Are your writing problems: wine, waste paper, or manure?
Authors wear at least three hats – writer, publicist,
and business executive. Instead of investing time and money in another seminar
on how to manage your time more effectively, consider reading Murder:
A New Way to Lose Weight. Don’t shake your head no, keep reading!
Set priorities
In Chapter One of Murder: A New Way to Lose Weight,
Linda Almquist receives this advice on setting priorities when she begins a new
job.
“There are three types of
problems. A few problems are like wine; those situations improve if you delay
decisions and let them age. Most problems are like waste paper. You can ignore
them because they don’t matter. Unfortunately like waste paper, they tend to be
messy when they pile up. And some problems are like manure. You must identify
them quickly before they stink.”
Most of us are so swamped by our “waste paper”
problems, that we ignore the “manure problems.” For example, I dribble away my
time agonizing over the position of pictures in blogs and the color of the
background on ads and slides. I should spend more time on my “manure” problem –
getting a larger audience to read my novels. That means I should spend my time
scheduling more and diverse speaking and blogging engagements and more time
editing my next novel.
Change
your work activities as if you were dieting
You can lose a lot of weight rapidly and you can
write a lot a 48-hour writing frenzy but these spurts of effort may not be the
best approach to keeping weight off or to a long-term writing career. In Murder:
A New Way to Lose Weight, Linda Almquist loses weight because she makes
lots of small choices, in terms of food and exercise, everyday. Similarly,
setting aside time (even only a few minutes) to “work on your books” every day
is smart. While you may not be able to accomplish much writing on a novel in
fifteen minutes, you can outline a blog in that time.
You are more apt to attain small achievable goals
(such as losing a pound a week or writing twenty pages per week) than larger
goals with artificial deadlines (for example losing fifty pounds before your
class reunion in six months or writing a three hundred page novel by
Christmas). In both cases you have to stick to your weekly goal, every week for
months to see results. Patience and old-fashioned “stick-to-it-iveness” are
virtues.
Create your
own action plan
= Keep notes
on how you spend your time on writing and publicizing your books for a week.
= Analyze
your time usage, in terms of what you accomplished.
How does
your time usage align with your writing goals? If you don’t have defined goals
for your writing, you’ve just uncovered a “manure” problem.
Are you
surprised by how much time you spent handling trivial (“waste paper”) problems
or surfing the web?
= Set
workable weekly goals and stick to them for months.
Maybe
part of your plan should be to read Murder: A New Way to Lose Weight.
Then you can decide if Linda Almquist follows this advice as she checks out
allegations of medical malpractice against two diet doctors in a medical school
rife with battling cliques. Her schedule is thrown out of whack when she finds
one diet doctor dead and starts receiving threats.
Bio: J. L. Greger, a biologist and professor
emerita of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, can’t put her past behind her.
She puts tidbits of science and snippets on the culture (good, bad, and ugly)
of medical schools and science labs into her medical mystery/suspense novels.
So far that’s Coming Flu and Murder: A New Way to Lose Weight. A third is on the way.
Learn more about JL Greger at her website (http: www.jlgreger.com) and her
blog (www.jlgregerblog.blogspot.com) called JL Greger’s Bugs. Coming Flu (http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Flu-ebook/dp/B008WDL84O/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1372715303&sr=1-1&keywords=Coming+Flu
)
and Murder:
A New Way to Lose Weight (http://www.amazon.com/Murder-New-Lose-Weight-ebook/dp/B00DFCC3IM/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1372715439&sr=1-1&keywords=Murder%3A+A+New+Way+to+Lose+Weight)
are available from Amazon in paperback and ebook formats.
Great advice, Janet. I need to pay more attention to that myself. Best of luck with the new book!
Comments
Thanks to Marilyn for hosting me.