9 Ways To Sneakily Get More Reading Time:

Can't find the time to read? Luckily you have me. Here are my top 9 tips for getting more reading done!

1. Buy your spouse and children movie/sports tickets.

 Get them all out of the house at the same time and out of your hair. It’s great if they can all do something together, but be careful not to get roped in as a family event. If you do somehow get roped in, take your book in your bag and feign diarrhea, then leave. Meet up with them again when it’s over. You should have earned at least two hours of reading, even if they were in a public bathroom or the foyer of a cinema.

2. Pretend you’re having an affair, but it’s with a book and you’re lying on a blanket in the park.

Having an affair requires a lot of subterfuge, lying and finding blocks of time to spend with your illicit lover. However, since no one really wants two lovers interfering with their reading time, make your torrid betrayal with a book. Or several. You hussy.

3. Hide in your car in the garage.

What is a car really, but a cone of silence? Four walls, a roof and some chairs that you can sit in and ignore your kids and that bloody computer game they love so much.  They can’t ask you for a drink and snacks if they can’t find you. Just slip into the garage, cuddle up in the car and get a few chapters in before they seek you out, like some hellish, unwelcome game of hide and seek.

4. Say you’re going grocery shopping, order delivery and go to the library.

Did you know you can have groceries delivered these days? Organise your shopping list online, place your order for later that evening then tell your family you need to go to the grocery store because they eat like horses. Only the grocery store is really the library and you get to spent the afternoon in the blessed quiet, surrounded by books. Stop somewhere and get chocolate on the way home too.

5. Fake your own death.

Sometimes, your family and friends can be doggedly persistent or have stopped falling for your other ploys to get them to leave you alone for one goddamn hour. In these cases, I highly recommend faking your own death and moving to another country under an assumed name. Pick a country with a good postal service for all those amazon orders! And, of course, somewhere with picturesque reading spots. New Zealand is nice.

6. Sleeping spells.

If you don’t want to leave everything behind, you just want some time to yourself and that’s not an unreasonable thing to ask for, goddamnnit, then it might be worth investing in some magical supplies and simply casting your own sleeping spells. Like all DIY projects, it can take a bit of time and there is a learning curve. If money isn’t an issue, you can always hire someone else to do it for you, but doing it yourself can also be considered a skill boost which can be beneficial when looking for a raise or a new job. Two birds, one very sleepy stone!

7. Pact with the fairy king.

If you’ve read enough books, you probably know making pacts with fairy kings is a terrible idea. However, if you’d read enough books, you wouldn’t be looking for solutions to let you read more books, would you?

8. Use a time machine to travel back to when you were a kid and had school holidays and used them to annoy your mother so she couldn’t read.

Remember when you were a kid and it was holidays and you were bored so you annoyed your mother who was just trying to put her feet up and read for moment? She wants you to remember that moment. She has been looking forward to this exact scenario for almost all of your life. Revenge is sweet.

9. Become a fourth dimensional being and exist in a reality that transcends time.

I feel like this one is self-explanatory.

If you’re looking for something new to read, can I recommend you take a look at Zaide Bishop’s Bones of Eden Trilogy? Its available for pre-order and has mutant crocodiles, queer themes, far too much killing for a romance series and super intelligent pigs.

You can find them here:

www.zaidebishop.com

Writing Exercise: Your Perfect Book

This week I am shamelessly stealing a writing exercise from a writing masterclass I am taking at the moment. I am altering it slightly, but all credit goes to the original creator—I’m just not sure who that is.

I am a person who has a lot of book ideas. More than I could ever feasibly write. So I don’t usually do any ‘idea generation’ exercises, as the last thing I want is more ideas. However as I am doing all the exercises in this masterclass, I did this one. And while it didn’t give me a new idea, it did make me reorganise some of my priorities and remind me what I want from my writing career.

So without further ado:

If you could walk into a bookstore right now and buy any book that doesn’t exist, your dream book, what would it be like?

When I first read this question, I realised instantly it was a book I had started writing and put away. My dream book is already plotted and I have written several drafts of it. So, this year I am going to look at tackling it again. Amid other projects.

However maybe you aren’t there yet. Maybe you can’t answer that question easily. So here are some more questions to help you.

What genre is it?

EG: Fantasy, romance, horror, drama?

What tropes, themes or narrative elements does it contain (or do you love most)? Write your top five, or ten, tropes.

EG: Dragons, Arthurian myth, space cowboys, girl disguised as a boy, queer romance, viral outbreak, vampires, political intrigue, marriage of convenience, etc.

What is the tone?

EG: Dark, light-hearted, tense, epic, humorous, melancholy, etc.

What sort of characters do you love reading about?

What are your top five, or ten, favourite characters from books, movies, TV, etc?

What do you like about them?

White a list of twenty character traits for each one.

You can use these three mini exercises to mix and match and create your new characters in your novel.

What sort of relationships do you like?

What have been your favourite relationships in books/movies/tv shows? Make a list of ten.

Are they mostly romantic? Siblings? Parents and children? Friends? Protagonist and antagonist?

What relationships do you want to explore?

What relationship have you been longing to see and read about?

What is the setting?

Is it on earth or a fictional world?

When is it set, now, in the future, in the past?

Where is it set? London? A fantasy china? A futuristic Africa? What times and places fascinate you?

Is there a time in history that you love? Or a type of setting trope? Make a list.

What are your favourite pivotal/key scenes?

Make a list of twenty or thirty key scenes that moved or awed you in your favourite books, movies and TV shows. The scenes that made you feel the strongest emotion.

Can you group them into types? Twists? Cliff-hangers? Big reveals? Declarations of love? Victories? Darkest moments?

What type of scenes are you excited to write about? What type of scene are you scared to try? How could you structure these ideas to have as many of these awesome scenes as possible in one book?

If you do this exercise and feel like sharing, I would love to read what you come up with.

Post it here or even email it to me. I’d be fascinating to see what other people’s perfect books look like. And I hope if this hasn’t given you a brand-new idea, it has at least made you realise what you should be writing, like it did for me.

Happy writing!

The Right Time To Write

A few weeks ago, a friend who has read my time management book 'Half a Million Words in Nine Months' asked me: 'Do you feel like you need to be in a zone or space for writing?'

It's a good question, because I hear a lot of writers talking about 'the zone' or 'the muse'. However almost universally, the long time, prolific authors don't believe in it, or say you have to teach yourself to make 'the zone' when you need it.

I told my friend (who is a new mother) that it was like being a mother. You just do it. You don't get to not do it. You don't get to decide for a few days that you don't feel like being a mother and go back to being a single party girl. You just have to be a mother. She said her manuscript wasn't screaming or kicking or hungry and latched on to her whether she liked it or not, and that's fair enough. It was, perhaps, a bit of an intense analogy.

If you want to write seriously, you should treat it like a job though. You probably don't wake up 'feeling' like you want to go to work. Even if you love your job. However you need the money so you do it. Sometimes it takes some coffee and grumbling, but you do it, because there isn't much choice. If you approach writing with the same attitude, that you just have to do it, you will, well, do it.

As I have said before, however, I rarely have to 'drag' myself to write. I enjoy it. Yes, it is work, yes it is a job, but I like doing it. Even the difficult bits are difficult in a way I enjoy, and I really only struggle when my health makes focusing difficult.

So what about 'the zone'? I think we've all felt it at some point. When the words are flying and you're having a fantastic time and you're so absorbed in the project you don't want to do anything else. It exists, you've felt it. So why do some authors say it's not real?

Brace yourself, I am about to blow your mind.

When you're not in the zone, what you're feeling, that reluctance, that unwillingness to write, is anxiety. There's no 'zone' you need to get into, you're just feeling insecure. The 'zone' you're looking for is ego. Or, at least, the temporarily ability to turn off that voice that says you aren't good enough.

'The zone' is your natural state, without criticism or doubt. It's an unwillingness to write, an apprehension, that is the unbalanced, abnormal state.

The trick is, those big prolific authors? They still feel anxious. They still feel pressure. They still feel like a huge fraud and worry their next book is going to tank. Only it's going to be super public. Everyone is going to know about it and talk about it. That anxiety doesn't go away when you're published. For a lot of people, it gets worse.

The trick is learning to turn that off while you are writing. Be anxious about that shit in the shower or driving or trying to sleep at night, but NOT when you are sitting down to write.

This is why I slow down when I have deadlines. The pressure, the anxiety, makes it difficult for me to write. It's also hard for me to write one book if I am getting edits for another book at the same time, because the criticism overflows and I can hear my editor's voice while I am trying to write. It feels like someone is looking over my shoulder, judging things as I type them.  

You probably know the feeling. The point is, it's just that. It's a feeling. It's not a real thing that is actually happening, it is a thing you are imagining. It's like being deeply traumatised over your parents' death when they are both still alive.

'The zone' is just the times you can turn off that inner criticism for long enough to actually get shit done. There are several ways to achieve this, but what works for you is going to be pretty personal. So I am going to let you figure that out and say this instead:

I'm not going to say you don't deserve criticism. Maybe you're a shit person, I don't know. I am going to say that you and I both know that abusing and berating people doesn't motivate them. So if you keep abusing an berating yourself about your writing, it's not about motivating yourself. It's about making an excuse so you don't have to do it.

But you actually don't have to do it. Creating art is an optional extra in life. Something we are privileged to have the opportunity to do. Don't piss away your chances because your ego isn't playing ball today.

And remember, support other writers. Tell them you're excited to read their stuff, tell them what you love about it. They feel just as insecure about their writing as you do about yours. We're all in this together, start acting like a fucking team.