The Great February Reset

Do you know the best thing about February is? No, not the holiday. Valentine’s Day is one of my least favorite holidays on the calendar. It has always felt manufactured, like if the folks who sold flowers, chocolates, and greeting cards all got together and invented a holiday to increase their bottom lines.

Actually, one of the best things about February is the chance to reset on any habits you might have already broken.

I suspect you’ve seen all the historical data that tell us many people stop doing their New Year’s Resolutions sometime around 14-19 January.  That's just two weeks. Typically we think of resolutions like going to the gym or talking a daily walk to help us exercise or stop eating a certain food or abstaining from alcohol.

Those are all well and good, but often, we creatives want to start a habit and, in some ways, that can be more difficult, especially if we’ve fallen by the wayside prior to New Year’s Day.

But here’s the thing: a New Year’s Resolution is not a one-and-done. It’s not like if you fall off the wagon sometime in mid January you have failed for the entire year. Let’s not judge an entire 365-day cycle by the actions of a 14 or so days.

I’m a firm believer that every new month is an opportunity to get back into a habit or reinforce one you started the previous month. I resolved to write a 1,000 words a day in 2022 (or reach 365,000 words for the year). I’m happy to say that my streak is intact, but boy, some of those days were a slog, especially with a day job.

In fact, I battled with myself over just how important a streak like this is. To remind myself of the power of streaks, I need only look at the small calendar on the fridge. I had fallen away from taking vitamins every day so I needed to start that back up again. I did the Jerry Seinfeld thing where I put an X on the calendar for each day I took my vitamins. Eight days into the new year, I forgot. Boom! Busted up my streak and my January has a hole in it. Irritation.

But my writing streak is alive. My writing resolution is alive. I hope your resolutions are alive, too.

If they’re not, dedicate the month of February to creating a new habit. It’s only 28 days long, an even four weeks. Chances are high if you maintain that new habit until 1 March, you’ll be good to go. But if not, then let March be your new start date. Heck, let each Sunday be a start date. Just start. Then continue. The rewards will flow to you.

The Sunday Morning Pick-Me-Up

Sunday mornings have become like New Year’s Day.

For most of 2021, Sunday mornings have developed their own rituals, and the end result has been weekly resolutions.

Monday through Friday have their own schedules. I wake usually between 5:00 and 5:15 and set to work on the latest story. Since last Monday, I’ve been re-reading and reviewing a collaboration with a fellow author. I should finish that up this week and I’ll send it back to him for a final polish and publication soon. When I’m working from home, come 6:25 am, I have to stop the personal work to get ready for the day job. Now, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’m going back to the office so that getting-ready schedule is back by half an hour.

Saturdays are the fun mornings. I still wake earlier than everybody else in the house—7:15 or so—in order to have the quiet all to myself. I head on out to Shipley’s do-nuts and buy the same two do-nuts I’ve been eating for over forty years—cherry iced and cherry filled. It’s my big indulgence every week. Coupled with coffee and scrambled eggs, I eat breakfast and watch something no one in the house wants to watch. It was WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier during their runs and, for the past two weeks, it’s been the first two films of the Fast and the Furious franchise. Yeah, I’m just getting around to them. After the family wakes, I head on outside for lawn mowing and whatever else needs doing before jetting off to Trader Joe’s.

And then there are Sundays. I’m a church goer and always have been. During the pandemic, my Methodist church streamed the services live and I shifted from the 11:00 service back to the 9:30 service. That gave me time to participate in the service and then catch The Brady Bunch on MeTV. I’m returning to church in person now, so I’m back to the later service.

But before I get ready for church, I wake around 7:15 and have the quiet house to myself. It’s not like Saturdays. I’m not waking to watch something. I’m waking to read and work. I do a chapter of the Bible everyday—reading through the Apocrypha for the first time ever—and then I start working on my personal projects.

That’s not all I do on Sunday mornings, however. Sunday mornings have become a time to reset. Part of the morning is to review the emails that have accumulated over the week, the ones I didn’t instantly react to, the ones I set aside thinking at the time they were important but didn’t have the time to address them during the other six days of the week. With a clearer head, I will either read and respond or realize I could have deleted them earlier. It’s amazing was a culled email inbox will do for the mind.

Soon after the mind’s cleared, I think back on the past week. How did it go? How well did the personal projects do? How about those day job assignments? Also, the personal interactions. I live with my wife and nineteen-year-old son plus two dogs and a cat. Did any of the humans get into a disagreement over something? What great thing did we do this past week? How’s life going? How well did I eat? How much exercise did I get? Was there anything I wanted to do but didn’t? If so, why?

What these questions do for me is center my mind. I constantly analyze my life to find ways to improve on it. Diet and exercise is a big motivator now that I’m in my fifties. Also the writer life and career. The personal stuff with my family is often a day-to-day thing, but on Sundays, I consider the week as a whole.

Almost always, when the time comes for me to shower and get ready for church, my mind is cleansed. More importantly, however, I have a new set of drivers for the week ahead. Resolutions, if you will.

Like this week. I am going to eat as little processed sugar as possible and just see how the body feels. Also, I plan to complete the review of the collaboration and then get back to my latest book. I’m going to make my day job work better by striving to complete certain assignments in a more streamlined manner. It’ll improve my efficiency and I’ll get more projects out the door. I’m also going to resolve to leave the common areas of our house free from my own personal clutter. I’m talking the latest magazine folded open to the page I’m reading. Ditto for the history book I’m reading, the novel, and the comics I bought at Houston’s Comicpalooza over the weekend. I’m going to do one small thing that’ll help not only myself feel better about the house, but also help the wife and boy.

These weekly resolutions enable to me tweak habits and experiences along the way. New Year’s resolutions are fine and important, but they often get forgotten by the end of January to say nothing of May, September, or December. When you shrink the time down to a week, I can easily remember last week. It gives me the chance to adjust things along the way. And it serves as a positive reminder that if events of the coming week foil my plans, I’ll have another New Week’s Day the following Sunday. That reassurance is a key factor in always picking me up each Sunday morning and helping me face the coming week.

Have you tried weekly resolutions? You should. Pick a day and make that your New Week’s Day. Then you get to make some New Week’s Resolutions and see how you do. I suspect you’ll find the results more than satisfying. And, if you need more incentive, you’ll also get a New Week’s Eve

100 Days: The Summer of Productivity

Here in the US, every new president is judged by what he does in his first one hundred days. It harkens back to 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt entered office in the midst of the Great Depression and accomplished a dizzying amount of laws and regulations in a little over three months. Every subsequent president is measured by that same yardstick even though most haven't experienced the dire circumstances FDR faced. Still, everyone does it and it has become standard. In fact, it shaped President Biden's early agenda, with his administration's efforts all focused on that date.

For us creatives, having bookends by which to measure our creativity is also a good thing, but how often do we start something on any given day and then have to mark a calendar at our desired end point? Often, we literally count days on a paper calendar and do the math in our heads.

But summers provide us with obvious an obvious beginning and an obvious ending. Memorial Day kicks off the summer vibe while Labor Day concludes it. What happens in between is defined as 'summer.' It doesn't matter that summer's heat extends--at least here in Houston--into September and October. What matters is a codifed set of days that counts as perhaps the best time of the year. Yeah, the holiday season is great, too, and it is the most wonderful time of the year, but over the past decade or so, I have really started to enjoy summer. The low-key vibe, the refreshing cocktails, the grilling of anything, the summer movie blockbusters, the beach reads. It's just a great time to kick back and just take it easy.

It is also a time to work and be productive.

For those of us for whom their creative job is second to a day job, our productivity is parceled out among our day job responsibilities. It's why I wake in the 5am hour on weekdays to write and, when I'm at the office, write during lunch on my Chromebook. While doing the creative thing isn't that different during the summer than any other time of year, with a definate beginning and end, the summer season has, by default, a running clock. A countdown if you will. Labor Day can be your deadline. It's real and set in stone and everyone knows it.

So that's why I have, in the past few years, used summer as a time of greater productivity. Often I start and end something fresh. This year, however, I'm still laboring over my current work in progress, so the primary goal of summer 2021 is to complete that manuscript. And publish my next novel. 

Those are my tentpole objectives in the Summer of 2021.

What are yours?

Note: You get a 100 days if you start today. It's 99 if you start tomorrow and 98 if you start Monday. I'm not counting Labor Day as a work day. That'll be a day of celebration for completing that which you accomplished this summer.

Erle Stanley Gardner Acted Like An Independent Author

According to my Half Price Books calendar, today marks the 128th birthday of Erle Stanley Gardner. I noticed that fact yesterday while sipping coffee and thought I would commemorate the birthday with a little thought experiment.

Erle Stanley Gardner acted like an independent author even though he was traditionally published.

Let me explain, but first a bit of background.

We writers all have our list of go-to books that helped us hone our skills and learn how to be a writer. One of those books rarely shows up on when we discuss famous writing books. It’s called The Secrets of the World’s Best–Selling Writer: The Storytelling Techniques of Erle Stanley Gardner by Francis L and Roberta B Fugate. The book was published in 1980. It’s the story of how Gardner went from being merely a lawyer to, at the time of his death in 1970, the world’s best-selling writer. It is a fascinating book. When I first discovered it a few years ago, I checked it out from the Houston Public Library and read through it very quickly. I took copious notes. I mean a lot of notes. I ended up reading it a second time and then a third time. There is little about Gardner’s personal life; instead, this is a “biography” of how writer practiced, honed his skills, and ultimately, was successful.

The Erle Stanley Gardner papers are housed at the University of Texas at Austin at the Harry Ransom Center. When I attended school there, I never knew it and, let’s be honest, I had never read any of Gardner’s books. The two Fugates scoured through all of Gardner’s papers and pulled out a wonderful history — complete with many of Gardner’s own notes — of the steps he took to become the writer he became. The appendices are wonderful and there are even a few photographs of Gardner’s own handwritten notebooks complete with descriptions, timelines, and all the other things he needed to craft his mystery books. A particularly neat thing is the transcription of a lecture he gave to the writers of the Perry Mason TV show back in 1959. And when I say transcription, I’m talking about an 8 to 10 page block quote. He basically summed up everything you needed to know about how he wrote all his books in this single transcription.

So how do the writings of Gardner and independent authors collide?

As independent authors in 2017, we are urged to publish regularly and frequently. This helps us build up an audience as quick as possible and, if one can maintain a certain writing production, it will give our readers a constant flow of our work. There are many different definitions of “publish regularly and frequently.” Current thought is readers prefer 3-4 books a year. If you think about it, even a moderately paced writing schedule of 1000 words a day (30 minutes or less) can yield, more or less, four books a year that you can then publish.

The reason I bring up Erle Stanley Gardner when talking about independent publishing is his publishing schedule. Now, for the purposes of this discussion, I’m only talking about his novels. He honed his skill as a pulp writer in the 20s and early 30s, writing short stories, novelettes, and novellas. At one point in his early writing career, he set a goal of 1.2 million words a year. That comes out to a 10,000-word novelette every three days. I know some modern-day writers who can achieve this feat — James Reasoner being one of them — but the mere fact of writing a million words a year is incredibly staggering. That's 2740 words a day. But with the writing and publication of Gardner’s first Perry Mason novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, Gardner turned toward writing more books and fewer short stories.

Consider these statistics. In 1933, he published two Perry Mason novels. In 1934, he published three. In 1935 and 1936, he published two each. So that’s nine books and four years. Starting in 1937, things get more interesting. In 1937, he published three novels, two Perry Mason’s and one of his Doug Selby, DA, series. In 1938, same thing: two Perry Mason books and one DA book. Now comes 1939. We get two Perry Mason books, one DA book, and the debut of the Cool and Lam series. That’s four books in one year! He tops himself in 1940: two Cool and Lam books published*, two Perry Mason books, and one DA book. So, if you do the math, in the first eight years of his novel writing career, Erle Stanley Gardner published 24 books in three different series.

*The Fugates' book was published well before the discovery of the manuscript that became THE KNIFE SLIPPED, the 30th Cool and Lam novel but the second one written. It turned out that the publisher thought the content of THE KNIFE SLIPPED too much for readers in 1939. Instead of revising the novel, Gardner simply wrote another book altogether (TURN ON THE HEAT).

And he kept writing and selling stories to the pulps, although at a slower pace than before. Just for curiosity’s sake, I extracted all the material Gardner published in 1939. Here it is and I'll leave it up to you to factor in the writing time. NOTE: I left in the January 1940 publication of TURN ON THE HEAT knowing he wrote two Cool and Lam novels in 1939. The novels are in capitals.

Published Bibliography 1939

• THE BIGGER THEY COME (Cool and Lam #1 written and published) January 1939
• "The Monkey Murder" Detective Story January 1939 Lester Leith novelette
• "Without Gloves"–Clues–January 1939–Barney Killigen novelette
• "It's the McCoy"–Dime Detective–January 1939–Paul Pry novelette
• THE CASE OF THE PERJURED PARROT (Perry Mason #14) – February 1939
• "Unstuffing One Shirt"–Clues–February 1939–Barney Killigen novelette
• "The Seven Sinister Sombreros"–Detective Story–February 1939–Lester Leith novelette
• "The Joss of Tai Wong"–Adventure–March 1939
• "The Fourth Musketeer"–Detective Story–March 1939–Lester Leith novelette
• "Take It or Leave It"–Black Mask–March 1939–Pete Wennick novelette
• "The Rhyme and Reason"–Detective Story–April 1939–Lester Leith novelette
• "The Queen of Shanghai Night"–Detective Story–May 1939–Lester Leith novelette
• "Dogs of Death"–Clues–May 1939–Barney Killigen novelette
• "The Eyebrow Moon"–Toronto Star Weekly–May 13, 1939
• "The Ring of Fiery Eyes"–Detective Story–August 1939–Lester Leith novelette
• THE D.A. DRAWS A CIRCLE (Selby #3) –September 1939
• "Dark Alleys"–Black Mask–September 1939–Ed Jenkins novelette
• "Lester Leith, Magician"–Detective Fiction Weekly–September 16, 1939–Lester Leith novelette
• "A Thousand to One"–Detective Fiction Weekly–October 28, 1939–Lester Leith novelette
• "Mystery by Inches"–Toronto Star Weekly–October 28–December 23, 1939
• THE CASE OF THE ROLLING BONES (Perry Mason #15) –November 1939
• "A Hearse for Hollywood"–Double Detective–November 1939–Jax Keen novelette
• "Fair Exchange"–Detective Fiction Weekly–November 18, 1939–Lester Leith novelette
• "A Headache for Butch"–Double Detective–December 1939–Ed Migrane, the Headache, novelette
• "At Arm's Length"–Detective Fiction Weekly–December 9, 1939–Jerry Marr, P. I.
• "Where Angels Fear to Tread"–Detective Fiction Weekly–December 30, 1939

1940–TURN ON THE HEAT (Cool and Lam #2 published; #3 written) – Morrow – January 1940



So yeah, Erle Stanley Gardner pretty much published like an independent author. The only difference between him and what we do in 2017 is that he had a traditional publisher who, frankly, did the marketing for him. And it was the 1930s, so things were different. And he was able to devote all his time to writing. And he dictated everything. Famously, he dictated the first Perry Mason book in three days. He said it took him a half a day to come up with the plot and 2 1/2 days to dictate the entire book. Wow. I’m majorly impressed.

And if you want one more little tidbit from the mind of Erle Stanley Gardner regarding how he thought about his readers and the editors of the pulp magazines in the 1920s, there is this: “My own approach to the question is different from that of the critic. I am a writer. I serve the reading public. The reading public is my master.” And, according to the Fugates, “After that, he became an outspoken exponent of the idea the publisher of the magazine was simply acting as a middleman in purveying merchandise — story supplied by writers — to readers, the ultimate consumers.”

Erle Stanley Gardner. He acted like an independent author when such a thing rarely existed. Now it does. I wonder how many authors can replicate his success over the nearly 40 years of his novel-writing career? I have my own answer. I aim to try.

New Year's Day 2017 - Resolutions and Goals

Happy New Year’s Day 2017!

I suppose many of us make resolutions on the first of January every year. I know I do, and have for awhile. For many of us, resolutions often zero in on health. My weight management plan involves limiting my intake of sugar and weighing myself only on the first day of each month. That allows me to have splurge days and not go crazy with every half pound gained or lost. It’s worked for me for going on a year and a half now. So I’ll keep on doing that.

Cooking
Another thing about myself I want to improve on is my cooking. My wife is a fantastic cook. Just last night, we had chicken and sausage gumbo. Her Louisiana heritage always shines through when gumbo is made. But I’m not nearly as good as she is. We have a great system: she cooks and I wash the dishes! There are a few things that fall under my bailiwick—grilling is the primary one—but I’d like to develop a few things I can whip up with little notice. My wife can look in the pantry, assess what we have, and, in about an hour, has a great meal ready for us. Me? I can easily do a recipe, but I can’t do that. I’d like to beef up (as it were) my ability to cook on the fly and expand my current repertoire of recipes.

Reading
Put simply, I’d like to read more books in 2017 than I did in 2016. I can’t recall the exact number—and don’t feel like looking it up—but to read at least one physical book a month. For me, physical also equals my Kindle. Throw in another audiobook a month and I should safely be able to handle 24 books this year.

Professional
Those are resolutions. But on the professional side, I think of them as goals. What do I want to accomplish in my fiction writing life? The obvious: more sales. But, here’s the catch: I cannot control that aspect of the business. What I can control is productivity, output, and marketing. As far as marketing is concerned, I’ll be starting the third year of my professional fictioneer life come February. I would like to sell more. That means I need to market better. That’s my long-term goal for 2017.
But the main aspect of this fiction life is productivity and output. That is something that is 100% in my control. I plan to write more. A lot more. I’m hesitant to divulge the number I’m aiming for, but it’s a big one. And I’ll be tracking the numbers and speed rates and time taken to write.
Word count isn’t the only metric I’ll be using, although it will be my daily one. Products—books and short stories—will also be a metric by which I measure 2017.
The good news is that, as of today’s writing session, I’m 5217 words into the first brand-new western novel of 2017. Not a bad day’s mark by any stretch.
Happy New Year indeed.

So what are y’all’s resolutions and goals?