How to Balance an Unbalanced Writing Life

Lately it feels like I've been putting more effort into my posts over at Beyond the Margins. And I admit, I've been saving some of my ideas for that blog. While some of my posts on Unreliable Narrator are less personal or less about the craft of writing. Mainly, that's a result of having a deadline at BTM. I can see on our Google calendar that once every 11 business days (or so) a sparkling new post is expected of me. I know what I signed up for and if I get overwhelmed I can opt out at any time.

But I'm not going to. Having my own blog and being a writer in great company on a co-op blog is just too good an experience to let flag. So I plan to continue participating in both. It's really a matter of keeping my writing life balanced. Because not only am I blogging, I'm also working on a novel-in-progress, querying agents and smaller publishers regarding my finished novel A Little Disappeared, putting finishing touches on a handful of stories and sending those out to literary magazine, and enjoy contributing literary magazine reviews to The Review Review. 

As a writer who works to pay a mortgage, I need to find that balance of work and writing. My balance is a little unbalanced. I try to use the weekends as much as I can. Weeknights after using my technical writing brain I'm pretty frazzled. But I try to do a little reading, emailing, or social networking. I also try to keep up with the many excellent blogs and websites that help inform writers who are querying, synopsizing, and otherwise seeking publication. Publishing is a business and as such I need to work at it. I know this, I just have to work harder at it.

In general, I'm happy with my writing life. I am able to get up about an hour early each weekday and work on my novel-in-progress. It's slow going, a slog if you will (if it were a song, it would be a dirge or My Bloody Valentine stretching their 4 minute pop ditty You Made Me Realise into a 20-plus minute live sonic assault), but one that moves forward. And soon, I'd like to add to my unbalanced writing life by taking another writing class or reinstating an existing writing group currently on hiatus or joining/starting a new one. But that's a writing life decision for another day.

How do you keep your unbalanced writing life balanced? What goes, what stays, and what kind of schedule do you have just to get through the week?

In the meantime, here's You Made Me Realise for your listening pleasure (or pain, depending):

Query Writing: Get the Basics Down

This morning, instead of starting chapter 6 of my current novel, I'm revising a query letter for my finished novel which I'm marketing to agents and small presses. I've used the same query template for the past couple years, and I felt like it needed to read more contemporary more to today's standards of query presentation.

For some query enlightenment I browsed over to my old friend Query Shark. Query Shark is a working agent's blog to which writers submit real query letters. QS critiques certain ones, giving the poop, the scoop, and the 411 about what she loves, hates, and needs in a query. For writers at the getting-a-book-published stage, her advice (I think it's a her) is essential.

I trolled through the critiques and came across this great piece of query writing advice from the mighty shark herself, which concisely explains what a query should do:

"I think of queries as a bit like what figure skaters used to have to do in the Olympics: compulsory figures. Skaters were required to perform a series of figures, and were judged solely on accuracy not artistry. There is a photo somewhere of a judge measuring a line in the ice with a ruler!

The resemblance of queries to compulsories is this: you have to get the basics down in the query. Your artistry shows in your pages. Yes your voice comes through in your query. Yes there is style there. But mostly you've got to communicate some basic info: what the book is about, and the stakes involved."

Word.