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Welcome back. I am Rekka, writing science fiction and fantasy as R.J. Theodore, and you, my audience, are coming to me one of two ways. You are either watching this video as my R.J. Theodore YouTube monthly shop-talk or you are listening as a subscriber, hopefully, to Hybrid Author Podcast. The podcast is audio only and, of course, you have audio and visual on YouTube. Consume how you like! Please interact, though, and share it with a friend, subscribe, et cetera. Leave a review. Those would all be great, wonderful things.

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So, the topic for this month, May 2019, is the orderly?—perhaps. Panicked? —definitely—process of scheduling out a hybrid author’s publication calendar. So I, myself, am a hybrid author. Conveniently, since that is the name of the podcast, anyway. I have a trilogy of books coming out through Parvus Press. Flotsam came out in March of 2018, Salvage comes out this September of 2019, and Cast Off should be coming out in 2020 at some point, I do not have a date yet. And so those are my traditionally published books.

I am at the mercy of the publisher’s calendar, of course, that’s part of the deal. As a result of that, I don’t know, necessarily, when things are going to happen, when they are scheduled to have copy edits, etc. These things tend to pop up, so what I really need to get in the habit of doing, I’ve realized, is not be crunched for time when I’m trying to meet my own publishing schedule. I have several various stream of publishing. I have my Patreon, at patreon.com/rjtheodore where I publish monthly episodes of Phantom Traveler and those episodes are paired— sometimes, I might be a little bit behind— with an illustration. That content comes out monthly.

Now, I started off 2019 by writing a bunch of those episodes. I wanted to do the drawings monthly just to keep up my illustration skills, so when I fell behind, I didn’t have a back-up because I didn’t batch those. But I did batch the writing. Now, the end of this month is the last batched episode of Phantom Traveler. So I need to be moving ahead on writing the rest of those for this year. That’s June through November. I do take December “off” from the Patreon content, but I will probably be using December to catch up on illustrations— the way things are going.

So, yes. I have content going out through Patreon. From last year’s Patreon—and I will hold this up for the viewers on YouTube— I have a collected book of the 24 episodes that I did in 2018. In 2019, as I said, I’m only doing them monthly. I decided that 24 was a lot. I’m writing the same amount of words but—am I writing the same amount of words? No, I don’t think I am. I used the illustration to take the place of the other episode each month. So this book is now in some form of process to move toward publication. I wanted to have it out this month, that was my original plan, it might have been earlier originally. Originally. I keep adjusting because Salvage has been a bit of a process and I have made a lot of major revisions to the opening of Salvage, more than expected, honestly, and so that has caused me to fall behind on quite a few of my self-publishing goals.

So what I decided to do was treat this like a publishing house and come up with a production schedule for when I wanna release my books. So then I can work backward from there. So what I did was I started a timeline project in Asana. I have tasks in there for each step of the publication process, for each of the books I’m planning to release going forward, as far as I am aware of them. So that it’s not just, “Oh, I wanna release this book in August.” It’s, “I wanna release this book, therefore I should have scheduled my copyeditor by such and such date.”

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What I want to do is get back to what I learned in my brief, one year of interior design in college. I am very grateful that that year was not wasted, and that I learned a lot about process. It was the first time that I’d ever had an instructor who said, “This is due way out here, but what I want to see from you is this step and then this step and this step in the interim. So picking out your fabric swatches, picking out your paint chips—” Things like that which, I don’t know when I might have started it. You know, well hopefully I would have started it right away. But as things start to fall behind, how do you stay on task?

The best way, and the thing that I really learned in that class, in that curriculum, was to make sure that I had a plan for each week. What was I going to be working on? And I sort of do that. I have a planner book and I write out, at the beginning of each week, what my tasks are that week, what my goals are. I have goals for each individual day, the top four things I need to be working on. I make the top thing a personal project, I make the other three things, things for work or other people. I’m trying to keep my focus on my own goals as primary. So I do that every week, but it doesn’t let you look ahead months, you know, a super number of weeks ahead. So I’m using Asana as a way to map out the production schedule for a book.

There was a service that seemed like it was going to be really handy and I cannot remember— it might have been called— no, I don’t know. [ETA: It was https://www.bookplanner.com/] Sorry. It was $10 a month, which at the time seemed pricey. Now, if it did what I wanted it to, it would have been really handy. But it didn’t let me do things out of order. Like it wouldn’t let me even consider that I had the cover done until I had earlier stages, like the draft, done. Sometimes you have the cover done first and you’re just sitting there and you can’t check it off. It was just a little frustrating. I couldn’t look ahead and say, “Well, I can’t be working on the draft right now because it’s with a reader, what else can I do?” And because I can’t check off the draft, I can’t move on to the next thing.

I’ve always wanted to create a web app that does what I wanted it to do, but that’s, you know, one more thing that I don’t have time to do. Would someone out there please create a web app that lets me manage my production calendar and lets me be a little bit more flexible with it? That lets me, you know, look ahead, rather than doing things in the prescribed order of actions. I don’t remember what that—it was called like Book Calendar or something, I don’t remember. It didn’t work out, so don’t go use it. Maybe it’s better now, but I have a feeling it probably evaporated rather than expanded.

I’m using Asana as my task manager. I’m using Asana because I use Asana for work and other things as well. It seems like the less places I’m splitting my focus, the better. Unfortunately, what it means is that I have a litany of tasks that I get emailed about every morning from Asana, and I tend to just delete the email without reading it and going, “Yeah, when I log in I’ll look at my task list depending on which area of my life I want to work on.” I have things that are just house chores and feeding pets that don’t get fed every day. Because we have lizards and their metabolism. You know, things like that. It can be a little bit of a heavy load to look at, but I think it’s offset by the fact that I only have to look at one place.

I have a publication timeline, and when I add tasks and due dates, they appear on a calendar. At the beginning of every month I can see and look ahead and say, “Oh, I really need to be working on that draft!” or “I really need to schedule that copyeditor,” or “I haven’t reached out to beta readers yet, I’d better get on that.” So for each of the seven—I think?— current projects I’m working on, I am creating this calendar.

What it’s showing me is that I’m going to have to be working on more than one thing at a time. I can’t just focus on this draft and then get to the other stuff after. Because it’s just not going to happen that way. So I’m going to have to say, “Okay, my morning writing time will go to this. That gets an hour. Then my lunch time, I might be able to work on this aspect, which doesn’t need me to be in that creative flow state so much as just focused. Or in the evenings, I’m on the couch, I can be working on this.” So that’s something that I’m just working into my current process.

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The thing that occurs to me, if I’m being completely honest, is that when I wrote Flotsam, I was not doing anything else except for my day job. I wrote Flotsam and I wrote it in a month of hours in the morning and maybe a couple hours on the weekends. So I said, “Hey, cool, I can write a novel in a month.”