Back in the day, Rune Skelley could be found hard at work in the prose mines nearly every single evening. We toiled behind our keyboards night after night, weekdays and weekends, only taking time off for real emergencies. We got a lot done, but we also burned out. We didn’t want it to be as catastrophic as the time we remodeled our master bathroom and got so burned out we abandoned the project for six months and just used the bathroom in the hall, so we modified our schedule.

It started with taking Friday evenings off. We allowed ourselves some time to relax. Most of the Go! Go! Go! attitude came from Jen, so to ease her into the “weekends aren’t the enemy” mindset, we started by watching movies that could count as research. When she saw that we were able to take an evening off once a week and not lose our momentum, that rule relaxed and we now watch whatever the hell we want.

Things started to slip a little bit during the early days of the pandemic. We had dinner with Jen’s mom once a week, but at the same time we stopped having weekly writer’s group meetings so we told ourselves it all balanced out. Even though in the good old days, the only reason we didn’t have to work on Writer’s Group night is that Group counted as work. Visiting Jen’s mom, not so much.

And then we spent a solid year outlining the Ghost Series. One of the best things about brainstorming is that you can do it anywhere. Another of the best things about it is that it doesn’t take long to get into the right gear to do it. Work sessions can be short and still be quite productive.

All this slipperiness on the slopes started to turn into an avalanche when we were hit with a double whammy: we started having regular (though virtual) group meetings again, and we started actually writing Untitled Ghost Novel #1. Suddenly we couldn’t work in the car on the way to and from our family dinners, and we had another evening commitment on our schedule, and the short work sessions we’d learned to sneak in between episodes of Supernatural and Ted Lasso weren’t cutting it. Sad to say, instead of knuckling down we are now more likely to come up with excuses to skip writing sessions. “Would you look at that? It’s so late. There’s no point in trying to get the fiction engines spooled up now! Better just go watch Severance.” “We’ll get in a good long work session on Saturday (as long as the weather prevents Kent from doing yard work).” “It’s my birthday, and I want to just chill and eat cheesecake.” “It’s the dog’s birthday and I just want to chill and eat cheesecake while the dog wears a funny hat.” etc.

Untitled Ghost Novel #1 is coming along, but not as quickly as it ought to. We had a Very Serious Talk about it today and vowed to do better. But we did not pinkie-swear. When we pinkie-swear you’ll know we really mean it.

A writing partner is someone who values your pinkies as much as their own.