Mondays are notorious for being the least-favorite day of the week for the majority of working people. Just because I work for myself doesn’t mean I’m any different. While I don’t dislike Mondays, I’m certainly a lot less productive on Monday than on most other days of the week. But I’ve figured out a nice little secret to dealing with Mondays if you’re anything like me.

Don’t fight it.

That’s right, don’t fight the Monday blahs. I don’t. And because of that, my Mondays are much less stressful than they used to be.

See, I used to treat Monday like any other workday. I got up in the morning and tried to get as much work done as possible before I called it quits for the day. And that usually resulted in me feeling like I hadn’t gotten as much done as I should have at the end of the day. After all, if I could write two articles on the average Wednesday, why could I barely outline one on a Monday?

But the truth is, I’m just naturally less productive on Mondays than on other days. I’m usually coming off a very busy weekend and sometimes I don’t make it to bed until after midnight on Sundays. So it’s no wonder Mondays aren’t my best day.

Finally, I started just not worrying about how much work I get done on Mondays. I use it as a sort of planning day. I try to get everything in order for the rest of the week. I do some research. I catch up on email. I update my productivity system to reflect what I have to do that week. And when I get sick of work for the day (which could happen anywhere between 1:00 and 5:00), I stop working.

Occasionally, I write on Mondays. But only if the mood strikes me. Sometimes I edit on Mondays, but I’ve found that’s not always productive, and I either have a hard time focusing or I tend to nitpick and be too harsh (not good for editor-writer relations).

On some Mondays, I go visit my grandmother, who lives a little over an hour from me. If I didn’t make it to see her on the weekend, Monday afternoons seem like as good a time as any. It brightens my day and hers (she’s 90 years old and just gave up living alone this winter).

Since I started treating Mondays as a “workday lite”, I’ve found I’m actually much more productive the rest of the week. I wake up on Tuesday ready to get tons of stuff done. And I don’t dread Mondays. In fact, I look forward to them, as I love the work I do and don’t feel the pressure I used to to get everything possible done every single day. Sometimes it is better to put off till tomorrow what you could do today.

Here we are, on the cusp of a new decade. I will be the first to admit I am wholly unprepared for 2010 (and let’s please call it twenty-ten, NOT two-thousand-ten; after all, we say “nineteen-ten” not “one-thousand-nine-hundred-ten”), but that doesn’t mean I haven’t given it a lot of thought.

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I started on a new novel last week. I had said I wouldn’t start working on this one until after I’d finished editing my nonfiction book (which is coming along nicely), but the story crystallized for me on Wednesday morning and by Friday I just couldn’t help myself. Read the rest of this entry »

This is going to be another short one. On a personal note, my freelance writing has really picked up recently, with three new inquiries in the past couple of week and two new regular gigs. Keep an eye on my portfolio page for updates on new articles I’m writing. I’ve also picked up a ton of new Twitter followers (you can follow me @cameron_chapman if you aren’t already).

Dan Holloway wrote a great article on the future of books over at the Streamwriting site (which is run by Hannah Davis). It’s a great article. Dan is really on top of new technology coming out in the publishing world and is taking advantage of a lot of it himself (have you seen the interactive novel he’s writing in a Facebook group?) At some point in the future I’m supposed to have an article going up on the same site. Stay tuned for that.

I am almost finished with the website for the new book. It’s currently in the hands of it’s first beta readers and I’ll be starting some edits this weekend on the first few chapters. I’m forever greatful to those who are taking the time to read it and they’ll all be mentioned in the acknowledgements and possibly get a case of champagne if the book does really well…

Nathan Bransford has his usual excellent round up of other publishing news. My favorite of the stories he mentions is the one from the New York Times addressing piracy concerns over ebooks. Very interesting read.

I make a living writing. It may not be a great living, but then again, I don’t really work that much (less than twenty hours a week on paid work). I’ve been making at least a portion of my monthly writing for almost two years now. Read the rest of this entry »

Staying motivated over the course of any long-term project can be tough. Writing a book is no different. When you’re looking ahead at weeks or even months of writing, maintaining momentum gets tricky. My novels generally go pretty quickly, but this new nonfiction writing project is moving much slower than my previous books. With all the research involved, I’m only managing a couple thousand words a day. Read the rest of this entry »

I am currently working on my first non-fiction book. While I’ve completed somewhere around a thousand blog posts and articles over the past couple of years, this is my first attempt at book-length non-fiction. It’s a bit of a daunting task, the idea of writing 250 or so pages about something that I didn’t make up. And the idea that I will not be judged just based on my words and their ability to entertain, but also on the accuracy and usefulness of those words, is kind of scary. Read the rest of this entry »

To date, I’ve completed at least one draft on five different novels. Two were fantasy, one was science fiction, one was slipstream fiction (though on rewriting it may just become a mainstream novel), and one was women’s fiction. The first novel I ever wrote was a high fantasy epic. It was terrible. The writing itself wasn’t too horrible and the characters were decent, but the storyline was so cliched that I will never let it see the light of day in its current form. Instead, I’ll take part of the basic concept and two of the main characters and start over from scratch. It will bear little resemblance to the first draft when it’s finished. Read the rest of this entry »