearing, copywriting for cash, agent-querying, reporting on murders, blogging, peeing, and, of course, writing that memoir. I NEED time management skills. (Superwoman (Kristin Wells). Art by Gil Kane, 1983. (Wikipedia))

BECAUSE I PROBABLY have no business writing about time management, I didn’t finish my first post on the topic, A How Not To for your To-Do: A Writer’s Attempt at Time Management.

In the first part, I offered a bit of a narrative about a typical day in my writing life, and how I strove to work through my to-do list: ghostwriting the first chapter of a book about achieving success in business, querying an agent, reviewing a friend’s edits, and, finally, that blog post. (Don’t forget Twitter, bless it, and email, and more Twitter and more email).

What I didn’t get to was a sweet and succinct little bullet-point style list of tips on how you as a writer can manage your time better. Fortunately, the clever folks at (Resume) Writer’s Digest have already done just that.

The site’s recent post, 7 Time Management Tips for Resume Writers, was written with resume writers in mind, but the suggestions also apply, almost more (to my mind anyway), to creative writers and journalists, who have juggle a range of right and left brain writing and administrative tasks as part of their day.

What else can I offer on a topic which I am still wading in?

• Don’t be too ambitious. I am a freak who writes lists for lists, and I love nothing more than a several-lines long to-do list. Oh, I do love something more: Looking at said list at the end of the day and seeing pen strokes through every item. A lot of the time, I set myself up for failure and think I’m superwriterwoman. And at least two tasks are bare, their words glaringly clean with being ignored and left behind. By setting realistic goals, you’ll feel good about what you’ve done instead of feeling like you’ve come up short, when you should really be patting yourself on the back (I still use this expression; I also give high-fives and thumbs-ups).
• Ignore advice about time management for writers. That is, after you’ve read it and figured out what works for you. We all have different rhythms. There is a time of day to think, a time to write, a time to do all those tasks you distract yourself with: Facebook, cleaning the toilet…. I write best first thing in the morning, without speaking to anyone, even my alarm clock (Actually I don’t want to wake up, but thank you, alarm). My husband, however, can’t imagine having a coherent thought before noon and won’t start writing an essay until at least 10 o’clock at night. So, determine when you can be most efficient at certain tasks, get in your groove, and go with it.
• Get some air, and some face time. Very few time management tips for writers mention the importance of fresh air, of exercise and mind-wandering time, not to mention getting out into the world. Among the living, writers can observe humans, how they gossip, the crooks in their faces. Since most of us are writing about people, it’s important to get out there and watch how they live once in a while. Even if you can only step out for bananas and bread, ‘Come home with a face,’ as some writer once said.

What helps you manage your time as a writer? What does your writing day look like? 

Knowing when your brain is at its writing best will help you be an efficient writer. (A drawing of the brain of a dogfish shark, from the book "The soul of man", by Paul Carus, 1905; Wikipedia.)

BB (BEFORE BABY), I WROTE WHEN I WANTED TO. I wrote in the morning. I wrote in my pajamas. I wrote long after my tea got cold, until I couldn’t hold my bladder any longer.

And then I had my son, a beautiful, hot-headed little wonder who always woke up just as I would sit down at my laptop and say, “Ahh. OK.” So, I didn’t write much until he was seven or eight months old.

My brain can’t write after a certain hour, and certainly not after a certain number of hours.

Now that my baby is more of a boy and about to start going to daycare two days a week, and on those two days a week I will have full access to both arms, as well as my brain, I wanted to get back into a writing routine. I did really want to.

In addition to fancying myself a creative writer of memoir and short fiction, I also take on odd copywriting jobs and work as a freelance journalist, writing for the big city papers who call only when a teacher is in court for sex crimes, or when a small-town teen is killed on Halloween (I wish both of those instances were fictional examples).

So, I have to prioritize according to deadline, according to which project is actually earning me money, and according to when my brain can most efficiently execute a task.

Here was Friday’s to-do list:

- Write pot pitch (two BC communities are on board to legalize marijuana) to a national newspaper

- Start A&W chapter (Nothing to do with the restaurant. I’m ghostwriting a business book, and this is an abbreviation of one the ‘author’s’ tips to success)

- New blog post- Anne’s MS. A writer friend wanted me to take a peek at her editor’s latest edits to get another perspective on what to take a stand on and what to slaughter

First, I had to determine which needed the most of my brain. I write best in the morning, and I grow slightly less competent with each passing  hour. So, I try to do my creative writing first and other tasks that require less focus and brainpower, such as research, querying agents, responding to emails, and invoicing, for later in the day.

Since I’m not writing any fiction or creative non-fiction stories at the moment, I started with the A&W chapter. I think it was nine a.m. by the time I shooed my husband out of the house and opened Word.

Just before noon, I had written 1,438 words, which is OK.  I only drifted towards my Twitter page once or twice, something I wouldn’t have allowed myself at all before (In fact, I said I’d never tweet, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised with what people can say in 40 odd characters).

I ate a can of Campbell’s Italian Wedding soup whilst scanning through Anne’s editor’s edits. Her book, about how weight-loss surgery at 17 didn’t turn her life around, was much better than my lunch. I chose to do this over lunch because I could multi-task (eat and read), and because she’s always amazing at giving me valuable and prompt feedback. A writer friend  in need is a friend indeed.

 A writer friend  in need is a friend indeed.

By 1 I was getting squirrelly, and I thought I’d take myself downtown and knock off that (this) blog post at a cafe. But between here and there, I got distracted by a few emails and a tiny brown paddy on the carpet that looked suspiciously like a dropping from my son. Once I got out of the house, I ignored my gut and went to a new (to me) cafe and then spent almost an hour trying to get the wireless to work on my laptop. The back of my brain knew I could write the blog post in Word and then post it into WordPress later, but nah, I needed to waste time and try to be an Internet hero. I failed.

I ended up run-walking to the library so I could use the wireless there because an agent had just requested my manuscript, and it was now late afternoon on a Friday, and I needed, needed, to send that email.

The blog was bleating on my Friday the 13th agenda page: Write blog. Write blog. Write blog. It pains me to have un-crossed out items on my to-do list. The pot pitch, I knew, wouldn’t even get started, and I was secretly OK with that because, frankly, I don’t want to write that story. But I really wanted to cross ‘Write blog’ off my list.

It pains me to have un-crossed out
items on my to-do list.

So I checked Twitter again, and most of the newspapers and radio station websites just to make sure I hadn’t missed something big, like a bear on the loose (it is spring in the Okanagan), that their reporters had maybe forgotten to Tweet about.

By 3:20, at a cubicle overlooking the City of Vernon parking lot, I opened WordPress and fiddled with the first sentence of this post for about 10 minutes. Three-thirty. Ten minutes before I need to leave to pick up my son. I fiddled with another sentence. Cut it. Re-wrote it, but worse, then pressed ‘save draft’ and slammed my lap top shut.

My brain can’t write after a certain hour, and certainly not after a certain number of hours. I wanted to give my blog, though not a source of income or expression of literary greatness, equal intelligence and attention. So here I am, Saturday morning at 9:05 a.m., while my son naps, typing away and wondering if my brain is, in fact, any better at this hour.

And I realize now that I set out thinking this would be a how-to for your to-do as a writer. I wanted to offer some thoughts on how a writer can stay on track and attempt to manage her time.  Cheese and rice, I’m juggling finding a literary agent, revising a memoir, teaching two writing classes a week as well as two private students, keeping up a blog, maintaining my social media presence and raising a baby boy. And not a lot of real writing.

Alas, my time management skills are not perfect, and perhaps too ambitious.I this needs to be a two-part topic. Keep an eye out for the next post (if it’s during your allotted professional development for free surfing time).