Why Time Off Isn’t Time Lost

by Jeffe Kennedy

I’ve been pushing hard lately.

“Lately” meaning about the last year and a half. I’ve talked about it a fair amount on my personal blog and on a panel or two. Mainly what happened was that I signed with an agent, who was fabulous enough to get me several book deals, and I ended up scheduling myself with a novel deadline about every three months.

What with a full-time, career-type job, it’s been a bit tight.

Not that I mind! My new mantra is “Good Problems To Have.”

*goodproblemstohave* *goodproblemstohave* *goodproblemstohave*

What it’s meant for my daily life is that I’ve been writing in the neighborhood of 2,000 words a day. In 2013 I wrote just shy of 500,000 words. 2,821 words short, to be exact. Which kind of burned my ass to miss that milestone by so little, but my stepson got married on New Year’s Eve and I needed to be part of that.

And, really, it didn’t matter. My overall effort mattered. A round number is prettier, but ultimately meaningless.

The last ten days have been a mess for me. I traveled for my day job to do a weekend-long training session. Very intensive, no time to write. I was able to get through the galley proofs of my book coming out in May, The Mark of the Tala, but that was pretty much it. Upon my return, I got hit with developmental edits for Going Under, the first book in my new erotic romance trilogy. As we all know, editing is nothing like producing word count.

Then my agent, Pam van Hylckama Vlieg, pictured above on the left with my friend, aspiring writer Anna Philpot, came to visit for four days. She spoke to my local RWA chapter in New Mexico. We had a great time and had many excellent conversations about trends in the industry and my career, all important stuff.

But I got nothing done. Nothing *writing* done, that is.

So, today I’m back at it, staring at the next novel deadline of March 15. On one hand, it feels like I lost time. My spreadsheet certainly thinks so, with my blinking counter showing me I’m over a week behind on my predicted progress. On the other, however, I’m feeling rejuvenated.

It’s counter-intuitive, because I’ve been going pretty much non-stop. The key, however, is that I haven’t been drafting. I’ve been learning new things and talking to people, going to fun places and *gasp* socializing.

Turns out it was good for me.

While my spreadsheets and I tend to believe that real progress is measured only by those steadily increasing word count numbers, that’s simply not true. Many steps forward are intangible and can be measured only by the long-term results. That training for the day job gave me a certification for instructional design that I can use for teaching writing workshops, too. Spending that extensive time with Pam has given me much food for thought and a better idea of how to chart my future.

Time well-used.

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Jeffe Kennedy is an award-winning author with a writing career that spans decades. Her works include non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and novels. She has been a Ucross Foundation Fellow, received the Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship for Poetry, and was awarded a Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial

Award. Her essays have appeared in many publications, including Redbook.

Her most recent works include a number of fiction series: the fantasy romance novels of A Covenant of Thorns;  the contemporary BDSM novellas of the Facets of Passion, including the newest, Five Golden Rings, which came out as part of the erotic holiday anthology, Season of Seduction, in late November; and a  contemporary serial novel, Master of the Opera, which released beginning January 2, 2014. A fourth series, the fantasy trilogy The Twelve Kingdoms, will hit the shelves starting in May 2014. A spin-off story from this series, Negotiation, appears in the recently-released Thunder on the Battlefield anthology.

She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with two Maine coon cats, a border collie, plentiful free-range lizards and a very handsome Doctor of Oriental Medicine.

Jeffe can be found online at her website: JeffeKennedy.com, every Sunday at the popular Word Whores blog, on Facebook, and pretty much constantly on Twitter @jeffekennedy. She is represented by Pam van Hylckama Vlieg of Foreword Literary.