Typical Day

Typical Day

Bobby wakes up at 9:30AM, punches his snooze alarm, and finally gets up at close to 10:00AM. After eating half a banana (he's saving the other half for tomorrow morning; then he can use the check his parents are sending him to go to the store and buy more for next week), feeding his cat, and deciding that, yes, he should probably change his clothes, Bobby starts his day.

First, he pens an entry in his personal blog, entitled "The Quiet Life of a Writer, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Calm."

After he's finished blogging, he writes two book reviews for a website that's paying him $25 per 300-word review. He hasn't actually read the books he's reviewing—he can't be expected to put in that much time and effort for only $25—he just read a few other reviews, checked out the synopsis on Amazon, and pieced together what he could. He'll consider it a success if he can convince just one reader out there to read the book based on his completely uninformed recommendation.

Bobby takes a break for lunch from 1:00PM to 2:00PM. Microwave pizza, if you must know. After lunch, he spends two hours working on an ebook about home furniture repair that he has been commissioned to write.

Again, he doesn't have any personal experience with home furniture repair, so he has to do a ton of research online as he writes. Hopefully, by the time he's done he'll be an expert. He even purposefully breaks one of his kitchen chairs just so he can challenge himself to put it back together again.

Mmm. Breakfast.

Finally, he's free to dabble on some of his own projects. From 4:00PM to 5:00PM, he polishes up a query letter for the last novel he finished and sends that out along with the synopsis and sample chapters to a number of literary agents and publishers. More likely than not, he'll soon have a handful of rejection letters to add to his collection. He's even thought about wallpapering his bedroom wall with them, since the old paper is starting to peel off anyway.

At 5:00PM, he spends another hour or so writing the third chapter of the new novel he's working on—a sci-fi fantasy novel about killer kittens from outer space. (Shoot—he got to it first! Ah well, you had your chance.) He's pretty much wiped out at this point, so that's the end of a long, hard day of writing for Bobby.