Yesterday I proposed a strategy for writing and building a business based on creative writing where I would only work for 89 minutes every day.

Yes, I know. Silly. But when you have the idea it does not sound so silly at all. A fresh idea not only sounds great, it also sounds highly logical and totally doable. Except that this won’t be.

So this is a retraction and a restatement of my 89 minute commitment.

Sidenote:

I am aware that I am shaking things up again, having just started on a new course. It is a creative process and for me that means a messy process. I have tried before to keep it clean and not mess it up but I know I will. I will plunge in and do things. And I will step back and decide it is a mistake and that it needs changing.

In the past I tried to hide the scuff marks and deleted anything that did not sound polished or decisive. I am not doing that anymore.

My blog is my sandbox. I will construct ideas and post arguments only to shoot them down immediately after. I will try things and say things that are stupid, ill-advised and headstrong. And I will change my mind. And I will record all the changes here.

Because that is creative process.

End sidenote

My family is important to me. I will be available to them and will always place them first. We are going to a play tonight as a family. Snow White and Other Stories. I would prefer to stay home and get some work done but it is not going to happen.

My work is important to me. And with that I mean my salary paying art teaching job. It pays for school fees and medical aid and petrol and snacks after plays.

My creativity and my creative soul is important to me. This third one needs special attention. I need to build a space for it to live and thrive. That will not be done in only 89 minutes a day.

Some days it will have to fit into five minutes because that is all that I have available. Sometimes I will have five hours and then I will take that and use it.

I changed my blog title and tagline yesterday. I am changing it again today and I will keep fiddling with it until I have it working. The title was: 89 Minutes of Extra Time. The tagline was: Gerhi Janse van Vuuren writes about building a creative life after midlife through writing and painting and teaching and living life.

But before I change it, let me describe the path I am taking.

What is the business about?

At the core I am moving to a business of writing and publishing. I have been doing it for a while, but that was more of a hobby. Not in intent but in the way that I implemented my strategies.

I want to move into specific niche writing an publishing with non-fiction. Between me and my wife Petro Janse van Vuuren we cover quite wide field of experience. We also have a big overlap and shared concerns. Amongst these interests there are a specific niche we can cover. And as a micro-publisher and expert writing duo we will be bringing out a number of books over the next one to two years.

That is the core of the plan.

Adjacent to that I write strange little longish short stories. I want to continue doing these. I want to illustrate them and publish them also and market them to the best of my ability. That is my creative work and the practice on which the non-fiction will partly be based.

In that strategy I am following and aligning myself with practices and approaches by other writers, publishers and content creators that seem to have worked in the past and promise to work in the future. The first of these is in setting up a mailing list building program. That is the next thing I will start with after finishing this post.

And rewriting my blog title and tagline.

Some military strategist, or possibly all of them, said that no plan will survive contact with the enemy. I feel the same way about setting writing goals, because in my experience they never survive. But not when they come into contact with the enemy, leaving it for the moment to your imagination who the enemy in writing is, but when they come into contact with my own implementation. Because there normally isn’t any.

I am very capable at formulating goals, plans and grand strategies. But not so good at following through.

Sometimes it is good to have plans and goals. Sometimes it isn’t. For the moment I am leaning towards the notion that it is good. Not taking them seriously thus far have led to writing productivity and quality which has been less than stellar.

Therefore I am revisiting and refining my writing goals.

This goes with A Round of Words in 80 Days update. Which is a writing challenge for people who also have a life. Which does not mean that the writing challenge should not be challenging. The current round will run until 25 December 2014. And the goals that I redefine below is for this period. Short term goals then.

I have set out goals earlier for A Round of Words in 80 Days but this was done very fast, without a proper consideration of what is possible or not. Now I am reconsidering and revisiting my goals, especially because I am rethinking where I am going with my writing and creative career. More about that in other posts to come.

There are obviously two broad areas I am writing in (as are most other writers). These are fiction and non-fiction. I always want to write faction because I find it weird to define something for the most part by what it isn’t. It is similar to referring to singing as non-talking, or running as non-walking. Or day as non-night.

My fiction writing has especially suffered under the non-implementation of strategies and goals. I have many unfinished projects and half-baked ideas as proof. And as a long-term strategy I would like to, at some point, attend to these unfinished chapters.

Restating my writing goals, again

I write fiction under a pseudonym: Gerhi Feuren. I chose this mostly because it is short and I thought that for branding issues it would be good to have a shorter name. Branding is another strategy I have not employed well. But I like the name and will continue to write my fiction using this moniker. I am busy working on two fiction projects as Gerhi Feuren.

1. A Novella of at least 25,000 words. Of these I have already written 4,500 words which leaves just over 20,000 to go. I want to write these words, finish the story, and then edit and publish the novella before the end of the round.
2. A series of short stories, each about 3,200 words long. I am scrapping this goal. The story bits I have written I want to recast as a novella. After I have finished the one above. I am deliberately limiting my fiction writing, as I am with everything else in my goal restatement.

I also have non-fiction pots on the brew. Quite a good brew. Just the other night I read a post at an exhibition opening and one of my students said it was deep. Writing under my own name as Gerhi Janse van Vuuren there I have two non-fiction projects.

1. I am developing and researching a short non-fiction book idea to write with my wife, Petro Janse van Vuuren. We have wanted to work together for the longest time and now have ideas that would make a nice little book. Possibly a whole series later.
2. I also want to improve the quality of blog posts I am putting up here. That means writing both meatier and slightly more edited posts. Doing this I also want to stick to more specific topics. I have chosen three topics for the moment: Scrap that. I will post when and what I can and how long I want it to be, or have time for.

In terms of publishing I am also working on some changes. Thus far I have worked solely as a self-publisher. I would like to change that, establishing a publishing company. Doing this require a number of official actions, bank accounts, income tax, user accounts and so forth. I won’t list what needs doing but I will state that establishing the company is a priority in order to move forward, especially in terms of the co-writing projects.

Goals are worth nothing without strategies and tactics. You have to know how you are going to be able to do what you want to do. These are some of my specific strategies:

1. I am using 750 Words as a tool to help me write at least 750 words every day. It is the method I have used to write my novella so far and what I will continue to use to finish the story. It will take me 28 more sessions to finish the first draft. I say sessions because I do skip some fiction days and just journal, because the fiction requires a wee bit of preparation and I can’t always do that.
2. I will be using my blog posts and especially my two RoW80 updates to keep me on track and to work out the progress I am making.
3. I need to do some binge writing.
4. Lastly I have a partner to help keep me accountable. We will have to lean on each other because the last bit of this year is going to be a howler.

To here the original draft, minus the changes and deletions I made just now. From here fresh words and a new, restated goal, which has a huge impact on the above. But first a bit of background.

I have always wanted to live a creative life. Meaning that I want to make things and make my living by making things. That has not worked out so far. It is a combination of a ill-defined strategies, lack of drive, changes in direction, children and old age (Not so old, but old enough).

I have decided that I will change that. But I cannot do it with a full-time job and a family if I push it to the absolute limit. My job, my family and myself will not survive it. Therefore I have chosen to place a serious limitation on what I can and will do.

In working towards changing my life to a creative existence I will put in 89 minutes of concentrated effort every day. That is right, one hour and twenty-nine minutes. That is all. When the timer goes of I will stop what I am doing and go live my life.

Update: I have retracted the 89 Minute strategy. It is a creative process you can read more about here.

Doing more with less

Here are a list of things that will have to fit into this time:

• Writing blog posts (including this one)
• Writing fiction in any form
• Writing non-fiction (except for work related writing)
• Building my website
• Fiddling with my blog template or my website design
• Tweeting, facebooking or any other social media
• Any business related reading and research (this includes publishing, writing and social media)
• Any publishing including design and formatting
• Any marketing, newsletters, blog hops, twittering or whatever flavour comes up
• Anything else related I cannot think of right now
• Oh, and all planning, strategising, systems building and so forth

Basically then, anything that can be considered extra work.

And from that it should be clear that I will have to be very clever with my time. Not wasting any of it on just sitting and staring at a screen. I also suspect that it will mean that I will have to be much more realistic in terms of planning, and I will have to accept that what I manage to do, is what I manage to do. And that is it.

Why 89 Minutes?

There is of course a reason for choosing 89 minutes. Two reasons in fact:

1. 89 is the 12th number in the Fibonacci sequence. It is nice to give an arbitrary decision some semblance of higher validity.
2. 89 minutes is more than an hour but less than an hour and a half. Short enough to stay awake and finish up when the day have run away from me. And long enough to get something done.

I am thinking of changing my blog tagline to something such as Creating a New Life in 89 Minutes of Extra Time. Or maybe even as a blog title. When I have posted this and there is time left I’ll get onto that next.

Update: I briefly changed the Blog Title and Tagline. Read about it here.

Lastly, this is still a blog hop. Find the other writing bloggers here.

Now, this question can at the most be rhetorical. Because the answer cannot be: Yes, and can everybody just stop writing and publishing them for a minute.

With both a growing worldwide population, a diminishing of illiteracy, and a progressively easier system of publishing books it is unlikely that there can be less books in the world. If only one writer keeps writing, finishing one book per decade, there will be more books in the world. But that one book will not make it one too many because there are too many already.

Too many for one singular person to read.

Too many for every single author to make a living wage from their writing.

Too many to even realistically comprehend.

In commenting on this post Professor Paul Richardson agree that the question is rhetorical. Then he quotes Ecclesiastes 12:12 ‘of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh’. And then he comes to the conclusion that here, amongst other places, the Bible gets it wrong.

Or does it?

Of making many books there is no end?

Isn’t that exactly the point? Ecclesiastes was not the last book ever written. Books have been written since. Books are currently being written. There is no foreseeable end of books being written at all.

Ecclesiastes 12:12 says there is no end to the writing of books. I can’t see the end. Can you?

Unless Professor Paul Richardson meant that the second half of the quoted verse is wrong. But that is a topic for another post.