It's 8:30 a.m. and I am at my desk.
Well, desk is a misnomer. I'm sitting at the kitchen table in our apartment in downtown Toronto, Canada. But this table is where I work, so until the family comes home it’s my desk.
My name is Erik Buchanan. I’m a professional writer, and I make a pretty good living at it. “This Writing Life” is a series about how I got here, how I stay here, how you can get here, and what all of us who write can do to improve our writing.
My desk chair faces a wall. There’s a window beside me but I have to crane my neck to look out, which keeps me from staring at the garden and daydreaming.
Instead, if I look up from my computer I can see two whiteboards. The smaller whiteboard lists my projects. There are about a dozen, and so far everything is running on time.
The big whiteboard shows the story arcs for my new novel, True Magics, (due out this fall). The story arcs are written in in eight different colours and look a mess, but they tells me exactly what I need to fix.
Today’s writing tasks:
Tomorrow looks similar, except it’s six hours of editing True Magics, seven if I can squeeze in the time.
This is where I am: in my office, writing for a living. And I love it.
So how did I get here?
I’ll talk about that next week.
Well, desk is a misnomer. I'm sitting at the kitchen table in our apartment in downtown Toronto, Canada. But this table is where I work, so until the family comes home it’s my desk.
My name is Erik Buchanan. I’m a professional writer, and I make a pretty good living at it. “This Writing Life” is a series about how I got here, how I stay here, how you can get here, and what all of us who write can do to improve our writing.
My desk chair faces a wall. There’s a window beside me but I have to crane my neck to look out, which keeps me from staring at the garden and daydreaming.
Instead, if I look up from my computer I can see two whiteboards. The smaller whiteboard lists my projects. There are about a dozen, and so far everything is running on time.
The big whiteboard shows the story arcs for my new novel, True Magics, (due out this fall). The story arcs are written in in eight different colours and look a mess, but they tells me exactly what I need to fix.
Today’s writing tasks:
- This blog post
- Four hours of ghostwriting for a client,
- Three hours of editing on True Magics
Tomorrow looks similar, except it’s six hours of editing True Magics, seven if I can squeeze in the time.
This is where I am: in my office, writing for a living. And I love it.
So how did I get here?
I’ll talk about that next week.
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