Every day in the week leading up to the release of my brand-new book The Lost English Girl on March 7, I’m revealing a story, fun fact, or other tidbit about the book. Follow along each day to learn more about the book!
The Lost English Girl was my first book written as a full-time author.
It’s a common misconception that all published authors write full-time. The reality is that most of us, at one point or another, have held a day job that allows us to write during little snatched bits of time: before or after work, on lunch breaks, on the weekends.
That is what I did for about ten years—first as a journalist and then as the editorial director for a tech company’s content team—before I was fortunate enough to quit my day job for good in June 2021.
On the advice of a good friend and fellow author who had left a very busy job as an attorney, I took a month off between leaving my day job and my first day as a full-time author. I read, cleaned my flat, gardened, went on holiday, saw friends and family—anything that would break all of the habits I’d gained from ten years of working and writing around the clock. Then, on my first day of full-time authorhood, I opened my laptop and began to write The Lost English Girl.
The Lost English Girl is my twelfth novel (my fifth historical fiction book). You might expect, as I did, that after writing twelve books I would have some sense of how to do this. Some level of expertise. Nevermind that every single time I sit down to write a new book, I wonder how on earth I’ve done this.
In the case of this book, I soon realized that I wasn’t just dealing with a case of first page jitters. I was, quite simply, stuck. I’d done this writing thing before, sure, but never when it was my only thing. All of the logistics that I relied upon to make sure that I sat down and wrote a book a year while I was working a day job were reliant on just that: a day job.
When you only have ninety minutes a working day and a few hours on the weekend to write, you become very adept at blocking everything out and focusing on making the most of your time. I took away all of the time pressure of working a day job, and I found myself staring down at eight or nine uninterrupted hours in which I could write. Having an open day was far more jarring to my writing than I expected because there was no pressure on me to get the job done. I would sit down to write, but then a bit of marketing or a bit of admin would distract me and then, the next thing I knew, my partner would be telling me that he was about to start making dinner. I was losing valuable time because, strangely, I had too much time.
I quickly realized that I needed to recreate what my day job had inadvertently given me: structure and a routine.
The Lost English Girl began to flourish (and my word count began to grow) when I went back to basics that I could recreate from my ten years of experience. In the past, I’ve found these four things the most useful when I’m trying to consistently get words on the page:
Having a hard deadline that I could not miss. (Old journalist habits die hard.) For me, this was the Friday before Christmas.
Having a consistent daily word count that must not be missed. For The Lost English Girl, that looked like about 3,000 words per day because I was playing catchup after flailing around for about a month.
Working to a rough overall book outline but then taking fifteen minutes to sketch out a more detailed outline for the next three scenes I’m working on so that I don’t have to stop a good flow and make up what’s going to happen next.
Writing first thing in the morning until I hit my word count. If that took me two hours, I wrote for two hours that day and used the rest of the day for marketing or admin. If it took me eight hours of grinding out a particularly tricky transitional scene? So be it.
This basic set of rules and routine helped me write the 150,000 word first draft of The Lost English Girl. Not all of those words were good. I ended up cutting a lot—the finished book is about 114,000 words—but it helped me create the working routine that I’ve kept since quitting my day job.
Want to learn more about The Lost English Girl? Check back tomorrow or follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and don’t forget that there is still time to preorder your copy of The Lost English Girl in print, ebook, or audiobook!