A Day In The Life of Bree & Donna (Version: Bree)

A question I get a lot is “How do you two do it? How do you write so much?” I wonder sometimes if people imagine me holed up in a writer’s lair, hunched over a keyboard, pounding out thousands of words in fits of brilliant inspiration. Or maybe they imagine both of us setting aside several hours for hardcore writing as a team, where ideas and words flow and we write 5,000 words in the span of a few hours.

That would be way cooler than the truth.

A typical day goes something like this:

10-11 am: At this point I wander into my home office. If I forgot to set my messenger to away the previous night I sleepily consider the 5-10 messages I got, including one from P. Andrews that invariably says, “YOU’RE NOT REALLY THERE ARE YOU?” He is always correct in that assumption. Then I check my work e-mail and scratch my head a few times while drinking water and pondering if I’m too lazy to eat breakfast.

11 am: I am too lazy to eat breakfast.

11 am – 12 pm: I mostly concentrate on clearing out all of the important e-mails I’ve gotten while everyone else was starting their industrious work day. This is mostly writing business because, while I live in the central time zone, my office is in California and so I don’t have to be up and alert before 10. If I’m feeling very industrious, I may check my writing folder to see if I have any of our current drafts, and write my response to them. It takes 5-10 minutes.

12 pm: By this point Donna is online as well, though she may be cleaning the living room in between feeding her toddlers. Sometimes we bitch about our wacky dreams or talk about anything important that showed up in our e-mail. If we’re determined, we will send our current projects back and forth during that time, in between our other tasks.

1-3 pm: Work, work, work. I’m answering my phone and working on database projects. I might be talking to clients about a new website. Possibly the art director at Cobblestone Press sent me a new assignment, and I’ve decided to take a break from building a database to do that. Every fifteen or so minutes I’m probably taking a 1 minute break to shoot a reply back on a project. Maybe it’s only 50 words at a time, but it’s a few hundred an hour and there’s two of us so that’s maybe 500 words an hour. While I’m doing my “day job” work in between replies, Donna is somehow managing to feed, entertain and clean around a 2 ½ and 4 year old, and also edit our latest finished work or review our editor’s notes. I get up to walk once in a while because staring at a computer all day makes me crazy.

3 pm: I realize that I forgot to eat lunch. Donna makes angry emoticon faces at me until I do it. If I don’t cop to having left my desk for food, she calls me. She’s SUCH a mom.

3 – 5 pm: The work/write/work/work/email/write cycle continues. By now we’ve done 4-5 hours at ~500 words an hour, so even by stealing just a few minutes away every once in a while, we’ve hopefully made some progress. If it’s a very busy day for either of us we may not have written at all—there’s always editing and promo and when I’m programming for my day job I can’t stop until I’ve finished a section. But we’re the cute little turtles that are plodding around and planning on winning that race some day.

5 pm: My husband comes home from work and listens to the daily gossip. If there is new cover art to admire or contracts to cheer about, he obliges.

5 – 7 pm: The last two hours of the work day in California, so I keep at my e-mail for last minute questions from my office. I’ve probably wandered off to eat dinner in there somewhere, or maybe gone to watch some TV with the hubby. On her end Donna’s doing the same thing, only way more hardcore because she’s got two little ones to feed whereas my husband can feed himself (and me) and often does.

8 pm: Back at the computer, and now I’m mostly in writer mode instead of programmer mode. Though I’ve been dabbling most of the day, this is when Donna and I set our priorities, decide what needs to be written and edited, and really pound out the words. Of course, depending on how much work I got done I may still be multitasking, but now it’s the reverse: mostly writing and perhaps answering e-mails for the day job or cleaning up stuff to get ahead for the next day. Often I do my webwork or graphic design in the evening as well.

9pm – 1am: Writing/editing/plotting time! Hubby’s asleep and Donna and I are at it hard. We can write 2-4k in the evening if we’ve got a few projects going. We’ll work on editing, arrange our to-do list, discuss promo, write proposals. It’s WORK and it’s a lot of it. It’s a second job, and while I’m grateful that I get to do it in my pajamas while watching TV, that doesn’t make it any less work than if I were checking groceries down at the supermarket. We’re busting ass and giving up a lot of free time to do it.

1am – 2am..ish: We wind down and start to get giddy. Donna’s kids are sleeping (we hope) and we’re thinking we probably should, but maybe we have that one last scene or just 15 pages left to edit. Maybe release day is coming up and we need graphics. Maybe there’s a publisher promo day going on and someone needs to get excerpts together. Maybe we’re stuck on YouTube watching hot videos. Eventually, we both collapse…

…and then it starts all over again the next morning.

Now of course, there is variation. Some days Donna comes over and we stay away from the computers for most of the day. We couldn’t do this EVERY day, but we do it enough days to get the job done. And the hope is that, someday soon, there will be less other work. Donna’s kids will be growing up and heading to school. I’ll be able to cut back a little on the contract work and do the jobs I love. Maybe this writing thing will pay-off. But in the meantime it’s a labor of love.

And we’re just lucky we both love it, labor and all.