The first, currently called Big Time, is an exploration of time abundance through the lens of many of my favorite topics: time tracking, mega-family logistics, year-long projects, etc.

The second, currently called The Golden Hours, will look at evening routines, and how to use the often under-appreciated hours after work and before bed.

I’m excited to start work on these, and I’ll be keeping everyone posted on my progress. I’ll be doing lots of interviews and case studies for both, and my goal is to have a diversity of experiences presented, so lots of people can see themselves and see helpful strategies in these books.

Thank you for all your support of me and my books over the years. I really appreciate it! (The Publishers Marketplace write-up is included below.)

Partly, that’s because they were less focused! In 2021, I set a goal to write 100-200 words a day of something. I ended the year with somewhere around 50,000 words of…nothing. I think I’d been hoping that all that free writing would spark a new novel idea but it did not.

Then, in 2022, I decided to write in 100-200 word chunks about a single day in the life of a person. I loosely based this on my experiences on an unseasonably warm and unreasonably busy mid-December day in late 2021. It had been a long day, so somewhat along the lines of Bloom trotting around Dublin, we’d follow this middle-aged woman around her suburb.

It was…ok. More focused than the year before, for sure. But not that interesting. I started re-reading it early this year and stopped about 120 entries in, which doesn’t really bode well for anyone else wanting to read it.

So in 2023 I took a different approach. I’ve listed “write a collection of seasonal sonnets” on several of my Lists of 100 Dreams. I’ve long been fascinated by these poems, and particularly the 14-line, iambic pentameter version where the first and third, and second and fourth lines of every stanza rhyme (plus a rhyming couplet at the end). Ideally the first eight lines set the scene and then the last six twist it somewhere else, though different poets have explored the format in different ways. This year I set a goal to write two lines per day, which comes out to one sonnet per week.

I’ve stuck with it, which means I now have around 40 sonnets. They’re not all ready for prime time. Some are terrible. Some could be better with editing. And some I quite like. I may try to put a collection of them out into the world at some point.

But broadly, I have found this version of a daily writing project both doable and compelling — each week I wind up with the draft of another poem! I only need to write 20 syllables each day. That doesn’t take much time. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are more challenging than Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, as I need to match the rhyming scheme from those days. But my Sunday/Tuesday/Thursday self tries to make things somewhat easier on my Monday/Wednesday/Friday self by choosing words to end each line that at least have multiple rhymes. (Saturday, couplet day, is a project unto itself.)

Coming up with topics has been a mix. Some Sundays I feel like I don’t have much, but I just put something down, and the upside of this project is that I can start another poem the next Sunday.

Anyway, I’ve found this writing project enjoyable enough that I think I will continue it in 2024. Then by the end of that year I’ll have over 100 sonnets. There’s no reason I couldn’t have plucked this item off my List of 100 Dreams at some other point, but I didn’t. Sometimes we just need to figure out the right structure to make goals feel doable.

In other news: A somewhat more chill weekend… On Friday night, we took the big kids and my mother-in-law, who is visiting for a few weeks, out to dinner at a steak house. On Saturday, my husband’s oldest sister and her husband came to visit. We were going a little stir-crazy in the rain, but then I took them over to Chanticleer, a local garden, while my husband was buying the 16-year-old semi-formal clothes (he decided last minute, to go to homecoming on Saturday night…). We were about the only people in the garden with the rain, but we had rain jackets and it was absolutely lovely — fall flowers plus fall color in general is just the most magical combination. Plus all colors look brighter against gray skies. That 90 minutes completely changed my mood for the day. Also a reminder that bad weather doesn’t always have to stop things (see Dutch Wonderland the weekend before).

Photo: Whimsical display at Chanticleer

It is a very strange experience to read something that I wrote from the perspective of being many years removed from the writing. I’m blogging about it right now partly as I am trying to process it! I created this whole world, and all these characters, but in ten years my memory has lost some of the details. And so some of it seems new. What is going to happen next? On some level I should know. And I vaguely do. But then I start thinking wait, that was quite a twist…or I didn’t think that character would react that way, but now I can see how it had to happen…

Anyway, there’s no larger point here. I enjoyed reading the book, so I guess that’s good, and I’ll probably be thinking about it for a while. I’m looking forward to discussing it with my “Summer Reads” book club later this month. It was also a reminder to myself that I do like writing fiction, and when I put the effort into it, I like reading the fiction I write. So perhaps I should do more of that as my next career twist.

Have you ever revisited something you created many years ago?

Having two full days to immerse myself in editing felt fantastic. I made it through the entire 52,000 word manuscript and did some serious work (like I managed to cut an entire chapter and redistribute key plot points elsewhere — and it was very clear to me that the chapter needed to go. I love feeling that clarity!). Because I was editing all at once, I could see that I was repeating some musings from earlier at a different point. I kept notes of proper names so I could make sure I was staying consistent.

And Lititz itself provided ambiance. Much of the story is set in a fictional place called Winston, Indiana, but it is a small town and Lititz is a very cute small town and it helped me picture what certain things might be like. I ate at a few nice restaurants (though I was trying to have stuff for lunch and snacks in the room so I wouldn’t have to leave at inopportune points!). I admired some historic architecture as I took my occasional breaks to walk around.

I am pretty much at my happiest in life when I am deep in a manuscript and I’m working on it and I can see I’m making it better. I love playing around with words and finding the best way to convey things and describe things. I try to create this flow state sometimes in my normal work days but it is always going to be limited. Being in that state for a few days allowed me to really enter my characters’ world. I find it to be an interesting place! Hopefully others will too.

In other news: On Friday my daughter successfully got her ears pierced. The lady who did the piercing was very calm and reassuring and we got some very cute blue flower shaped studs. So I feel like we survived that rite of passage.

Anyway, today was novel day. I was excited to dive into my manuscript and…it was also the day that a lot of other stuff seemed to be happening at the house. Let’s just say the doorbell rang several times, stuff needed to be tracked down, various things needed to be delivered to the right places, and then it turned out that a child had forgotten a school laptop at home and desperately needed it by 10:30 a.m.

So…a lot going on. As I’ve written numerous times on this blog, sometimes I fantasize about a cabin in the woods where I would work uninterrupted. But I will take a writing retreat this summer to finish my edits; this current round is about getting the manuscript into a state where it is close enough to finished that an immersion in it is helpful. Everything did quiet down reasonably after 10:30 a.m. or so and I was able to work through the chapters. Later in the book it’s a lighter lift — as I’d more figured out characters by that point in the original writing, and I am keeping most of the later plot points from earlier iterations. The biggest change today was probably deleting a whole section. That I could do even with the leaf blowers going.

I do wait for reasonable conditions (see: the open day) but if I waited for perfect conditions I’d never get anything done. As I do want to write this story, waiting for perfect isn’t an option. Maybe someone reading the novel will think “hmm, it really feels like she was writing that section with a leaf blower going outside.” But we shall see!

As noted yesterday, I am working on a novel. But I write both fiction and non-fiction, and non-fiction is more my main business. And in that category, I’m not working on anything now! Instead, I have put “think about book ideas” as an entry on many recent weekly priority lists.

Yes, I know that sounds vague, but what this tends to mean for me is that I will sit for an hour at my computer, ideally twice during that week, and just type various thoughts. I’m not guaranteeing anything will come to me, but by devoting mental space to idea generation, I’ll at least think about what might be appealing to write. And if I devote two hours a week of mental space to this question, often I will think about this question at other times too. That’s when random ideas pop into my head that might lead to something.

But anyway, “come up with a book idea” is kind of a tall order. What’s an interesting idea that I could write 70,000 words on and stay interested in for two years? What’s an idea I haven’t written before that I could enthusiastically ask my readers to spend their precious time reading?

I am trying to be patient, because I have written a lot of books and I know that something will come to me. There really isn’t a rush. If I keep thinking about this for six months and at the end of six months I have something worth writing, then that would have been a good use of time.

But boy does it sometimes feel like spinning the wheels. Time to go do other things, like play the piano, pack for spring break… Sometimes being productive, in the long run, doesn’t look so productive in the moment….

Anyway, the prospect of a major revision is always daunting, especially when you don’t know quite how to start. I had some fantasy of retreating to a cabin in the woods (or on the beach) for a month. Or three months! But that might leave a bit of a mess in the rest of my life. So that leaves a different question. How, practically, does one do the mentally intense work of revision in the middle of everything else?

Here’s what I’ve wound up doing. On the advice of KJ Dell’Antonia, I spent a few hours one morning making a chapter outline of the existing manuscript. Upon doing so, I saw that several chapters could be cut or combined (I should note here that the chapters are quite short — I originally had close to 50 in a 50,000 word novel). I also wanted to rework one major plot point. So I spent another few hours making a new chapter outline that did both of these things.

Then I created a revision calendar for the next few months. Each week I would revise somewhere between 0-3 chapters, depending on what was going on in my life and how much work those chapters would need (a complete rewrite takes more effort than polishing a chapter that’s in pretty good shape). A work week where I was traveling or had limited childcare might be assigned one chapter. A vacation week (e.g. next week) would get zero. A full, “normal” week might get three.

Then, each Friday as I plan my week, I figure out where I can do this work. Generally, it’s an open Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday morning. Ideally it’s a fully open day (even though I do break for lunch). When I’m writing fiction I don’t like to count down to a call or meeting at some point, even though I absolutely can switch from one to another quickly if I need to.

But…a funny thing has happened as I’ve gotten about halfway through the revision calendar. I’ve become better about creating open days because I want to preserve the space. I really do love this part of the writing process, when I have something but I am clearly making it much better. Progress is motivational.

I should have a roughly revised manuscript by some point in May. Then I plan to do some more polishing work and take a shorter writing retreat this summer to plow through it. Then, hopefully, the novel will be ready to show people by the end of the summer. I’ll likely do a “Summer Reads with LV” series — a book club of sorts — where I work through The Cortlandt Boys, Off the Clock, Juliet’s School of Possibilities, and then this novel with readers. The sign-up for that will come later this spring.

In the meantime, I am having so much fun immersing myself in my characters’ world, and in their struggles, which all feel real even though I made them up. A cabin in the woods could be cool but sometimes holding that out as what is necessary can become an indulgence, an excuse for procrastination. It’s often possible to do a little something. And a lot of little somethings add up.

For instance, I have read almost all the works of Shakespeare. I actually have read everything except two very short works in my anthology (I just finished The Tempest this week), but my reading calendar has me reading The Two Noble Kinsmen, which current scholarship says Shakespeare co-wrote. I also read Edward III a few weeks ago, which was not in my anthology, but seems to now be put in the Shakespeare camp. Anyway, that project is pretty much done.

Our Best of Both Worlds goal-setting workshop for the Patreon community happened on December 14, 2021. (This year’s is today, at noon, eastern if you want to join by then…). During that workshop, I decided to do my year-long writing project (basically, a very short morning pages thing I always do) with a specific theme in mind. I would do 365 entries describing a single day in the life of a character. I elected to model this on my day of December 14, 2021. It happened to be a very long and full day, if not particularly life-changing, but I thought it would be interesting to see if I could pace myself through writing 365 100-200 word vignettes on normal life.

And I have! We are closing in on sleep right now on this day, which was almost exactly a year ago, some 348 entires in. I am at 49,577 words, so it will wind up being about 51,000 words or so. This is, technically, a book length manuscript.

I’m a little wary of going through and re-reading it, because it is probably not that great. But who knows. Maybe it’s interesting. The point was more to develop the writing discipline of doing this. Something always comes to me. I have never thought that I have nothing to say. It is also a reminder to me that 100-200 words is easy. It inspires no resistance. But 100-200 words a day over a year is a book. Small things done repeatedly truly do add up. That is true with reading through Shakespeare at the rate of three pages a day, and it is true of writing things.

In any case, if you are looking for a resolution for 2023…maybe you could consider a writing project along these lines! Just write 100-200 words a day on something. The point is not to do much each time. It is to just keep going. Time will pass anyway. We may as well make the journey mindfully.

In other news: I was a guest on Modern Mrs. Darcy’s What Should I Read Next? podcast! This was so cool as it is one of my favorite podcasts. We talk about reading projects and how to tackle ambitious works (like Shakespeare or War and Peace…)

Tranquility by Tuesday is also making a few end-of-year lists. The Globe and Mail listed it as one of the best management books of the year (requires subscription). The Next Big Idea Club listed it as one of the top productivity books of the year. If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, would you do so? Thank you!

Photo: Not currently looking like this…more of an icy rain with a tiny bit of accumulation, much to my kids’ disappointment. Dec 14, 2021 was actually unseasonably warm — a detail I remember thanks to my analyzing and recounting every second of that day! 

But I did want to do some more free writing. So I elected to do a modified version of NaNoWriMo, where I’d write 1000 words every work day in November. I would write about characters and scenarios in an existing novel draft of mine (The Norwegian Secret to Enjoying Winter, for the few folks who read a draft of that). I would work out a few things and think through motivations, with the goal of eventually editing that novel manuscript.

There are 20 workdays in November (weekdays minus Thanksgiving and the Friday after) and I just hit 20,000 words. I didn’t mind the exercise much. I simply put writing 1000 words on my task list each day and I did it. I was reminded that I did like my characters and the general world I created. I do want to revisit it and turn something that exists into something better.

Now I just need to figure out when and how I will do that. I honestly want to take a few weeks away from everything else in life and plow through it but that is going to be hard to pull off! We shall see. But a year from now I would like to have a draft that I am happy with. And then maybe in future years I’ll create an entirely new novel…

So it’s basically two years from the start of the research to the launch. And that’s after I’d already solidified the canonical nine rules. This was a longer project than, say, meeting my husband, getting engaged, and getting married (that one ran from February 2003 to September 2004…).

I’ve learned or rediscovered a few things about logistics and planning along the way.

Practice is good. The Tranquility by Tuesday project involved collecting data on people’s time satisfaction and time use, then teaching them nine time management rules over nine weeks. Each week, people would learn a rule, answer questions about how they planned to implement it, then answer questions a week later about how it went. We used Mailchimp lists to send the emails to people and then SurveyMonkey to collect the data.

Doing this entire process twice (first with a smaller group, then a much bigger group) added time to the project, but doing a pilot phase first was incredibly helpful. First, I saw that we would get results with the way we were structuring the study. Second, I could see what questions were clear, and what people were clearly confused by. This made the larger project run far more smoothly.

Much of writing is the raw material. Lots of raw material means that themes emerge and the stories are already there. I undertook the TBT project in the hopes of getting quantitative results, but the sheer volume of qualitative answers people filled out on the survey forms was just amazing. When I went to start writing, I already had a novel’s worth of observations on what is difficult when it comes to time, and what people have tried, and how the rules fit into life and what challenges they faced (and often overcame).

This made writing the first draft feel almost too easy! There was a lot of editing afterwards, but to me, creating a first draft is always the hardest part. In this case it felt more like creating a quilt out of lots of existing colorful blocks than trying to create something out of nothing.

Pace requires space. I already knew each rule would be a chapter, and presumably there would be an introduction and a conclusion. So that was 11 units of writing to be done. I gave myself a time line that generally required writing one chapter each week.

Within each week, the rough schedule was to write the draft on Monday and Tuesday, and then edit it on Wednesday and Thursday. Friday was open because (per Rule #5) it is my back-up slot, in case something pulled me away from the writing/editing earlier in the week.

I left my vacation weeks open during the summer and, during a longer stretch, built in an open week as well. This allowed me to get caught up on stuff that writing had displaced and also not to feel too rushed.

My first draft was due at the end of October, but this schedule allowed me to be done by the end of September. I then could edit the whole manuscript during October.

You can do a lot in bits of time. But deep work is good too. During my first draft writing stages, I tried to leave my mornings as open as possible. This allowed me to focus on the book first before I dealt with everything else.

Life often intervenes, however, especially when one has five kids and is managing a major home renovation. So once I had a full draft, in October, I took an editing retreat to Cape May so I could focus on the book as a whole. I rented a hotel room with a kitchen overlooking the beach (cheap, in the off season!) and spent that time working without figuring out when other people were coming or going.

It was good. I don’t need that often — I am incredibly not-precious when it comes to writing and “the writing life” (whatever that is). But I do need it sometimes.

Hopefully it paid off in a book that works. We shall see what people think!