This summer, I took three months off of work.
To be clear, I was laid off at the beginning of June, but I’d known it was coming since March, giving me time to plan and prepare, and after evaluating my options, I decided that I was going to take an intentional break. Three deliberate months where I wouldn’t even think about going on LinkedIn and would instead get a feel for what my life would look like if I didn’t have a job. I’m very fortunate to be able to do this (and even more fortunate that when I did start looking at LinkedIn in September, the opportunities came rushing in), and part of arriving at the decision to do this was because I knew I needed to lean into my advantages while I have them.
It didn’t hurt that I was also incredibly burnt out and sorely needed some time away. Working while maintaining a career as an author will do that to a person.
me after three years of blue people movies
Really, this was a summer where I only had one job instead of two. Through a different lens, it was less a summer sabbatical, more a summer of freelancing. For ten years, “full-time author” has been a far-off dream (and only getting farther at the moment), but for these three months, I could live somewhat close to the fantasy that I was making my creative work my main squeeze and get a feel for what that would be like. “Somewhat close,” of course, discounts the fact that apart from the publication advance for A Legionnaire’s Guide to Love and Peace, I was living on savings and under no pressure to make any additional money because I knew that unless a miracle happened, there was zero chance of me suddenly earning the kind of money that would make me reconsider going back to work.
So what did I do with my summer sabbatical and those three generous months? In summary:
I focused on the release and promotion of A Legionnaire’s Guide to Love and Peace, which included creating more social media content and traveling to San Diego for Comic-Con.
I wrote and pitched two potential option books to my publisher, neither of which took. Pour one out for A Centurion’s Guide to Love and Diplomacy and the romantic fantasy project that will never have a title beyond the codename Buffer Overflow. Maybe some day in the future, they’ll see the light of day, but for now, excelsior.
I threw myself into development work on a new fantasy book and churned out 35k of material on top of the beginnings of a draft I started earlier this year.
I traveled to Chicago for a family reunion and up to NorCal for a mini writing retreat.
Looking back, taking this break was the right call. It gave me a chance to experience life at a different pace than the one I’d become used to after years of working full time, and it gave me a fresh perspective on my financial situation. All my life, I’ve been a reluctant spender and an extreme saver, and going into this break, I was worried about the impact living with a hole in the boat for a bit might have on all the rules and systems I’ve built for myself. This stress test gave me a far clearer view of my position than I ever would have gotten if I hadn’t taken this step back, and it’s given me a new confidence going forward. It’s shown me that if it truly sucks, I can hit the bricks, and that if I need to, I can take an even longer break without a long-term impact. Above all else, this break was a reminder not to take that for granted.
My summer sabbatical also shattered some of my illusions about what it would be like to write full time for real. It was a good reminder that just because I get nine hours of my day back doesn’t mean it’s possible (or even advisable) to apply those nine hours toward writing. I found the limits of my output pretty fast, and though I certainly scaled my work, I wasn’t suddenly putting up generational numbers. In total, over those three months, I wrote about 60k spread across a few different projects. That’s about 20k per month, and my average rate when I’m writing under Day Job Conditions is closer to 15k.
I’ve never been a particularly fast writer, and this break was proof that I won’t suddenly become one if given more time. I had a few periods where I was pushing for 2,000 words a day, but I discovered it simply wasn’t a sustainable pace. Even if I had the time to write that much, I didn’t have the time to process everything that I’d laid down and everything that came next, effectively cooking my brain and arresting my progress. Towards the end of the summer, I settled down to a far more reasonable 1,000 words a day, paired with development journaling that gave me space to process what I was creating, and that proved to be a pace I could keep up for weeks on end.
Stats for nerds
Now I’ve settled into my new job, and I’m back to the good old evenings-and-weekends grind when it comes to writing. The fantasy of writing full time still lingers, but now that I’ve had a taste of the reality, I know that on top of it being financially infeasible, it won’t fix the things I’d want it to fix. My output won’t go up significantly, but the pressure to sustain it will. The self-doubt, in some ways, will get keener. There will be more pressure to write to-market, to fold to whatever will sell quicker and for more money, and the work will suffer for it. Until I can get myself to a place where I can live off a nest egg and write without worrying about whether it will be profitable, it’s far better for me to stick to evenings-and-weekends and focus on building a sustainable, creative life that fuels the kind of speculative fiction I want to write.
In the meantime, whenever I can take a day off work and spend a few hours sitting in a cafe, pounding away at a draft, I’ll remember to savor it.