Howefitz Blog

As we look to a bright new year, many of us are looking back at the year we just had. Then we look forward to the year ahead. I am doing the latter with a vengeance. This does not come without the required retrospective, however.

The past year has been very busy for me. I moved twice, continued to try to sell my home in Missouri, worked overnight and days, considered a second job, started several blogs, discovered Facebook and Twitter while growing increasingly impatient with MySpace, and somewhere in there tried to figure out how to get family and ‘me’ time.

So, looking forward to a year of building my online presence and finding ways to escape ‘the old grind’, I decided to  call in a few experts. What follows are excerpts from emails I sent to several authors and bloggers to find out how they balance family, life, and technology. How do they make the pieces fit?

My first questions went to author and blogger Dayton Ward:

You maintain another job along with family and writing. How do you make
the pieces fit? Do you not sleep, sir?

I sleep more than you might think, but less than I’d like, or which some
folks might consider healthy. Between the dayjob, family, and writing, I
average between 4-5 hours of sleep a night during the week. On weekends, I sometimes am able to squeeze in another hour or, on very rare occasions,
sneak in a nap. It all depends on the schedules my wife and I are keeping
on a given weekend.

You also maintain a website and blog as well as MySpace and Facebook. How
many hours a week do you think you spend on those things?

I don’t really keep track of that sort of thing. I spend far less time on
MySpace and Facebook than I do my LiveJournal blog, which I try to update at least once a day. I have no real agenda when it comes to the LJ; I post about things I observe, things that piss me off, updates about my kids or the writing, or jokes and assorted detritus I find amusing. As for Facebook and MySpace, in all honesty, I only really maintain a presence there as a gateway to my LJ and website, but I’m also looking for ways to keep those pages up to date and relevant. I’ve set up Facebook to get feeds from LJ automatically, and I’m looking into doing the same thing with MySpace. I don’t really go in for all the little applications and little cutesy things you can do with MySpace or Facebook, but I do participate in some of it as time permits. The trick is to just not allow them to become bottomless pits of wasted time.

Now, if I may, I’d like to add a second voice to the discussion, Dayton’s partner on many works of fiction and commentary, author Kevin Dilmore.

You also use social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. How many hours a week do you think you spend on those things?

I spend time on FB and Twitter because it helps me a lot with my work. As a
writer and marketer for Hallmark, I absolutely NEED to know how people will
connect socially in the 21st Century. The future of my business depends on
it. So, I use them to learn about them.

Back to Dayton:

George Lucas said that there’s an old saying about how films are never
finished, they’re simply abandoned. Do you feel that way about your books
and stories?

I think every writer feels that way to some degree about at least some of
their past work. Aside from fixing obvious errors or things of that nature,
would I go back and correct, revise, or update everything I’ve ever
written, given the opportunity? No, but there are a couple of select pieces
I’d either refine or expand if I had the chance. In those instances, I’ve
reread the story and thought “Gee, I could have gone this way, rather than
what I did,” or “I should’ve fleshed this out more.” For the most part,
however, I’m okay with leaving my past work as is. In the case of one
particular short story, I became so enamored with what I considered to be
untapped potential behind it that I plotted out a novel-length prequel to
the thing. How crazy is that?

Kevin?

Hmm … actually, with the writing and rewriting and editing and re-reading
and everything, I’m pretty finished with them by the time they hit
print! >

Author/editor Kevin J. Anderson had this to offer:

The blog, the website presence, the e-mail accounts, they’re all like a hungry monster, always demanding to be fed. Authors are expected to have a web presence these days, but maintaining everything is a constant chore, taking away time that I really should be using to write. For the time and word count of the blog posts and e-mail I did last year, I could have written at least another novel!

I am extremely grateful to everyone who contributed to this blog. It’s nice to see that it’s not just we amateurs that struggle with this! I hope you have gleaned some insight as I have from these responses. I leave you with one final thought from prominent blogger John Chow:

“Family is the foundation of growth. No matter how hectic things may get, you must always take time out to enjoy what it most important.”

How many moments like this do we get in our lives, really?

—Who are these guys?—

Dayton Ward is the author of many media tie-in novels and short stories as well as original works. You can find his complete bibliography and other great tiddly-bits at daytonward.com

Be sure to read his LiveJournal blog!

Kevin Dilmore is also a media tie-in author and conjurer of worlds. Check out his stuff at amazon.com!

Kevin J. Anderson is an author/editor whose name has been associated with little known universes such as Star Wars and the Dune series of novels. Check him out at wordfire.com and dunenovels.com.

John Chow makes money online by telling people how much money he makes online. See how at johnchow.com.

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