In this week’s episode, we share six tips and tricks for writing while traveling.
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 231 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is December the 13th, 2024, and today we’re discussing tips for writing while traveling, which seems a timely topic as the Christmas holiday is coming up. First, we’ll have an update on my current writing projects and do Question of the Week.
For my current writing projects, I’m very pleased to report that Orc-Hoard, the fourth book in the Rivah Half-Elven series is now out. You can get it at Amazon US, UK, Australia, Canada, and in Kindle Unlimited.
I am also very pleased to report that I have now published a million new words of fiction for 2024, which is the first time I’ve been able to do that in a year since 2020. I will probably talk more about that in an upcoming episode. Now that Orc-Hoard is done, my main project is Shield of Deception, the fourth book in the Shield War series. I’m 11,000 words into that and I’m hoping to have that out in January 2025, if all goes well. My secondary project will be Ghost in the Assembly. I haven’t actually started that. I’m still in the outline writing phase, but I’m hoping that will be out in February or potentially March, depending on how long it takes to write Shield of Deception.
In audiobook news, Ghost in the Tombs is now out in audiobook (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) and you can get it at Audible, Chirp, and most of the usual other audiobook stores. She’s also recording Cloak of Masks for us right now, and that should be out in January, if all goes well.
00:01:29 Question of the Week
Now it’s time for Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics. This week’s question: where do you obtain free media like free ebooks, free audiobooks, free movies, and so forth? There are no wrong answers though for obvious reasons please keep answers limited to legal media sources. No piracy, please.
The inspiration for this question was our 12 Days of Short Story Christmas, during which I’ll give away a new free short story every business day until December 23rd. If you want some of those free short stories, head to my website now. They will remain free at my Payhip store until December 31st. Now on to answers from Question of the Week.
Our first response is from Grimlar who says: Well, it’s not exactly free, but I do find myself buying books from LMBPN publishing every Saturday for $1 each (their new releases from earlier in the week, usually Thursday or earlier). They drop the price of new books for Saturday as a loyalty bonus for their readers. Also, when a series has been completed, they tend to release a box set (or several for a long series), also priced at a dollar per box. They tend to release several books a week, which is handy, provided you like their stuff, which is mostly urban fantasy with some fantasy and some sci-fi. As I said, not free, but does make reading a much more budget friendly pastime.
I should note that LMBPN publishing also puts nearly all their stuff in Kindle Unlimited so if you’re paying for a Kindle Unlimited subscription already, that is an easy way to check out their books.
David says: Some places I buy ebooks and audiobooks from offer some free material from time to time. So when I’m looking for something new I stumble across the odd book that is free that I am interested in, when I do stumble across these free offerings, I sometimes look to see if these authors have other free books. I don’t bother with free movies.
Jeanne says: I get emails from BookBub, which sometimes has free ebooks, but most of the ebooks are between $0.99 and $2.99. That’s probably actually how I came across you (you being Jonathan Moeller in this case). Otherwise, Kobo has a selection of free ebooks, if small.
Jenny says: I love Libby, and back when it was available, Axis 360 and Hoopla. I’m not sure if they’ve just gone from my library or gone forever. (Side note from transcriptionist: Axis 360 changed names to Boundless in 2023. Hoopla is still in business.)
Adeline says: The only time I ever received free items is when they’re directly given away by the owner. Downloading virtual freebies from somewhere just seems wrong since they would still belong to someone. Although I don’t have any movie subscription services myself, I still don’t download free movies.
Bonnie says: I use Amazon for ebooks. I usually pay quite often though. I get a free town newspaper every two weeks. I don’t watch TV anymore, so that isn’t an issue.
Rob says: Amazon (you can search and order by cost) and authors do free downloads with their newsletter, not just Jonathan Moeller, but PA Mason, Kelly Armstrong, etc.
Chris says: Kindle Library, following you online gets me updates.
For myself, I get free ebooks through Libby (the local library system’s ebook app) and very rarely audiobooks as well. I also, if I see something I like on the Kindle store that’s free, I will download that right away. For free and legal movies and TV shows, I usually go to Tubi, which is free but ad supported and has a surprisingly large collection of stuff. So that’s it for Question of the Week.
00:04:38 Main Topic of the Week: Writing While Traveling
Now onto our main topic this week, tips and tricks for writing while traveling, since of course many people travel over the Christmas holidays, so this seems like a timely topic.
Two principles to start with: First, think of why you are trying to write while you’re traveling. Is this something you really need to be doing and more to the point, is this really something you should be doing? This obviously depends on the nature of your trip. If you are traveling for business reasons and you’re sitting in an airport for four hours waiting for your flight and then you have a five hour flight, that would be an excellent time to get some writing done since otherwise, you would just be like everyone else in the airport paying too much for coffee and staring at your phone. If you are on the kind of trip that is a vacation, it might be a good idea to put aside writing while you are doing that just for the sake of your own mental health. If you are on a trip that involves a lot of family obligations, like for example, a funeral, then it might be a good idea just to set aside writing for that time, focus on the emotional needs of the moment and then pick it back up once the trip is over.
The other thing to keep in mind if why you are writing is if you have a deadline. That sort of focuses the mind quite a bit and if you have a deadline, you’re going to have to plan accordingly. The other thing to keep in mind is flexibility, why you are writing and flexibility because as we know, modern travel is utter chaos. I mean, it was worse in the past. I mean, Odysseus tried to get home from the Siege of Troy and got lost for 10 years, which is less likely nowadays, but travel is still unpleasant and a lot of things can go wrong, and you have to be flexible and seize the moment when you can and accept that sometimes things are beyond your control. If you are working on a deadline while you are traveling, then you’ll have to treat it like any other remote work job while you are traveling.
Having a true external writing deadline means you need to plan your vacation or trip differently and in a more structured way if possible. You absolutely need to plan this with your traveling companions in advance (if you’re traveling with people), so everyone’s prepared for this and pick your destination based on internet access instead of relying on standard hotel Wi-Fi because as we all know if you travel, standard hotel Wi-Fi generally is pretty terrible. You may need to bring some sort of mobile hotspot with you or pay extra to use your phone as a mobile hotspot while you are traveling.
If you are genuinely on a deadline and don’t want to burn through your mobile data, check the internet setup of your destination before you arrive. It might also be wise to check on guest internet use policies at nearby libraries or universities if your destination does not have reliable internet and you’ll need to use the internet for a significant amount of time. Many of these places require registration or a fee for non-residents/non-students but tend to have far more reliable internet than coffee shops or hotels.
Also, if you’re in the phase of writing where you’re writing your rough draft, if you’re not editing and relying on an online editing tool like Grammarly or Pro Writing Aid, then you can probably do without internet if you absolutely have to. If you’re just writing, just open up your laptop, sit down and write, it actually might be beneficial to have the internet off if you are prone to being distracted by the internet, but if you do need internet, bear that in mind.
For the next part of this episode, we’re going to focus on the second type of writing while traveling, the feeling that many writers have that they should be writing while traveling or on vacation and fear of missing progress or falling out of their hard-won routine. I’ll also provide some suggestions if you decide you want to write while traveling in spite of the various obstacles you might face.
If you don’t have a deadline and this isn’t a necessity for you and you really want to get some writing done while you’re traveling, you need to ask yourself why. Writing because you want to means you can be flexible, but you still want to plan your expectations in advance to make the trip smoother and to deal with things in accordance with reality (always a good idea).
If you’re not on a deadline and you don’t have to be doing this, why do you want to write while traveling? Do you just want to keep the streak going by at least writing something? Do you want to keep your normal writing routine exactly? Are the reasons why you want to write more important than the personal, work, or family obligations on this trip? Like I said before, there are some trips where it’s really in the best interest if you put aside any writing or work for the time and focus on the needs of the trip, whether that’s a vacation by yourself or a family vacation, a family gathering such as a holiday or a funeral or another family gathering that’s a bit happier than a funeral, like a graduation or a wedding or a baptism, that kind of thing. Do you want a soothing writing retreat at a lakeside cabin, but really you’re spending a week with ten relatives in a cabin that you just rented? Then you might need to rethink your expectations for writing during that week. Now onto some tips for writing while traveling.
#1: If possible, plan the time. Note that this may not always be possible. You may have to carve out your own time to get writing done because it’s definitely not a group activity, especially if you are on vacation with friends or family or something of that nature. Are you going to be able to sneak in half an hour of writing while everyone else is off on the boat or going to town for ice cream? That’s a far more realistic of a goal in that circumstance than an imagined weeklong writing retreat.
Here’s a recent example for myself. Over Thanksgiving before dinner, I was the only one who was not taking a nap in the house. I was the only one who was awake. I could have used that time to read or play video games, but instead I pulled out my computer and wrote a thousand words of Orc-Hoard. Now obviously there is nothing wrong with playing video games or reading or quietly browsing the internet in that circumstance, but I felt like what I really wanted to do in that moment while everyone else was taking their naps was to get a thousand words down. So that’s what I did, and that’s also a good example of a flexibility of seizing the moment when it presents itself.
I should also note that traveling is definitely not the time to start a radical new habit. If you can’t get out of bed before 07:00 during a normal day, getting up to write at 04:30 while traveling is unrealistic, especially if you’re staying up later, dealing with jet lag, or not sleeping well as usual, since it’s often difficult to get a decent night’s sleep in a hotel or somebody’s guest room.
One long block of writing time may be more realistic than every day of the trip, especially if you’re traveling with groups or with small children. Maybe you use the train ride or flight (or better yet, the seemingly endless wait for a delayed flight) as your writing time for the trip, and don’t worry about the days at your destination. Like I mentioned before, if you’re stuck at the airport waiting four hours before a flight will take you on a three-day trip and you get 3,000 words written during those four hours, you’ve probably got your trip writing covered.
#2: If possible, minimize distractions/create a working setup. Find a low traffic area if you’re going to write such as the guest bedroom or your hotel room or something. Some hotels have work areas or lounges that are more tucked away from the lobby because hotel lobbies can get pretty noisy, especially nowadays when people seem compelled to bring their dogs with them into hotels. We also cover how to minimize distractions pretty extensively in our November Writing Challenge episodes, specifically Episodes 225 and 226, so you can listen to those tips there.
#3: I think this might be the most important tip: find small windows of opportunity. In other words, be flexible. Find short bursts of opportunities to write such as when you’re in line for the rental car or waiting for your coffee at a busy coffee shop. These short bursts of two to three minutes might be the most realistic goal for traveling while writing, especially if you can teach yourself to write on your phone with your thumbs.
This might sound a bit outlandish, but I do know people who do this and have written entire books thumb typing on their phones on their commute from rural Britain to London every day. Then you will give yourself a big leg up because there are small, modern laptops you can use pretty effectively in small moments and carry with you, but everyone carries their phones with them most of the time nowadays, so you can whip out your phone and thumb type out a few paragraphs while you’re waiting in line. That would be to your advantage, and honestly, it’s probably a better use of your time in line than idly browsing social media or the internet on your phone.
#4: Find a way to store ideas on the fly (especially important for short bursts of writing). You can use the Notes app or voice memos on your phone. Test this before the trip so it feels like instinct to do, to write down things quickly or to record paragraphs or carry a small pocket notebook with a pen. I should note for that myself, I only very rarely write ideas down because I have lots of ideas and I’ve always figured that if the idea is good, it’ll come back to me when I think about it later, and if it’s no good, I’ll forget about it. I’s sort of a survival of the fittest for ideas inside my head, but a lot of people’s brains don’t work that way, so it’s a good idea if your brain doesn’t work that way to write down ideas as they come to you.
#5: Be realistic about your goal, and this also ties into being flexible and having a realistic idea of what’s going to happen on your trip. Is it worth pausing writing to have undivided time with family/ friends on this trip or is it worth pausing writing so you can relax (for example, if you’re going on vacation or if you are visiting family, whether for a happy occasion like a wedding or a graduation or for a sad occasion like a funeral)?
Believe it or not, coming from me who was just boasting about publishing a million new words of fiction this year, there are some advantages to pausing writing for a while when you’re compelled to do so by something like a trip. The potential positives: you can come back fresh to your work and your progress, especially after seeing lots of new things. That can work well with some people and help someone out of a rut.
Another advantage is if you’re traveling, you don’t have to deal with traveling with your laptop or additional tech equipment just for writing purposes or risk getting them damaged or lost. It’s a lot easier to travel with a modern smartphone than it is with a modern laptop. This can also give you more enjoyable and focused time with family on vacation, which will help if you need to focus on writing instead of them at some later point, like for example, not making your second cousin’s play because of a later deadline won’t feel like a pattern of neglect if you just spent a week visiting them at the lake.
This can also believe it or not, help with family strife because if you are frustrated with not meeting your writing goals while on your vacation, but if you give yourself permission to take a break, you won’t be frustrated and you will probably be better company for any people you are visiting. The advantage is you can enjoy your vacation and spend time with your family or friends being fully present in the moment and not being distracted by what you have to do.
For myself, I’ve been publishing for…in the coming April, I will have been self-publishing for 14 years and I’ve veered back and forth at different times over this over the years. There are some trips I’ve gone on where I’ve done a significant bit of writing at the time, and there are other trips I’ve gone on where I haven’t done any writing at all and focused on the moment.
Again, it really depends on the circumstances of the trip. If, for example, I’m visiting family and everyone’s taking naps in the afternoon, why not whip out my laptop and start typing and see if I can get out a thousand words before everyone wakes up and it’s time for dinner? But other trips, for example, I’ve spent all day in the car driving from various national monuments and landmarks, and if you’re doing that, that is really not a good time to attempt any writing for those kinds of trips, and so I did not do any writing on those kinds of trips.
Let me use myself as an example here. This coming Christmas holiday between Christmas Eve and about December 29th/December 30th, I’m not planning on doing any writing at all. I might do some writing if, for example, everyone’s taking a nap or everyone’s out doing errands or on phone calls or something and I have nothing else to do, so I might as well whip out my laptop and see if I can squeeze out a thousand words, but for the most part, I’m planning to focus on the holiday and not do any writing or very much writing between Christmas Eve and the 29th and the 30th or thereabouts. Then usually if I do that kind of thing where I have to take a couple days off or a weekend off or that kind of thing, I feel pretty refreshed and eager to get back at it once I am done with the trip and the vacation or the holiday is over.
Additionally, is it more realistic to use the trip for inspiration instead of getting writing done? You could visit museums related to what you’re writing about, historical sites or buildings, or visit new cities. If you’re planning to set a book there someday. Thinking of it as a research/inspiration trip may help with a feeling of guilt from not writing and make the trip more enjoyable.
What I’ve been doing lately is, as I’ve mentioned before frequently on this podcast, I usually do my own covers now, and that requires, of course, a steady supply of stock photos. So when I’m on a trip lately, if I see something scenic, it’s time to whip out the camera and take a few pictures because modern smartphone cameras are good enough and produce high enough resolution images that you can use them on book covers. Several of the book covers I have published this year with my books have elements in them that were taken from photos I took while I was on a trip. So that is one example of how I shut off writing entirely during these trips, but then still take a lot of pictures that I can use for later stock photo use in my book covers.
#6: And now for tip number six that I’m going to emphasize quite a bit, if you are in fact writing while you are traveling, make sure you have a method for backing up your work. This is so important. I’m going to repeat it again. Make sure you have a method for backing up your work to the cloud or a flash drive or something. One of the risks of traveling is that your laptop can be lost, damaged, or stolen, and if you don’t have a backup of what you’re working on the laptop, you will lose all your work, which is one of the most disheartening feelings you can have.
Fortunately, there are many, many low-cost options to back up your work. You could use a flash drive and copy your work to a flash drive at the end of every session. The advantage of that is your work’s in two places. The disadvantage of that is that a flash drive like laptop can be lost, damaged, or stolen, so it’s a good idea to use a cloud solution. We talked about finding reliable internet, but you might want to just find just enough internet to connect to a cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive or OneDrive or Apple Service and then back up your work to the cloud, and that way if your laptop is lost, damaged or stolen, you will not lose your progress.
It’s an interesting thing nowadays that laptops, as expensive they can be, are often less valuable to their users than the data they contain. The data is the important part, and you want to make sure that you back it up regularly. Even if you don’t have a cloud provider, you can just email yourself the file every day of your work progress, so that way if your laptop is again lost, damaged, or stolen, you have a backup copy in your email account.
Recently, I was talking to a relative who is subscribed to Dropbox and he’s complaining that he’s paying, I think it’s like $90 a year for a Dropbox to back up his laptop, and I told him to think of it as the computer equivalent of car insurance. I mean, in the ideal world, if you have car insurance and you get into a car accident, the insurance company will declare your car totaled and write you a check for the value of the car that will help you get your next vehicle.
Having a cloud subscription like that is the equivalent of car insurance for computers so that way if once again, repeat it with me, if your computer is lost, damaged, or stolen, all your data is safely backed up in the cloud and you can download it right away to your next computer. You can tell I used to work in IT because I’m really banging on about this, but if you are traveling and you are working, make sure you have a good backup solution for your work. This will avoid, trust me, much later heartbreak.
So to wrap up, I’d say what the main thing I’ve learned for many years of doing this is that if you want to write while you are traveling, be flexible, which is something I have to admit runs against my personality because I do have a very rigid and routine driven personality, and it was totally up to me, I would do exactly the same thing, exactly the same time every day, but obviously life doesn’t work that way.
One must learn flexibility, and flexibility is especially important while traveling. I’d say that is the biggest thing to keep in mind if you want to write while traveling, accept that sometimes you’re not going to get any writing done during your trip and that is for the best or accept that other times that there may be moments where if you need to, you can write a thousand words while you’re waiting at the airport or everyone else you’re visiting is on the phone or running errands.
So I hope these tips and tricks will help you if you decide to write while you are traveling. So that’s it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
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