S.G. Browne

I’ve been asked about my writing habits a lot, as though I need to find a way to break them.

When do I write?
How often do I write?
Where do I write?

As to the WHERE question, it’s in my apartment, usually at my desk, sometimes on the couch on my laptop. But I can’t write in cafes. Too distracting. Even in my apartment, sometimes I put on my iPod to block out the street noise by listening to instrumental music like “Green Onions” and “Comanche” and “Single Serving Jack”.

Plus I don’t drink coffee.

As for the WHEN and HOW OFTEN, that’s a little more involved.

From October 1989 to midway through 2002, I more or less wrote every morning for two hours before going into work, whether that was as a waiter or a driver or an assistant producer or as an office manager. Two hours. Every day. And if possible, another two hours at night. Sometimes I gave myself the weekend off. During this time, I wrote three novels and more then fifty short stories.

In 2002, while editing my second and third novels (both supernatural horror novels that had garnered interested from two small press publications), I began to hate what I was writing. Writing became a chore. A grinding job. A tedious two hours of sitting at my desk and staring at the computer and realizing that the words coming out of my fingertips were absolute garbage.

This went on for several months, before I decided to stop writing. To stop sticking to my two-to-four hours of self-disciplined masochism a day. To stop being a writer.

I still wrote. Sporadically. In fits. Whenever the mood struck. But I didn’t go back to the books. I told the publishers that I wouldn’t be able to send them the manuscripts. I felt that I’d let a golden opportunity slip away.

A year later, in October 2003, I started fiddling with an idea based on my short story, “A Zombie’s Lament.” I wrote a few chapters. Then I didn’t write. Then I’d write some more. Not sticking to a schedule. Not forcing myself to sit down for two hours before work or after dinner. Just whenever the mood struck. This went on for the next two-and-a-half years. Writing for weeks at a time, then doing nothing for a month or so. Binge writing. Like binge drinking. Only without the bar tabs or the hangovers. Until I finished my book in May 2006.

For the next six months after I’d finished Breathers I didn’t write at all. Nothing. Not a short story. Not a paragraph. Not a word. Then in December 2006, I started writing another novel about fate and destiny. For three months I wrote, at various times of the day, for various lengths of time. I didn’t stick to a schedule but just wrote whenever I had something to write. At the end of the three months, I’d written 45,000 words. Or approximately 180 pages.

Over the next ten months, I wrote sporadically, revising the book as I went, trying to figure out where it was going, giving up on it, coming back to it, forgetting about it, then finally realizing I needed to get it finished. By the end of December 2007, I’d written another 15,000 words.

On February 2, 2008, a week after I received an offer from Broadway Books to publish Breathers and the day before the New York Giants beat the New England Patriots 17-14 in Super Bowl XLII, I finished the first draft of Fated. 80,000 words in fourteen months.

45,000 words the first three months.
15,000 words the next ten months.
20,000 words the last month.

How’s that for consistency?

Then, for the next eighteen months, I didn’t work on another major project. I edited Fated. I wrote a couple of short stories. I blogged. But I didn’t have a schedule. I didn’t commit myself to a set time or a set amount of words per day. I just wrote whenever it suited me. And I spent a lot of time promoting Breathers, which came out in March 2009.

In August 2009, I started working on another novel. Correction. Three novels. See, I had three ideas and I couldn’t decide which one I wanted to write, so I started writing all three of them at the same time. For a few days I’d work on one, then get an idea that worked better in the other, then get tired of that one and work on the third. It was like dating three women at the same time and trying to keep all of them happy.

I went back and forth like that for six months until I finally decided I really needed to commit to just one book. So I picked one and forged ahead, plucking a few paragraphs and pages out of the ether until, at the end of March 2010, I had about 30,000 words of my new novel, or about 120 pages. And it had taken me more than six months to get to that point.

Wanting to finish my novel before the Crypticon Convention in the middle of June, I created a writing schedule. Actually, more like a word count goal. 1000 words a day minimum. Six days a week. However long it took me to get those 1000 words. So for the next two months, I stuck to that schedule, writing 27,000 words in April and another 28,000 words in May and the first week of June, finishing the first draft of Lucky Bastard on June 5.

So as you can see, over the past twenty years or so, my writing habits have been kind of all over the map. I’ve done what has worked for me at different times in my life with various work ethics, but what matters is that I’ve been happy with the results.

Just a quick update to answer some questions that have been thrown my way about my next novel, Fated.

What is it about?
Fated is a dark comedy about Fate, Destiny, and the choices people make that determine their futures. The story is told from the POV of Fate, who has spent the better part of two hundred thousand years watching his humans make bad choices that lead to lives of mediocrity, while Destiny gets to watch her humans actually fulfill their potential. It doesn’t help matters that his best friends are Sloth and Gluttony and that he has a five-hundred-year-old grudge with Death.

But when Fate falls in love with a mortal woman on the path of Destiny, he becomes involved in the lives of his humans, altering their fates and creating cosmic repercussions that could strip him of his immortality. Or lead to a fate worse than death.

When is it scheduled to be released?
November 2010. I know. I wish it was sooner, too. But unfortunately, I’m not Sarah Palin or Barack Obama, so I have to wait in the publishing queue with the other rabble.

What’s happening with the book now?
As I’d just recently Twittered, the line edits for Fated are done and it’s heading for the copy editors. While I’ve heard different definitions, for me, line editing involves working with my editor to make structural changes to the manuscript in order to improve the flow of the story and resolve any questions that may remain. Copy editing addresses grammar, formatting, consistency, etc.

When did you write it?
I started Fated in December 2006 and finished it on the day before the Super Bowl in February 2008, a couple of weeks after I sold Breathers. That was just the first draft. I took more than a year to edit it and send the manuscript to my agent.

How did you come up with the idea?
Back in September 2003 (September 10, 2003 at 10PM actually), I’d written a journal entry about a character in charge of everyone’s fates and who gets annoyed with all of the characters in books and in movies who actually believe they control their own fates. Eventually, it evolved into Fated.

If you have any other questions, I’ll be happy to answer them. And as updates become available on Fated, I’ll be posting them here on the Novels page of my web site.