One of the problems with trying to gauge the potential of ePublishing as an author is the limited amount of data out there. The big successes take up most of the spotlight, while the huge proportion of people who digitally publish slink away after a few family and friends have bought copies.

Somewhere in the middle, Tobias Buckell, whose original novels and Halo franchise books have sold well in print, has posted a careful account of how pricing and time have affected digital sales of his eBook short story collection Tides from the New Worlds. The results aren’t exactly inspiring, but they do offer some encouragement, and more importantly, some clarity. See his post here: http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2011/04/01/a-year-of-selling-tides-from-the-new-worlds/ .

Tobias Buckell is the author of numerous short stories and novelettes (many appearing in his collection Tides from the New Worlds); the “caribbean steampunk” novel Crystal Rain and its successors Ragamuffin and Sly Mongoose; and the New York Times bestselling Halo novel The Cole Protocol. He is also a well-known blogger, a past Writers of the Future winner, and a fellow member of the Codex writers’ group. Knowing both about his many successes and about the surprising number of difficulties he’s overcome, I asked to interview him about his writing and his motivation through hard times. This is the final installment of that three-part interview.

The impact from your medical condition on your writing time sounds very disheartening, and I imagine things only got more complicated (although admittedly with compensations) when Calliope and Thalia were born. What got you from being depressed and in disorder with your writing schedule to regaining your focus and getting back on track? Was support from others particularly important, or the experience of the work itself, or other steps you took?

Well, the kids took up some time, but they keep you from focusing on yourself to focusing on them, which was a good thing. It was tough from January to September of 2009, but mainly I kept my eye on the prize. I was alive, I got to write a little bit, and starting in September I’d have enough to go back to mostly writing. And I was grateful that even though I wasn’t getting to write as much as I preferred and loved, I still was a freelancer. This meant I had a life where I could work when I had the strength, and sleep when I needed, which was great for that recovery time. In April, with newborns, I was able to have a flexible schedule and be around my kids as much as I needed.

When September rolled around, it was a case of just being excited to do what I loved the most, even though I knew there was this 11 month or so hole in my career.

As a writer you have to love the work, and being inside the work. And that’s what I turned to as soon as I could. I started work on a young adult novel, which was a new kind of project. And it wasn’t due, so there was no pressure. I just hard to work on it every day. Just being inside a novel and working on it, living in that moment, and figuring out for the first time what my new energy levels were like, was a discovery period.

I also took the time to destress myself. I’d pushed myself too hard in Montreal for Worldcon. I ended up in a Montreal cardiac center. And I ended up getting a doctor who told me my condition was like asthma: potentially life threatening if I ignored it. But if I took things easy and built my life around realizing I had it, and then got on with life, I’d probably die of something else first (which was the case of his older patients who had my same heart condition). He told me I needed to not physically or emotionally stress myself out.

So I had a doctor’s excuse now. I negotiated out of deadlines as best I could, and just started focusing on the writing for its own sake. It would get turned in when I turned it in.

That ended up being remarkably freeing and, oddly enough, made me more productive over the next 9 months than I have been since I first wrote Crystal Rain.

Additionally, I read an article about how Asimov used to work. He used to work on a project on a typewriter, then when he’d get blocked or bored with it, he’d switch to another project on another typewriter. He’d keep hopping from one to the other. I started noticing that I used to have multiple day gaps on large creative projects, so I started to wonder, since I had few ‘golden hours’ in me every day, if I could afford to let these periods persist. So I decided during this time to experiment with the Asimov method. I’d avoided it in favor of writing work sequentially due to the fact that when I was a new writer, I always ran into these people who were perpetually starting something new. And never finishing. So I avoided that out of a desire to succeed at being a writer.

But now that I knew I could write a novel, or novella, or short story, I thought, why not take a risk during this recovery period? Everyone knew I was recovering, I’d negotiated out of my deadlines, my career had this gap of a year and was paused, I couldn’t see things being any more messed up. Now was the time.

I started working on that young adult novel called The All Tree, but I also rotated in a novelette I was writing for Audible.com called “The Executioness.” At the same time, I worked in my spare time on a non-fiction book about my journey toward becoming a writer, equal parts biography and manual and advice and random thoughts on writing. In eight months, despite having less energy than before I got sick, I’d written the YA novel, drafted it, made progress on an adult novel I owed Tor, written the novelette, finished a draft of the book on writing, and written a novella for Clarkesworld. Enormously productive for me.

I’ve also been thinking about mastery, and creative mastery a lot, and reading about neurophysiology. I’m starting to learn that keeping a sense of play and fun in creative work is really important, and so both getting out of the fear of deadlines and expectations about career, and just living in the work during that first draft process, is real important. Very directly tying money to creativity actually, and this is now shown by research, can have a very detrimental hit to your productivity. So I’m learning to work on projects, then set them aside as I find myself slogging and slowing down. Then I switch to something fresh and fun. After a while it gets sloggy, and I turn back to the project that’s shiny again, that’s gotten shiny again while I was ignoring it.

So now I feel like I get paid to play all day again, and that means there’s a great deal of enthusiasm and happiness in my daily work day, and also means that I’m actually more productive.

Tobias Buckell is the author of numerous short stories and novelettes (many appearing in his collection Tides from the New Worlds); the “caribbean steampunk” novel Crystal Rain and its successors Ragamuffin and Sly Mongoose; and the New York Times bestselling Halo novel The Cole Protocol. He is also a well-known blogger, a past Writers of the Future winner, and a fellow member of the Codex writers’ group. Knowing both about his many successes and about the surprising number of difficulties he’s overcome, I asked to interview him about his writing and his motivation through hard times. This is part two of that three-part interview.

 Back in 2008, I was surprised and worried to hear that you’d had a heart attack–while not even 30, I think–due to a congenital condition. Did you have writing plans that were derailed through that period? What effects did the interruption have on your attitude toward your work? And what kinds of things did you do to get back on track: did everything fall more or less easily back into the way it was, or was it more effortful than that?

I actually didn’t have a heart attack, we just discovered that I had a congenital defect with my heart. But the events were certainly as dramatic as a heart attack, and the ER doctor ended up assuming much the same. It turns out I likely have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. The quick and dirty is that under duress, my heart fails to fire correctly. I’d been doing some home remodeling, and went to bed exhausted. I woke up four hours later with my pulse still racing madly and having trouble catching my breath. Ended up in a cardiac specialty ward for a week and after they looked at my insides they declared my arteries clean and my heart strong, but that I’d either had pericarditis and the HCM together added up to a dramatic event, or I had just pericarditis, or I had an HCM episode. It’s a somewhat inexact diagnosis, but the best they could offer me. Since my grandfather had HCM, and my mother has it, and they saw very faint signs of the possibility I had it, it’s a good bet I have it!

I was very derailed. I went down for the count in November 2008. And after the event, got a pulmonary embolism (either from lying in the hospital for a week or from the heart cath or something that gave me blood clots) that put me back into the hospital a few days later again for another week. Recovering from both left me exhausted, I didn’t get much done throughout December, January, and February. Between the medical bills and having hardly any energy to work for three months, the financial fallout was really tough.

There were two issues that made it hard to get back on track. One was that some of the medicine I was on really affected me as far as energy. I had maybe two ‘golden hours’ of ability in the day where I was able to work at capacity, down from ten. I really had to plan my entire day around that. And because I only had two hours, I basically had to let a lot of stuff just go. My least paying clients, or freelance gigs, or potential jobs. I just had to let them go and focus on the best paying ones to get through the first half of 2009.

And that meant I got very little writing done, and had to make my peace with it. I wrote a few short stories throughout the year, and worked on the books I wanted to write as best I could. But my highest paying clients were freelance gigs, and I had over ten thousand dollars of deductibles (don’t get sick at the end of a calendar year, right? I had to pay deductibles for two different years at the start of 2009) and then outside bills to pay, plus I’d lost three months of work as I focused on just recovering. It was a pretty rough time.

On top of that, my heart is more sensitive to stress, both physical and emotional, now. So in December, January, and February, I made numerous trips to the ER for chest pain due to the after effects of the pulmonary embolism and events where my heart would go into overdrive. I was also dealing with enormous amounts of depression. I consider myself a pretty physical guy. I like to workout and jog. That was taken from me. I’d been making really good money in 2008 freelancing, and I was struggling to stay afloat. That stress, of course, didn’t help.

But I just kept my head down, tried to pay off bills as I could. I wrote as I could. My wife had twins that April, which, for a month or two, sucked up a great deal of time as we went through the initial newborn phase. But once we fell into a schedule with the twins, and I slowly got better, and inched ahead, I turned more and more toward the writing again. I built up a buffer of cash so that in October, almost a year after the event, I was able to devote most of my day to writing fiction once more, and have been since then.

A number of interesting things have come out of that whole experience. Wouldn’t want to do it again, though!

Tobias Buckell is the author of numerous short stories and novelettes (many appearing in his collection Tides from the New Worlds); the “caribbean steampunk” novel Crystal Rain and its successors Ragamuffin and Sly Mongoose; and the New York Times bestselling Halo novel The Cole Protocol. He is also a well-known blogger, a past Writers of the Future winner, and a fellow member of the Codex writers’ group. Knowing both about his many successes and about the surprising number of difficulties he’s overcome, I asked to interview him about his writing and his motivation through hard times. This is part one of that three-part interview.

You’ve made mention in interviews of your Mom giving you a little box of words to play with and talking to you about reading when you were young. Has her influence, or the influence of other family members or teachers, especially influenced your desire to write?

Well, mom was instrumental in getting me to become such an avid reader. She taught me how to read at a rather young age, and since we didn’t have TV on the boat I grew up on, I turned to reading a lot. She also helped me out by not really putting much of a stop to what I read. She let me read whole books almost right out the gate.

The box of words obviously helped. I would sit and play with the words. Laying them out into sentences, like fridge poetry. All of that steeped me in words and books and what not from as early as I can remember.

But as for writing, I think mom always figured I’d be a librarian due to my love of reading all the time, rather than an actual writer!

Then it sounds as though the desire to write is a more personal thing. What attracts you to it? What’s so appealing about writing that you can go back to the keyboard day after day and get new words down?

I like living in imaginary worlds, or daydreaming. I daydream a lot. It might come out of my being ADHD, I don’ t know. Most people grow out of what they call ‘childish’ daydreaming. But I never stopped, I never let it get grown out of me. When I was a kid I loved to escape and read about other places and other worlds, and daydream about them. I just never stopped, and over time started mentally escaping to worlds I’d built.

I was the kid who played with Legos all through my life. It was cool as a kid, then as you hit older grades it stopped being cool and I kept playing with them anyway. And then somewhere in college it got cool again, according to others. I just never cared all that much. I liked making stuff up.

Your mentioning ADHD brings up an interesting point: you have attention-related problems, yet you have written successful novels–not just once, but repeatedly. On first blush the two wouldn’t seem compatible. Is it that you become immersed in your story, and under those conditions the attention problems go away? Or do
you work around them? Or something else?

ADHD comes with an either/or switch. You’re highly distractible in one mode, and then go into long bouts of hyperfocus in another. The hyperfocus is often what throws people from diagnosis, as ADHD people tend to get an intense bit of work done in that stage. However, it’s hard to manage, and once broken, you’re out of it.

For example, I just spent eleven hours working on a project yesterday, all of it straight through, because once I got everything loaded up into my head I was completely absorbed by it. That’s not unusual. [Related Willpower Engine article: Flow: What It Feels Like to Be Perfectly Motivated]

My writing habits tend to reflect my need for quiet and focused time. I write from midnight to four am. No one calls, emails, or interrupts me during that time. If I get into a focused mode, there are no interruptions, and if I can just latch onto something, I usually will go all night. It’s rather intense. [Related Willpower Engine article: Handling Distractions by Managing Responsibilities, Devising Rules, and Erecting Barriers]

ADHD also helps my creative side. Research is fun. Wikipedia is ADHD crack. I can click around, jump from subject to subject, and just absorb interesting stuff. It all bubbles up later. I’ll see a show about ships made of ice, and then something else equally weird, and it’s all just undirected exploration that feeds the loam of the imagination.

You mentioned in an interview a few years ago that you started your blog “as a way to initially force myself to write and submit short fiction by being in the public eye.” Has being so visible had a consistent effect on your drive to get more writing done, or to complete projects you’ve talked about?

Yeah, it was a sort of ‘perform in public’ sort of thing. I wanted to share my journey on the path to being published. Knowing that people were out there rooting for me already, before I was even published, helped me keep at it. [Related Willpower Engine article: Kaizan on Whether It Helps to Announce Goals Publicly] 

So is having people out there rooting for you helping you by encouragement? Accountability? Both? something else?

A little bit of both. The third leg to that stool is the fact that we know that people who write down their goals are more likely to accomplish a chunk, if not all, of those goals. Particularly if they are goals within your control (ie: you can’t say, I’m going to have four short stories published in major magazines this year. But you could say, I will write four short stories and submit them repeatedly to all the major magazines, sending them right back out if they’re rejected, this year). [Related Willpower Engine article: One Good Way to Judge Goals: S.M.A.R.T.] With the blog and living live, a bit, you get all three pieces: encouragement, accountability, and defined goals. It helped me a lot in the beginning.