I’m told by reliable sources that humans are pattern recognizers at our core. It’s not all we are, but so much of what makes us human comes from this basic component of our nature. We find things we can recognize, sort them in our minds for later use, then look back at them critically (or not – look at how we vote/don’t vote).
I’m no different in that I crave patterns. I have daily routines. I have ways things get done. I have some actions thoroughly organized to the point where my consciousness doesn’t even need to think about them hard.
And I need my writing career to build the same kind of rhythm.
Right now, I’m going to set up some internal rules and patterns. And here’s what I want things to look like during the weekday.
- Every week day, I spend four hours minimum working on my creative endeavors (both graphic and written). I should be spending at least half of these hours a day writing Ossua’s first novel to a complete first draft.
- On Mondays, I blog. Can be about anything. Might be here, might be at HPP. If it is somewhere else, I repost it here.
- On Tuesdays, I write something brand new, ideally a short story. I should have at least a thousand to two thousand words. This may seem excessive until I realize how many words I write out on average and how many of them actually turn out to be good.
- On Wednesdays, I draw something. Might be a webcomic. Might be a character study for an Ossuan. Whetever it is, I should be at my desk for a little while just to see what falls out of my pencil, pen, or stylus.
- On Thursdays, I blog again. Same rules as Monday.
- On Friday, I go back to whatever it is I did on Tuesday and refine, extend, edit, or otherwise root out gremlins.
Weekends of course are whatever they are. I want to throw elbow grease in there, I will, but they’re free creatively. I get to do what I want with them. There’s no set hours – as many or as few as I want.
I think this schedule is ambitious. But I also think it’s necessary. I don’t want this to be my hobby. I want this to be my profession. And for that, I need a pattern of behavior and rules to follow.
Let’s see how it works out. I’ll be starting this cycle on Monday. Let’s see what I have to blog about next week.