Doing any Thing involves a certain amount of waiting. And  as you may have noticed from the degree to which we are slowly going crazy on Twitter and Tumblr, of our various collective virtues, patience is not one of them.

There’s a lot of waiting when it comes to writing: Waiting for yes, waiting for any answer at all, waiting for edits, waiting for the publication date. Then there’s just the waiting for the train, or the light to turn green. Even when we Do all the Things it is possible for us to do, there’s a point (many points, in fact) in the process where what happens next is in someone else’s hands. Even if it’s just the guy who programmed the lights on Route 50 (No seriously dude, why would you program them like that? It makes no sense).

What that all adds up to is a lot of time when we’re going crazy because everything we want to do is dependent on something else happening. It’s maddening, and it can be incredibly distracting, because the temptation to sit there and refresh my inbox for eight hours a day? Pretty damn high.

But all that time I’m slowly going crazy waiting for emails or the traffic jam to end (often both), is time I can actually put to good use. Which is just one of the many reasons why Racheline and I have multiple projects going at once. Rather than climb the walls, we open a new Google doc and start something else.

Well, we still climb the walls. But that time is there and waiting is a part of the business, so we might as well do something constructive with it. For instance, the novella we just submitted? we wrote while the manuscript for Book 3 was out with first readers and Starling was with our editor. (You know Sunday’s post about our project schedule? This is why it exists.)

How do you deal with waiting? Got anything you’re climbing the walls about because you’ve done all you can do and it’s up to someone else now? Whether you need encouragement, distraction, or just a “hang in there!” we’ve got you covered.