What I do with all my time

Fun times have come to Sun Meadow. This week we started afternoon ‘Hand and Foot’ card games. I won’t explain the entire game, but suffice it to say that I really enjoy playing and chatting with the others who join in. I spend a couple of hours each afternoon up at the lodge to play. That is two hours I’ve reserved just to relax and not think about anything else. Much.

I was asked by a reader the other day, how much time I spend writing and researching each day. I thought about it briefly. Even with my two hours out of the day to play cards with other old folks like myself, I spend around eight to ten hours a day writing, researching, proofreading, editing, and formatting my books. Here’s an example of the writing portion back when I was still keeping track of my time on projects. (I abandoned tracking everything because I just didn’t have time to keep these records and had already answered the question satisfactorily for myself.)

Those are the writing hours on one project at a time when I was working on three, and preparing two books for publication in December, and re-reading/editing/designing a series for special re-release editions for my patrons. But it gives you an idea of how fast I work and how long when I’m writing a first draft of a new book.

Remember that first draft has to be re-written a couple of times before it goes out to various editors who send it back to me all marked up. I read those returned manuscripts as I decide whether each correction needs to be made. Sometimes they are a matter of opinion regarding a correct word or punctuation. Sometimes I discover that I really didn’t say something correctly and I need to re-write again.

I typically produce four ‘final’ versions of each book. I do all my own coding, formatting, cover design, and posting of my books. I produce two html versions, one for serialization on StoriesOnline.net and one for release on my own website at either nathaneverett.com or devonlayne.com. Then I design an eBook and a paperback, generating ePUB and PDF files for uploading to major distribution sites.

For the past two-and-a-half months, since I first conceived the idea for the Team Manager series, I have been writing the first draft of a 3,500 word chapter each day. These first draft chapters are followed by my "Sausage Grinder" tier patrons on Patreon. I dreamt the idea for this series on March 14 and started writing furiously on March 15. The first volume was published May 25.

But the area that I probably spend the most time on is research. The reader who asked the question speculated that I knew a lot about girls' basketball. He was referring to my newly-released book, Team Manager: SWISH! So I responded with the list of things I’d been researching in order to write the 155,000 words of this book and the 125,000 that I’ve written so far in the sequel.

I’ve researched the history of girls’ basketball in Iowa, dating from 1924 forward, the creation of the IGHSAU, 6-on-6 basketball (abandoned in 1994), corn production in Iowa, hog production in Iowa, the Omaha District of the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation, the relevant state and national laws on moonshine and distilling, the tournament schedules and results of the state basketball and track tournaments, eye surgery, corrective lenses, makes and models of AR15 type rifles, school year schedules, weather patterns, Title IX, driver’s license qualifications, hay production and process, various tractor types and manufacturers, stretching and warmup exercises, SPARQ fitness testing, shared education programs with local community colleges, drug trafficking and sex trafficking, cheerleader competitions, sizes of basketballs, weights of shot puts, how to become a referee, Child Protective Services, athletic taping techniques, residential mental and behavioral inpatient centers, jobs for the handicapped, lethal doses of fentanyl and alcohol, wood chippers, Family and Consumer Sciences, sports management responsibilities, personal training vs. athletic training, choroidal folds, and Old Mother West Wind stories. Just as a sampling.

That doesn’t include things like searching for cover art, type fonts, reference photos for characters, national sports records and rule books, the cost of uniforms, the difference between silage and fodder, the difference between pig, hog, and boar, aerial photos of towns and sports fields, maps, the sizes and specifications of various basketballs, and what’s in a standard sports first aid kit.

Those are all for one series. I’m working on three different series at the moment. It’s not difficult for me to spend hours link surfing. I just pretend I have a reason to.

When it comes down to it, I spend all my time coming up with new ways to entertain people with my words. I don’t write for a living; I write to live.