May I have my fiction with a side of meta?  🙂

Today’s post is both to announce the title of this week’s dialogue for my weekly dialogue-only writing challenge and also to make an announcement.

First the dialogue. . . . The dialogue-only story for today is a bit of a meta piece wherein two characters are discussing the author: me.
I hope it’s clear from the artwork exactly where this story is going. Truth be told, this is the only piece I’m worried about getting into the book. It feels to me like it might be an even more problematic piece than Insults Two by Two. It’s not so much the content for About the author: but how I want to use the story in the book, which is something I also feel is terribly obvious.

Well, despite my worries, I’m still putting this one down as my next dialogue. It may be meta, but it’s a fictional story through and through.

Now, a little bit about me, the author.

As some of you may know, I have been writing full time for a about three years now. I work weekends at a hotel. Every Saturday and every Sunday I come into work at 3am and leave at 11pm. That’s sixteen hours a day, back to back. In other words, I’m putting in a thirty-two full time job hours in two days.

This doesn’t cover my bills. I’ve been okay for 2.5 years, but with my wife’s student loans recently coming due, an unexpected increase in monthly repayment for both of our loans, and the loss of rent from two roommates, it’s become tough. So instead of wasting my time building a platform for Patreon, I went and got a job.

I will admit, I did see this coming. I actually started working a sales position with an online company but didn’t make any sales in two months. I liked it since I set my own hours and worked from home. I liked that it was incoming calls. I liked everything, except for the fact that nobody wanted to buy what I was selling, even if it would help their own businesses. Beings I only got paid on commission, that job got kicked to the curb early last month.

After applying all over the place and having to turn down positions that would require weekends (and not pay enough to make up the difference of losing my hotel income) I have landed a job at a travel center. You know, one of those gas stations that serve as a home away from home for truck drivers.

Truck drivers are a huge part of my life. Father, grandfather. Great grandfathers. A huge portion of the hotel’s clientele. So, yeah, this will be my job four days of the week. It won’t necessarily cut into my writing time, which I tend to do in the morning. But it will cut into my family life (my social life is pretty insubstantial). I don’t really like my family time being cut into (don’t like it at all in fact), but I can use that to my advantage.

What advantage? Well, for one, the constraints of a second job will certainly eliminate the illusion of boundless amounts of time. I believe a second job will force me to set a ridged schedule. Right now my writing schedule looks like this: WAKE UP —> EAT—> READ —> WRITE UNLESS IT’S TOO NICE OUTSIDE, THEN JUST KEEP READING OUTSIDE —> LUNCH —> SHOWER —> HANG WITH THE WIFE, etc.

As you can see, my writing schedule has recently been more like a loose suggestion than a rigorous routine. I function better as a routine guy. I used to go to a cafe and write daily. Then I became poor and my routine was gradually broken.

Now that I won’t have the luxury of five full days of unstructured time, I’ll have to treat my writing more like a job. Or a passion. Because, hell, it is my passion. I can blame my love of books, stress, the online sales position, or sunny weather on not putting my writing first, but really when it comes down to it, the reason is me. I know I need structure and scheduling. I am more productive with it than without it. That’s why I went to the coffee shop even though there were far more distractions there than at my house—the coffee shop gave me a routine.

In the end, even though I’ll be losing time doing the things I love for the cash I need, I know that this will actually make my writing output increase quite a bit. I’ll admit that I’m going to miss all the relaxation, romance, and routine I’ve built around evenings with my wife. The truth is, we don’t know if we’ll be able to emotionally handle it once the school year starts since she teaches from 7am to 3pm and I’ll be working 3pm to 11pm. She already loses me all weekend to my job at the hotel. But we do need the money, and this will help me cement a daily writing routine. Yeah, I’m being a glass half-full kind of guy. But I think working six days a week will motivate me to write better and write more so I don’t have to hold a day job. Though I’d rather hold a job and write than not need a job but be pen and paperless. If anything, I think this summer of too much free time has taught me to stick with a schedule—a rigid one, even if it’s totally artificial.

Thanks for reading, bookworms. Leave a like or comment and let me know if you have a writing routine.

All photos from Pixabay (public domain, no attribution required) unless otherwise stated.