All good things must end

Tomorrow, after eighteen months of having as much time as I want to write, read and mess about (I mean, network) on Twitter, I start my new day job. Four days a week for the next couple of years I'll be commuting again, which at least means guaranteed regular reading time on the train. I guess I'll be reading more, writing less, maybe submitting fewer stories, and definitely spending less time on Twitter. Seems like a good time to look back over the last 18 months and see if I achieved anything.

One, from Ellipsis Zine - I've got a story in here

I set out with the intention of editing Sunrise Over Centrified City in a proper focused way. Eventually I did (it's called Lachlane's Centrified City now) and so far I've had it rejected by one indie publisher and entered it for a competition. Along the way, I won a 3-chapter critique from Claire Dyer in a Mslexia Max subscribers' monologue competition, so having already had a good go myself I sent Claire the first 12,000 words or so of my dystopian detective novel and got loads of helpful advice back, which put me on the right path for another round of editing.

The novel I started writing on that first day of unemployment is now at around 35,000 words. I'm so determined to get it right that I've trashed whole sections of it and had days when my wordcount spreadsheet has a negative total for the day. An extract of it got me selected for the Penguin Random House WriteNow initiative though so clearly someone saw potential, and I got useful feedback from Mikaela Pedlow at the insight day in Newcastle so I hope I've strengthened the novel since then, even if I haven't lengthened it as much as I'd have liked.

Souvenir of WriteNow

I have written tens of thousands of words of fiction (and a few thousand of non-fiction, not including the blog) but as it's not all in one project it's not easy to see how much there is. If you glance down my publications lists, almost everything published between November 2016 and April 2018 was written or heavily redrafted during my - shall we call it a sabbatical? That's included Twitter fiction (I even won a couple of competitions), flash fiction and short stories which have been published online, in magazines and anthologies, and I recently had my first flash CNF (creative non-fiction) published at Ellipsis Zine.

The study, decorated with encyclopedia pages

I didn't just sit in the fully-redecorated study and tap away at the laptop in isolation. All that time on Twitter included getting to know some fabulously supportive writers (the flash fiction crowd in particular are like a big extended family) and I joined the working class writers' collective set up by Carmen Marcus and wrote her an article about getting comfortable with my accent. I've done storytelling with Alice Courvoisier and we've got another event planned at this summer's York Festival of Ideas. I organised my first open mic and the story I wrote to read at it went on to be published at the Fiction Pool. I also read at other people's events, and at a joint Ilkley Writers and Wharfedale Poets evening at a local pub.

Me looking pompous in a pub

I made a radio programme last year with Andrea Hardaker and Rosalind York which sadly isn't available online any more, then I co-wrote a radio drama called Lavender Ink with Roz this year. I even wrote a blog post for the New Writing North website about how we did that one and I remain highly excited at having my name up there (if not quite as excited about the photo. Must practice looking less gormless in front of cameras).

It hasn't been a continuous year and a half of excitement and success. There have been projects that fell through due to funding scarcity, places I never quite felt ready to submit to, people I never quite plucked up the courage to contact, articles I didn't pitch, stories I didn't write (or finish redrafting). I had about 150 rejections plus a couple of magazines went silent after I sent them something (next issue failed to appear, tweets dried up - Ligature Works, for instance). As I write this during the week of the 9th April, I'm waiting to hear about more than fifteen submissions.

As I look back over what I've done since I quit my last day job, some of it seems so long ago. Real life intervened occasionally: domestic crises, family illness, my dodgy back and related muscular problems (relics of a slipped disc about 4 years ago) but on the whole I did a fair few things I wouldn't have done if I'd been at work. More to the point, at least I tried it instead of maybe regretting not trying it, later on. Immense thanks to OneMonkey who agreed to a scarily large slump in household income for six months (yes, the timescale grew once I got going) and made me hundreds of cups of tea when he was working from home and I was utterly focused and paying no attention to my surroundings. I wanted the new day job to be less than full-time so I could carry on a bit of this writing life I've grown accustomed to, and I'm not saying I definitely won't take another sabbatical when my two-year contract's up, but for now I'm reining back.

If you have a passion for writing (or anything else that might benefit from some dedicated time) and you think you can possibly economise, compromise or otherwise rearrange your finances so you can take some time out to focus on it, I can recommend at least having the conversation (with your spouse, your boss, or someone whose advice you trust). If I hadn't mentioned it to OneMonkey, my sabbatical would never have morphed from an idle dream to eighteen months of reality. And after the tight budget of the last year and a half, the prospect of a second regular income in the house is making us feel filthy rich.