Sometimes, especially after I have a frustrating day or two, or feel like I haven't done enough during the course of a day, I ask myself (and please pardon my French): Why the fuck am I working so hard?

I've been thinking about that question a lot in the last few months. Now, first of all, when I talk about "work" I mean fiction writing, not the Day Job, which I consider a necessary evil (for now, but I'm getting ahead of myself). And I really shouldn't look at my fiction as "work," I know, but you know what? It really is labor-intensive. But it's the most fun work I've ever done, and damn it, I'm pretty good at it.

I'm also obsessive about it at times. When the writing is going well, and I'm chugging along at a good pace on a story or a novel chapter, all is right in the world. I feel like I can be a productive member of society once I've written (I usually write best in the morning, anywhere from 5 a.m. to 10 or 11 a.m.). As long as I get SOMETHING done each day, even if it's just thinking about a character or a scene ("Would she really say that? Would he really do that? How cool would it be if they did this?") while driving or working on tech writing stuff for the Day Job.

When I don't get any fiction writing done, I feel like a sack of dog crap. It's as easy as that. Write = Feel Good. Don't Write = Feel Like Crap.

So I write, a lot. I'm really trying to jam on my writing in the next year or so, especially with my novels. I'll have 4 finished novels shortly (soon as I finish the Wannoshay novel), and I really want to write a couple more before I can "relax" into a novel-a-year pace for the rest of my life. I'll probably do a story a month for the rest of my life as well, just because stories are so damn fun.

But the novels are where the money's at, so I plan on really focusing on novels in the months to come. That's why I'm looking at romance novels and learning about them as well as fantasy and SF and horror -- I think the money there is really good, and they're open to new writers. And they're FUN to write! So that's one possible route to the ultimate goal of writing fiction full-time. I think I can do it. I definitely have the damn persistence and work ethic to do it!

I look at Elizabeth's last semester of classes in the Spring and her fieldwork in the Summer as my timeline for my continued hard-working period. I plan on finishing 2-3 more novels by September of next year, when she's done with grad school. In the meantime I plan on revising and marketing all of my novels like crazy, finding an agent, and getting some of those good book deals I talked about in my previous entry.

Ever since the Writers of the Future workshop (to which I owe a LOT, and ever new writer really should send their stories to them!), where I met full-time writers Tim Powers, Dean Wesley Smith, and Kevin Anderson and saw how hard THEY worked, I've been taking my fiction very seriously. And it's paid off in spades -- lots of pubs, and more importantly, I can SEE my improvement. Now that I've improved my writing speed and writing quality, I want more. I'd love to write fiction full-time, but I know that's a long shot, so I'm hedging my bets and working my ass off while Lizzie is in grad school, with the plan that I'll get a good Day Job in August or September 2003. Until then my focus is fiction writing and doing freelance tech writing (and any other type of work) to pay the bills.

Because after Elizabeth has been working for a year or so, the next milestone rolling our way is kids.

For a while there, as Elizabeth and I were just enjoying each other and having fun during the first 5 and a half years of our marriage, I thought we may not ever have kids. But after spending more time with our nieces and nephews, we know that we would be missing out on way too much by not having kids. So yeah, we're gonna have some, in maybe two years from now. That's a little freaky to me. But it'll be fun.

That also gives me a deadline. My time at the newspaper really engrained in me the importance of deadlines, and this is a major deadline. I plan on working my butt off between now and the time we start to have kids. I want to get my fiction writing career off the ground before that time, have a nice schedule set up, so I don't have to kill myself like I feel like I'm doing sometimes now.

Because I want to be an awesome dad and be there for my kids, and I know that in order to do that, I'll need to ease off my headlong pace with my writing. That's a given. So I'm working as hard as I can right now, so we're set up by the time the lil' Mike and Lizzies start hitting the street.

In theory, this is all simple as pie. In reality however...Later!