Squidsquatch. A new interview every day. A single question. The subject one day becomes interviewer the next.

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Nick Evans: As you’re one of the most prolific authors about, what do you do to take a mental break from writing, editing, and the business of being a writer (contracts, taxes, public appearances, et al)? Do you take four weeks a year off in a planned fashion, grab a couple of days off here or there as you feel the need, or just keep hard at it until you run out of energy and have to have a break?

Sean Williams: I’ve never been asked this before, but it’s something I’ve really had to think about down the years. My lovely wife understands better than I do that my life is dictated not so much by stress but by the strategies I’ve come up with for dealing with stress. So forgive me for answering at length on an issue I’ve arguably thought entirely too much about.

When I started writing, I didn’t take breaks, ever, because I had an anxiety disorder that kept me indoors when I wasn’t working. I pretty much wrote all the time, and that’s all. It wasn’t good for me, even if it did enable me improve very quickly as a writer. Once the condition was diagnosed, I recognized that I had to take time off or else I’d go crazy.

So I gave up smoking and took up booze instead. I started going out again. I met new people, discovered cons, gave myself permission to slacken off a little. Life began to fill up again, and it was great for a couple of years.

Then I became inundated with contracts and the tension was seriously mounting again. The urge to work all the time would have been an easy one to give into, but I knew it was still bad for me and needed to be suppressed. Hard work is good, but ineffective work is worse than useless.

I learned ways to set limits on what I expected of myself every day. The 1500 words that I talk about so often are as much a maximum* as a minimum. That daily limit exists to tell me when I’m allowed to stop and slacken off for a bit and recharge.

These days, I still work every day, but I get those 1500 words done pretty quickly most mornings, and that means I can smear emails and other work stuff across the afternoon and evening. Even though it looks like I’m working 24/7, there are lots of crucial sanity breaks. I only become agitated when I foresee any kind of extended length of time that isn’t permeated by moments to relax, and I do everything in my power to avoid them. When I can’t, I put on my Bose QuietComfort 2s, close the study door, and just get on with it, because the sooner I finish, the sooner I can get back to what is, by now, a very full life.

Sean Williams’ latest novel is Saturn Returns, the first in a space opera trilogy that promises “dark experiments, dangerous ruins, fleeting ghosts and deadly conspiracies.” Nineteen of Sean’s twenty-one novels have been published in the last eight years; he has published sixty short stories since 1991. He thrives in his natural habitat on LiveJournal here. For the next few days he will be engaging in conversation on the AsIf! forums.