Gail Z Martin, Inside my Writing Life

Ask a dozen authors about their writing process and their lives, and you’ll get a dozen different answers. I can only tell you how it works for us. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

My husband and I write full time now, having both left corporate careers in finance and marketing. Most days, I’d say that writing is less stressful, although there are definitely sometimes where it’s a toss-up. Hands down, writing is much more satisfactory, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

We work from home, so there’s no commute, just us and the dogs now that all of our children are either working or in college or graduate school. Neither of us are morning people, so we don’t get up crazy early, usually around 7 am or so, and make coffee, get breakfast, feed the dogs.

My brain doesn’t really turn on for creative stuff until after lunch, so mornings are allotted for walking the dogs, doing email, getting on social media, running errands and paying bills—the rote kind of things you don’t need a lot of mental juice to handle.

After lunch, we start writing. Usually one of us is writing new material while the other one is reading manuscript. We’ve generally got an outline in hand, so we know where the overall story is going and what needs to happen in each chapter. We work through plot problems when we walk the dogs or go on long car trips. We pass the manuscript back and forth electronically—it took too much paper to keep printing them out! Once a book is done, we may go over it twenty times or so before it’s ready to hand off to an editor and our beta readers, who give us feedback on what works and what doesn’t, and where there are problems that need to be fixed.

I’m generally working on more than one book at a time, on alternating days or weeks. It’s nice because it gives me a little break so I don’t get burned out on a particular story or world.

We have a good idea of what we’re working on every month (and week) of the year by the start of the New Year, if not before. Some of that is driven by publisher contracts and deadlines, and some of it is working around conventions, vacations, and family events. We start with the hard deadlines (contracts) and fill in the series that we self-publish around that, backtiming from when we want to bring out a new book or story. Even the self-published books/stories go through the editing/beta reading process, so there’s a lot of work to be done before they can launch—and we’ve got to do the formatting and arrange for the covers for the indie projects on top of writing them!

We take a break for dinner, and then we usually write until about 9:30 at night. After that, it’s time to do some reading for fun and/or watch TV.

I travel to about 15 sci-fi conventions a year. Larry attends fewer, so that we don’t have to board the dogs as much. Conventions are an important way we connect to readers, meet other authors, and get in on new projects like anthologies. They’re a lot of fun, but they’re primarily work because we’re either on panels, networking with other authors, or behind a table selling books. I’ve learned to write in hotel rooms, on planes, trains, ships and cars and in airports. Sometimes, a convention will be in a city where we’ve got a series set, so we’ll tack on an extra day for research and go visit locations we want to use in the book/story.

Our writing life isn’t very exciting, but we’re fortunate enough to be doing what we want to do, bringing stories out to readers for entertainment and escape. I can’t think of a better way to spend my time!

About the Author

The Hawthorn Moon is the annual summer blog tour for Gail Z. Martin, and features guest blog posts, giveaways, surprises, excerpts and more on sixteen blogs worldwide. Find the master list of posts and goodies at www.GailZMartin.com

Gail Z. Martin is the author of Scourge: A Darkhurst novel, the first in a brand new epic fantasy series from Solaris Books. Also new are: The Shadowed Path, part of the Chronicles of the Necromancer universe (Solaris Books); Vendetta: A Deadly Curiosities Novel in her urban fantasy series set in Charleston, SC (Solaris Books); Shadow and Flame the fourth and final book in the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga (Orbit Books); and Iron and Blood a new Steampunk series (Solaris Books) co-authored with Larry N. Martin.

She is also author of Ice Forged, Reign of Ash and War of Shadows in The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga, The Chronicles of The Necromancer series (The Summoner, The Blood King, Dark Haven, Dark Lady’s Chosen); The Fallen Kings Cycle (The Sworn, The Dread) and the urban fantasy novels Deadly Curiosities . Gail writes three ebook series: The Jonmarc Vahanian Adventures, The Deadly Curiosities Adventures and The Blaine McFadden Adventures. The Storm and Fury Adventures, steampunk stories set in the Iron & Blood world, are co-authored with Larry N. Martin.

Gail is also the organizer for #HoldOnToTheLight, authors blogging about depression, anxiety, PTSD, suicide, self-harm and other mental health topics to encourage inclusiveness in fandom and stand in solidarity with fans. Learn more at www.HoldOnToTheLight.com

Find her at www.GailZMartin.com, on Twitter @GailZMartin, on Facebook.com/WinterKingdoms, at DisquietingVisions.com blog and GhostInTheMachinePodcast.com, on Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/GailZMartin and free excerpts on Wattpad http://wattpad.com/GailZMartin.