On Radio Silence, Balance, and Parenting

Posted on 2015-04-07 by Matthew Shean

It’s been nearly a week since I’ve posted on the Here I Go. And the reasons behind it get to the very reason I am writing this blog in the first place – to talk out loud my fumbling attempts at learning how to be a professional writer.

My kidlets are on their Spring Break. A week and a half of no school, which roughly translates into as much time with no writing getting done. So far, we’ve gone to 1 museum, 3 playgrounds, and the public library, and spent some time riding bikes, blowing bubbles, and hitting a whiffle ball around. Good stuff.

Important stuff.

But what about writing?

I know of other writers or Work At Home Parents (I hate the acronym WAHP, it’s awkward and doesn’t spell anything. I firmly believe any acronym worth its salt needs to spell something cool.) who are able to keep up a steady flow of work with their kids in the house or home from school. They have a home office or some such that is off limits, and the kids know and respect that.

I trust that when my kidlets are teens, that’ll work somewhat well. But for now, when they are both in the single digits age-wise, it flat out doesn’t. So, I can’t just sit at my desk writing while they tear up the carpeting, climb the walls, and jockey for dominance of the iPad. I manage zero ability o concentrate, and no words hit the page.

Case in point – this the third day I’ve sat down to write this blog post.  First time I tried, kidlet2 came running into my office every 5 minutes with some Lego creation she’d made or doll she’d dressed up in the wrong clothes, excited to show me.  You don’t put up a wall to that stuff.  Not when you’re the only adult in the house.

Besides, even if I could manage productivity in that environment, what kind of Spring Break is that giving them? After a winter cooped up in the house, on the first few days of actual warmth and shining sun, am I going to make them sit inside going even more stir crazy as I tinker at a short story I have no assurance will sell?

This is where I need to strike balance. I need to be able spend time being an engaged and nurturing parent, while also treating my job as just that – a job and not a hobby.

Now, you may be wondering – what about your wife, the sugar-mama? She’s doing her part too, but just because the kids’ school is on break doesn’t mean that the university she works at is on break too, or even if it were, that she doesn’t have deadlines to meet and tasks to accomplish as well.

So what is the magic formula for prioritization? Seriously, I’m asking. I’m freaking out over lost productivity from a week and a half, but I’m staring down the barrell of a two and a half month summer vacation, and as things currently stand, I see next to no writing getting done then either.

I know there are other options, play-dates and babysitters and the like. And sure, those work for 1 day at a time mini-solutions. But for now, the only solution I really see is making the best of the situation at hand until the kidlets are old enough to do the job of taking care of themselves – going to friend’s houses unsupervised, weekend jobs and the like. Maybe at that point, I’ll be able to work solidly through the breaks.

For now, I’m enjoying wearing the Dad Hat full time for a few days, and leaving the Writer Hat on its peg. Just for a few days though.

Here I Go,
Matt

Posted in Blog Musings, Work-Life Balance | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Different Beginnings – Health While Writing from Home

Posted on 2015-04-01 by Matthew Shean

We’re talking about beginnings this week.  While I went on at length yesterday about ways to begin a story, let’s shift gears and talk about beginnings in life.

This isn’t strictly the first time I’ve spent a chunk of time at home writing.  When I was in graduate school, I had to write my doctoral dissertation.  This was after a period of years of doing lab work, and it had been a stressful few years for me.  Saying that graduate school is stressful (for any graduate student) is kind of like saying Noah took some pets for a trip in the rain.

When my advisor and my thesis committee agreed that my research was sufficiently completed that I could write and defend my thesis, I stopped going in to lab and wrote it up.  This was a roughly 200 page document of heavy scientific jargon, difficult ideas to learn, conceptualize, and summarize, and roughly five years worth of research to explain in detail.

I squirreled myself away in the spare bedroom of our house with my laptop, a box of Three Musketeers bars, and an IV drip of Coca-Cola.  Six weeks later, I emerged with a finished dissertation and an extra 30 pounds that had appeared from… somewhere.  Can’t imagine where.

In my planning and researching for this jump into full time writing, one of the tidbits I found was from author Mary Robinette Kowal in the Writing Excuses Podcast, who said that most writers either gain or lose 15 pounds.  Whether they gained or lost (and I am paraphrasing here to the extent of near misquoting) seemed to depend on if they were the type of writer who got so engrossed that they forgot to eat meals, or if part of their writing process was constant grazing and snacking, of a constant supply of glucose to the brain.  I am apparently on the side of constant glucose supply.  (See the IV of Coke, above).

Oddly enough, I have neither gained nor lost weight since quitting my job.  We have a Wii in the house, with the Wii Fit game, which is basically a glorified electronic scale that gives you cheery little guilt trips about how long it’s been since you exercised.  I’ve been periodically weighing myself with it, and in the seven or more months since I stopped going to lab, my weight hasn’t fluctuated so much as 2 pounds.  This includes Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day.

Oddly enough though, it did jump up 15 pounds in mid-April last year, almost a year ago exactly.  What’s significant about that time, you ask?  Well, even though I didn’t tell my boss until mid-July that I was quitting, and I stayed in the lab for a month after that, it was actually mid-April that I quit.  So, apparently, it’s not the sitting at my computer bleeding all over the keyboard and sucking down sugar-soda that leads to me gaining weight, it’s rather the decision to be a writer, I guess.

So, what does all this have to do with beginnings, I can already hear you asking.  Honestly, I am guessing you started asking your screen that about 6 paragraphs ago.  Well, in honor of Spring, and of new beginnings, and of just being sick of being so darned sedentary, I’ve started running again.

Short version – I used to run, not much, not marathons or anything, but I had fun running.  I ran a few 5Ks back in high school.  I used to sneak out of my parent’s house nights for various reasons we won’t get into right now, but one of them was to just run around the neighborhood on a clear crisp night under the moonlight.

When you spend every day trying desperately to carve out the time and energy to do the thing your soul is crying out for, and barely succeeding, it’s hard to then try to carve out even more time to exercise and stay in shape.  And it takes a toll.

When I was commuting by a combination train and subway, I frequently got off the subway a few stops away to add extra walking to the commute that already had ~1.5 miles built into it.  When I commuted by car, I parked in the far side of parking lots halfway across campus, allowing me to work about half a mile of walking into the commute.  But I never had (or made) the time to run.  In both cases, I used to go on long lunchtime walkabouts.

So, I’ve started running again.  The snow has melted and the days are getting warmed (and longer).  I’m terribly out of shape and my quads are insanely sore.  But I’ve startd.

I’m starting easy.  I’ve begun a couch to 5K program.  It’s slow, it works you up from a standstill.  But it gets you there.  For the time being, a few days a week just after dropping the Kidlets off at school, before I settle in to write for the day, I’m heading out for a run.

Here’s hoping I stick with it enough to feel better.

A final note now in closing.  I’m throwing around discussion of 15 pounds here, 30 pounds there.  Please don’t make much of it.  I don’t put much stock in numbers.  Sure, with the height I’ve got and the frame I’m built on, I could stand to lose 30-40 pounds and not be underweight.  But that’s not my target.  I’m not looking to hit a number and stick with it.  This isn’t about dieting.  This is about me feeling better.  This is about getting up and being active.  This is about starting and sticking with something that helps me feel happy and comfortable in my own skin.  So, please, no recommendations of diets, of new healthy eating patterns, or gyms to join.  This isn’t that.  I just miss moving my legs.

Here I Go,

Matt

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Thoughts on Beginnings 1 – Keeping Them Reading

Posted on 2015-03-31 by Matthew Shean

I intend ‘Here I Go’ to be not just a daily blog of my doings, but also a sort of think out loud exploration of writing as I learn my way.   That said, seeing as how this is the beginning of my journey, let’s talk about beginnings.   Most of the stuff I discuss in this article is general.  That’s OK.  Once I have some success under my belt, I will be able to work from examples and give more concrete information.  Everything discussed today is more gut driven.

Beginnings are important.  They set the tone of the story, they introduce plot or characters or both, they have to let the reader know pretty up front what type of story they are setting in to read.  Is this a fairy tale?  Harlequin romance?  Epic fantasy?  Murder mystery?  Noir detective story?  All of the above combined into one?  I read once that the late Robert Jordan, author of the Wheel of Time series, threw away and rewrote the first 3 chapters of the first book of the series (The Eye of the World) a dozen times, just to get the feel right.  In other words, it’s an important bit of your story, and important to do right.

I’ve read a lot about how to start a story or novel, different techniques, advice, lists of things to do and not to do.  Advice abounds, as it’s a place that so many people get tripped up.

(There are generally 3 places that trip people up while writing: Beginnings, Middles, and Ends.  Everything else seems to be pretty simple)

Why are beginnings so hard?  Mainly, it’s because the strength of your beginning in a very real way determines whether your audience will even bother continuing on to the middle and end.  How many books or magazines have you picked up, read or skimmed the first page, and thought, “meh.” and then put it back down?  That’s an author whose beginning didn’t work for you.  Your beginning has a job to do, and that job is to interest the reader enough to keep them reading  The first paragraph has to leave you wanting to read the second paragraph, the first page needs to carry your interest enough to turn to the second page, and so on.  If you can keep someone hooked for the first 5-10 pages, then you’re generally pretty safe that they’ll continue on from there.

So, how do you do that?  What’s the trick?  (Hint – whenever someone asks ‘What’s the trick’, the trick is that there is no trick.  It’s practice, and judgement)  If there’s no trick, then how about guidelines?

Don’t start with the weather. Introduce your main character right away. Start with a strong declarative statement. Start with a flashback. Don’t ever start with a flashback. Start with character.

All the different rules and advice can be overwhelming, and wind up not doing the one thing it needs to – help.

One rule that is often mentioned, for instance, is to never start a story with unattributed dialog.  So just dumping you right in to a quote of someone talking, and you have no idea who the person is, what they’re doing, or why they’re saying it.  It supposedly leaves the reader feeling lost and disoriented.  This sounds reasonable.  But one of my all time favorite novels, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, begins each chapter with unattributed dialog.  The very first page of the novel is a conversation between two people, essentially in a blank white room, about a third person.  Who are they?  What in the heck are they talking about?  In that story, sure I found it a touch jolting and disorienting the first time I read it, but it works on the whole.

Many people advise you to start a story in the middle of some sort of action.  This is referred to as in media res, which translates to ‘in the middle of things.’  If the reader is busy trying to find out why a space ship exploded in the first sentence, then they’ll likely stick around long enough to get invested in the characters before that curiosity wears off, and then they’re hooked.  But this too has a downside.  I read a book recently where every single section break started with a scene in media res, where you felt that the main character was in life or death danger, only to find out half a page later that it was a misdirect solely for the purposes of page turning.  I call that cheating.  It’s like when a TV show starts an episode with some chase sequence, and the two main characters are either in grave external danger, or acting out of character and betraying each other, followed immediately by a title card flashing on the screen that says “X hours earlier”.  When the scene plays out in order, you finally have the missing context that lets you realize what the chase was about, and it inevitably is far less impressive than you had imagined it to be at first.  I think we should all call out to Hollywood writers en masse to call for a moratorium on this.  It’s overplayed, overdone, and in general just done poorly.

Personally, my favorite bit of advice on how to write beginnings comes from Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells in the Writing Excuses Podcast.  At least, that’s where I heard it first.  Not sure where they got it.  The advice, basically, is that your opening sentence or paragraph needs to have some sort of conflict in it.  Something that says, ‘This isn’t quite right.’  It’s a small hook.  Just enough to rouse your curiosity, but not to promise you a big mystery. Something intriguing.

In my opinion, the main thing to keep in mind is to remember that no one rule or piece of advice works in all situations.  You have to see what works for your story specifically.  If you want to start in media res, that’s fine, but don’t let your introductory action and danger be a cheat.  If you’re starting with unattributed dialog, make that dialog say something that grabs attention.  

In the end, all that matters is, once the reader starts reading, keep them going!

Here I Go,

Matt

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Submitting

Posted on 2015-03-30 by Matthew Shean

My stomach is vibrating and my pulse is racing.

I’ve just submitted a story.

It’s not my first submission, but it’s the first one I consider a real submission.  Years ago, I took one of the stories I had written and submitted it to a professionally paying online e-zine.  The story was fun, and told a pretty tale, but wasn’t anything special.  But it had been un-professionally published in a different online e-zine I sent it to a few years before.  I was unclear on whether this made it unpublishable at the time.  In all honesty, I am still a little muddy on the distinction, as some places will accept that and others will not.  Regardless of the legitimacy, my story was rejected.  I did not send it elsewhere.

Then, just this past fall, I wrote and submitted a story to an anthology.  I puttered around with an opening to the story for a few weeks, with nothing gaining traction.  Finally, 25 hours before the deadline, inspiration struck, and over the next day, I wrote and rewrote furiously.  I wound up finishing my first draft of that story 1 minute past the deadline, and submitting it a minute after that.  I don’t recommend that course of action.  While I was very happy with the story at the time, I have since looked it over, and edited and reworked it.  It is now much better, and almost unrecognizable from the version I had submitted, and it is still a disjoint, broken story in need of a different ending.  It was similarly rejected.  I will give it time to breathe, and then I will fix it, and then I will submit it elsewhere.

But neither of those submissions felt right, felt proper.  One was pulling out a dusty old thing on a whim, the other was thrown together quite literally last minute and to fit someone else’s vision.

Today, I submitted a real story.  This is a story I wrote organically.  It came not from a desire to meet someone else’s requirements or specifications.  It took exactly the shape it had to take.  I wrote it from the heart, and when I wasn’t happy with a part that wasn’t working, I took it out and replaced it.  When it was done, I stopped.

Then I edited it.  I carved and refined it’s curves and smoothed its joints.  Once I was happy with it, this was one of the two stories I sent out to my beta-readers for them to examine.  I got back a lot of nice feedback.  Constructive criticisms, encouragement, and good vibes.  Once I absorbed the feedback, and incorporated what I felt would help the story improve I took this morning to go over it one last time with a fine toothed comb.

I chose my market – the place I wanted to submit it to – and I picked a few back-up places I’ll try next if it is rejected.

The submission process was anticlimactic.  I filled out a web form with my vitals and contact info, uploaded the file, and hit the submit button.  No trumpets sounded when I hit the button, no confetti fell from the ceiling.  The text “Thank you for your submission” showed up on the screen, and that was all.  But my internal organs decided to throw a dance party in an elevator.

Now, I have to do 2 things.  First, I have to wait to hear, and I have no idea how long that will take, as it varies from market to market.  And second, I have to keep writing.

Sending this story out was a milestone on my journey, to be sure.  But it wasn’t a destination.  I can’t even let it be a way station.  It’s just a really pretty and meaningful landmark that I am passing on my way through.  Professional Writer, here I come.

Here I Go,

Matt

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Beta Readers 2 – Testing Them Out and Breaking Them In

Posted on 2015-03-27 by Matthew Shean

Last time here at Here I Go, I wrote a bit about what beta readers are and aren’t.  This was all information I had gathered second-hand and from afar.  Stuff I knew from incessantly reading about and craving the writer’s life.

Last month, I went out and got some beta readers of my own.

I’ve have mentioned elsewhere on the blog that before quitting to do this full time, I’ve been writing as much as I can in my spare time for years.  Since 2nd grade, actually, but that’s a story for another post.  I have a good friend from college that writes also.  And he’s been very generous and supportive of all of my efforts to write.  Pretty much all of my friends have been, honestly, and I appreciate that more than I have been able to express to them.  But this one friend has more or less similar tastes and sensibilities to my own, and has always been around for me to critique and read whatever I send him.  I’ve been treating him as my catch-all beta reader for over a decade.

Somewhat more recently, another college friend also offered to read for me, and she has been very marvelous.

But I need more than just the same two voices for all of my critiques.  I need to get a wider array of opinions to feel more comfortable with how I’m coming across to a more diverse audience.  So I needed to recruit more beta readers.  To do this, I simply posted to FaceBook something along the lines of, “Would you like to volunteer to help me out by reading and critiquing my writing before it gets published?”  That was a pool of somewhere around 500 relatives, colleagues, former coworkers, and friends from every stage of my life.

But before I could ask people to read what I had written, I had to write it first.  So, I made sure that I had two stories lined up that I was ready to have torn apart.  And my choice of stories was serendipitous.   I grabbed the first story I had written start-to-finish since I began full-time writing, and the one I had most recently completed.  The most recent one, I absolutely adored.  It’s probably the best piece I’ve written to date.  The other was……  in need of some serious help.  After reading it the first time, my wife basically said that it was a spring cleaning of my soul, venting away all the pain and stresses of my life in a lab. I hadn’t considered that while writing it, but looking back on it, it certainly shows.

In short, though, I had two stories to send out, one in which I was confident, and one that I knew had problems, and I knew what many of those problems were. (But not all – that’s why beta readers were important!)

After my FaceBook call for help, I received close to 30 offers, far more than I expected.  I wrote out some detailed explanations and instructions that I emailed to the volunteers with the stories, as well as this list of questions:

  1. How did the story make you feel? What emotions (if any) did it elicit?
  2. Did any part of the story feel unnecessary, like it didn’t need to be there?
  3. Was there anything that was confusing – that you didn’t think flowed well or where you didn’t understand what was going on?
  4. Did the people act believably? Did it seem like they were acting the way real humans act?
  5. Don’t worry much about typos or grammar. If you catch something, great, let me know, but the point of this is more the feel and flow of the story.
  6. Were there any parts you really liked? Any you really didn’t?
  7. Did you get bored and want to put it down before you finished at any point? If so, where?

I gave them two weeks, with warning in advance that I would send out periodic reminders of when I wanted critiques back.  I felt the two weeks would be long enough, as each story was just shy of 5,000 words.  If I had been sending novel chapters, I would have given longer.

By the end of the two weeks, about a third of the volunteers had responded, which was, again, far more than I expected.

Of those nearly ten responses, some were insanely insightful and helpful.  Others were happy and friendly and polite.  A few were downright scathing, all of which I appreciated. They ranged from “I liked it”, to “here’s a list of the things I liked and the things I didn’t”, and they spanned from “This bit was a nice nod to the actual science that came out a year ago” to “that (science fiction element) doesn’t exist! take it out!”

In the end, three reviews in particular I am most excited by.  They are all from people that I know have similar reading tastes to myself, and come from somewhat different backgrounds, and live in very different parts of the country.  One had a very critical eye on both stories, pointing out problems in voice, tone, structure, etc. that I had not seen myself, while still being supportive and constructive.  One saw each story almost exactly as I saw them.  He saw every problem in my problem story that I saw, and he felt nearly the same as me for the one I was happier with.  The third reviewer was more kind, yet still insightful.  He saw good things in the ‘problem’ story that I didn’t, his comments were helpful, and the problems he saw were more with understandability and narrative flow than the first reviewer.

So, as an initial foray into finding beta readers, I feel very lucky.  I have a pool of very loving and supportive people to draw from.  I have several different points of view and walks of life looking at my writing critically.  While some of the reviews this time around may not have been as helpful as others, I don’t fully expect to have the same people respond every time, or the same way.  One beta reader may be insightful this time and miss the mark completely the next, or vice versa.

As I start churning out more and more inventory, we’ll see how many of the current volunteers will have the time or willingness to continue on, and who else joins in the fray!

Until next time, Here I Go,

Matt

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Beta-Readers 1 – What are they?

Posted on 2015-03-26 by Matthew Shean

Previously on the blog, I spoke a bit about my decision to quit my job before becoming a successful writer, and not the other way around, like everyone tells you to. In short – no real choice for me, and it always helps to have a sugar-mama.  I also complained about not having the time I had thought I would due to a number of factors, only many of which being out of my control.

This time, I’ll talk a bit about what’s going on in my life as a writer right now.

I’m testing out beta-readers, oh boy!

So, you might be asking yourself, “Matt, what is a beta-reader?”  It’s a concept that I have been familiar with for a long time, but it occurs to me that people who don’t live and breathe the details of a writer’s life may not be familiar with it.

Also, what, pray tell, is the difference between a beta-reader and an alpha-reader?  Or an alpha-male for that matter?  Well, alpha-males are more of a behavioral ecology or psychology sort of thing, so we won’t get into that here.  Today.

As for beta-readers, quite simply put, it’s the people you ask to read your stuff before you think it’s ready enough to ask someone to pay money for it.

When writers write, there’s times that they can lose track of some details about a character (like eye color being mentioned as the endless dreamy blue of a crisp October day over the ocean in chapter 3, but the hard unyielding brown of desiccated soil at the base of a withered and dead tomato plant – see?  blue vs brown.  oops!), or even make characters do completely unbelievable things.  They can leave gaping plot holes in their stories, or lose track of plot threads altogether.  Also, writers tend to know their stories inside and out, so we may accidentally leave out some bit of information that is crucial for understanding the oompf or point of a given story, but we might not notice it, since we already know the detail, and didn’t notice that it wasn’t on the page.

Beta-readers are the people you give your story and say, “Where did I screw up? I’d rather that you found it and pointed it out to me than the editor (who I am trying to convince of my effortless abilities as a marvelous writer!).”

They are crucial, important, and vital tools in a writer’s toolbox.  But they’re also thinking feeling independent people that need to be trained, wrangled, and hounded to get things done right. (j/k, they’re a delight, and it’s an honor and a privilege to have friends like that)

Some writers may enlist both alpha and beta readers.  This is two levels of help.  The first (alpha) typically being on a broad general level, perhaps even before the meat of a story is written.  These are the people you ask things like, ‘if my hero is a shy, sheltered, battered and broken shell of a man, would he jump on the lead horse in the calvary charge and shout, “For honor!  For Country!  For Judith!  Hiya!” while galloping into enemy fire?’, or ‘If I start off my space-prison-transport-ship overrun by zombies story with a love triangle between three brooding teens, it’s OK if I kill all three of them off partway through, and end the story with the power struggle between the only surviving crew member and the escaped alpha-male de facto leader of the convicts, right?’

Alpha readers are there to help you with major structural problems.

Beta-readers are there to help you more with fine tuning.

You remember those weight-scales that used to be in every pediatrician and elementary school nurses’ office, where you stood on the black rubber and stainless steel square, while at eye-level, the doctor or nurse moved the large clunky black iron squares across 50lb chunks, and then slid the smaller weight across the marked quarter pound increments?  Same thing.  Large scale vs fine scale tuning.  Alpha readers are the clunky windowed iron blocks, while your beta readers are the sliders.  If you have a good enough impression of where your story lies (lays?  lay?  My #1 grammar nemesis*), then you can forego the alpha readers.  But the beta readers can be one of the most helpful and enlightening tools in the writer’s box.

As such, I have recently put out a request among friends and family asking for volunteers, people who might want to, and would be willing to beta read for me.  Next time, I’ll ramble on a bit about how that process is going.

Here I Go,

Matt

*An important part of  trying to turn myself into a publishable author is flexing my writing muscles.  Improving my instincts.  But, just as important is making sure that the tools in my toolbox are in good clean sharp working order.  This includes my beta readers.  Absolutely.  It also includes my understanding of grammar, which** is in good working order, but needs to be honed just a touch more.

**grammar nemesis #2 – That vs. Which.  I have at least 3 different explanations of this concept on my computer.  And every time I read them, I’ve forgotten again by the time I look away.  Pretty sure I used it right this time.  I think.  maybe…

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Shouldn’t You Be Writing?

Posted on 2015-03-25 by Matthew Shean

Let’s talk today about working from home.

(Bonus content:  I have a sinus infection and wrote this while grumpy.  See if you can pick out the part where I get derailed by wracking coughs of mucus dislodgment, and spiral into disconnected griping.)

I’m nowhere near the first person to attempt working from home.  It’s getting somewhat common.  So there’s voluminous information about the potential pitfalls and glorious benefits of it.  Back when I was externally (and gainfully) employed, I researched this information in depth.  I thought I was pretty much prepared for what it would mean and what was to come.

When I quit my job last summer, my main thoughts about time management had to do with Kidlet1 and Kidlet2. Summer beak, they were home all day. Once school started, they’d be out of the house from 9:10 in the morning until anywhere from 3:30 to 6:30, depending. That’s a solid 6 hours-9 hours of writing, right?

Oh, universe, must you mock me *so* hard for my hubris and naivete?

I factored in that after so many years of giving up sleep to work, to commute, to parent, I would need time to blow off steam. I assumed I would fart around for a month or three, sleeping long hours, playing video games, and dabbling at writing without earnestly getting into it.

And for the most part, that did happen.

But so much more did. Oh so very much more.

There have been illnesses, meetings with teachers and school administrators, class trips and class parties. There’s been extended-family obligations, identity theft, house crises, pet crises, and health crises. There has not been a single week so far since August where I haven’t had to spend at least 2 full days on putting out fires.

Unrelated Public Service Announcement – get working Carbon Monoxide detectors. Do it now.

I have the ominous feeling that if I hadn’t quit when I did for the sake of switching careers, I would have had to quit just to keep the flowing torrents of shit at bay. With just the bare minimal necessities of what I’ve faced over the past nine months, there’s no way I could have done a normal 9-5 job without getting fired.

I tell you all this neither to bring the drama, nor to cry out for attention or pity. Woe is decidedly not me. I do it to ask all the other work-from-home people – is it always like this? How do you deal with it all? Was the world falling apart this badly even before, but I just ignored it because I had to in order to leave the house?

Also – as for that 6 hours of writing from 9:10 to 3:30. Ha!

That’s just when kidlet2 gets to school. kidlet1 goes anytime between 8am and 11am, depending on what extracurricular activity we have scheduled or illness come down with. Then there’s my overworked, overstressed, underappreciated, and stretched-too-thin wife to help out the door.  Most days I’m up and running at full speed from 6:30 to 10:30 getting everyone out the door. Then, I can have a little breakfast, sit, catch my breath. If at this point I lie down to close my eyes, I wake up at 2:45, just enough time to lunch, shower, dress, and hop over to the school and retrieve the kidlets.

If instead of conking out I attempt to write, I’m still in the stage where it takes a good 2-3 hours to focus my attention on the project at hand and get into a mindset where the words – at this point still just the mediocre ones – begin to flow. Oh, and there’s still lunch and shower and picking up the kidlets.

After they come home, there’s dinner to plan, cook, and serve, riding roughshod over the kidlets to get their homework done, getting them to bed, and decompressing from the day with lovely conversation with my wife.

This doesn’t even touch on the pitfalls that people actually warn you about. The advice you get from other writers, from bloggers, from basically anybody I’ve read from, spoken to, or listened to. “Make sure people recognize that you’re not *staying at home*, you’re *working from home*. Don’t let them expect you to spend all day doing the laundry, cleaning the house, and running errands. You have a job too. Just because you are in the house doesn’t mean you don’t have to be at your desk bleeding all over your keyboard.” (I’m paraphrasing here. A direct quote would have to have included the phrases “lounging about the house like an oaf”, “eating bon-bons”, and “doing the damn dishes.”)

Let me be clear – I’m not saying my friends and family are expecting that of me.  This isn’t a Mr. Mom scenario where I’ve got nothing else to do all day and let myself go with soap operas and coupon poker with Ann Jillian.  I’m pointing out that this minefield has been lain before by the loved ones of many who have trodden similar paths, and they expect no less of my journey than a shared trail of hardship.

And then I get well-meaning emails and texts from friends saying, “How’s the writing coming?” or “How many stories have you written yet?” Or the best – comments on almost any Facebook post I make saying, “Shouldn’t you be writing?” Honestly, people, I love you. But shut up.

Here I Go,
Matt

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Thoughts on Quitting My Job (or: Don’t Do What I Did, But I Had to Do It)

Posted on 2015-03-06 by Matthew Shean

I am a writer. I was a scientist too, but I was a writer first.

Every bit of advice about writing that I have ever seen includes 2 main ideas. First – you must write. Goes without saying, kinda, but people still need to say it. Second, though, is – don’t quit your day job. Even successful writers struggle for years before they make any kind of comfortable living from their writing income alone. And most never even make it to that level, so above all else, don’t quit your day job. So I quit mine. Let’s do a little Q&A to get to the bottom of that, shall we?

Why on Earth would you quit your job?

Well, looking at my age – rapidly approaching 40, some might say ‘midlife crisis.’ And if that’s true, well, I guess it’s better than some of the other most common hallmarks. But I would say that’s largely coincidental. I’m not here to dither away the years working on some ‘great American novel.’ This is hard work ahead of me, and I am looking at that with wide open, even fearful, eyes, and I am buckling down to do it. Not to write a great American novel, but to share as many damn stories that are cluttering up my head as possible.

OK, sure, but that’s why you need to write. Why did you quit?

Quite honestly, my entire adult life has consisted of 3 things: Family, Work/commute, and Writing. And not a single one of them was getting enough time for me to do them right. One had to go, and work/commute was the only one that didn’t feel like cutting off a hand.

I’ve been out of college and working in the same field for 17 years, and in all that time, my daily roud-trip commute was less than 2.5 hours for only five of them. Depending on which stage of my scientific career we talk about, it was even as long as 4.5 hours a day. That’ll kill anyone’s spirit. There was a day I remember getting off a MetroNorth train in Grand Central Terminal. Another train had arrived at the same time at the track across the platform. As I got off the train, carried by the press more than walking freely, I stopped in the middle of the platform and turned around to face away from the exit to the subway. I just stood and stared at the mass of people, hundreds upon hundreds from just these two trains alone, as they trudged, dead-eyed, carrying half drunk coffee and half-read newspapers tucked under the arm of their suits and pantsuits. They all had dead eyes.  None of them could even see where they were going, they just followed the herd through the chute. I knew even before then, but that day crystalized it in my mind, that I didn’t belong where I was. I had no business being there. If I had kept at it, I would have become every inch the mindless drone they already were.

But commuting is a lot of sitting on a train, right? Why not write there?

True enough. I was train commuting for about half of my 12 long-distance years. So, I tried it. (The other half I was driving, and it’s really hard to write in Long Island traffic. I tried it. The voice recordings I attempted aren’t even laughable, they’re just awful.)

When my wife and I first moved far enough away from my lab that I needed to commute, I convinced myself that spending that long on the train every day would give me plenty of time to write. I bought a laptop specifically to write on the trip. But something about the ride sapped my energy, my creativity, my mind. I wound up watching a lot of Netflix DVDs and reading a lot of books. Every day started off the same – lurch onto the train, sit (if there were even seats available for the 2 hr ride!), eat breakfast, open computer, stare at word processor in confusion and haze, close computer and read.  (or watch DVD)

I was working 40 hours a week in a job that expected 80, commuting 20 more, and spending all of my time at home in a fog of anger or malaise. Though I never stopped writing, after 12 years of commuting, all I had to show for it were four unpublishable stories, and the first acts of two troubled novels. And a lot of frustration. I knew that if I continued, my writing wasn’t ever going to go anywhere.

And the thing was, if my scientific career was going stellar, then it would have been managable. But see the part above about 40 hour weeks in a job that required 80.  And the part about constant anger or malaise.

But what about income? You don’t seriously expect to support yourself writing, do you, you delusional idiot?

Not yet. Hopefully someday. No, I am well aware of the statistics about novel advances, the rarity of paying out your advance, the hordes of earnest professional writers unable to pay bills via writing, etc. But my wife and I sat down and looked long and hard at our finances. Here’s the sad, raw truth. Being an academic scientist doesn’t pay much, and being a postdoc pays even less. We compared our finances with me in my current position, as well as expected income and expenses for the next few years with finances without me working. Turns out that the loss of income was almost exactly balanced out by the drop in tax bracket, the reduced usage in gas, and the loss of paying for child care (kidlet2 was finally old enough to enroll in full day school.)

Sure, things are tight, but we’re not in much worse shape than we were when I was working. But the truth of the matter is, I would never be able to write anything worth money in the state I was in before. Now, at least, there is enough less stress and more time that there’s a fighting chance that I can shine. We’ll ask more questions next time.

In the meantime –

Here I go,

Matt

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Mission Statement, of sorts.

Posted on 2015-03-06 by Matthew Shean

Welcome to Here I Go, the blog where I will catalog the beginnings of my career as a writer.

So let’s talk a bit about what this will be, and what it won’t be.

I’ll be randomly musing on advice I’ve gathered about how to write, I’ll talk about the nervous apprehension and stress involved with being beta-read, submitting, and getting rejections.  Hopefully, I’ll be sharing the elation of getting published.

I’ll talk about my home life tangentially.  I won’t go into details or specifics about my wife and kids (introductions – say ‘hi’ to my wife Di, and my kids, kidlet1 and kidlet2), but I will chat about managing the house and switching from a dual income to a single income household while living in the #1 most expensive county in America, according to a recent web article I read.

I’ll try to keep it from being too mundane or boring, and I promise no photos of my random meals.  Although I will state here and now that I make exceptions for my pies.  I will definitely be posting photos of my pies.  I make them often, I eat them quickly, and I am rather passionate about them.  Not tarts, not crumbs, not glazes, not flans.  Pies.  Lots and lots of pies.

mmm….  pie.

Here I go,

Matt

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First Post

Posted on 2015-02-23 by Matthew Shean

Please bear with me while I drum up some content and settle on a theme.

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