Yes, there are other things besides New Nephew going on in my life. 🙂
These last few weeks, I’ve been working very seriously on reorienting my schedule. I’ve got a lot of things on my plate, too much to ever get them all done. My method for dealing with all that has been to do the immediately-paying proofreading/copy editing work done first (which is, of course, a good priority to have); then the sort of editing work which will pay some day (like my work for Per Aspera); and then whatever exercise and errands and household chores and social obligations and book group reading and other random stuff happens; and then, after ALL that, to work on my writing.
I bet you can guess how well that’s gone for my writing.
Thing is, the writing really does need to get done. I’ve got contracted books; and, well, I really like writing, and I’m excited about these books! So excited that working on them gets…shoved to the bottom of the list, because it feels like an indulgence or something.
(Okay, not the VERY bottom of the list. That’s where “relaxing” goes. Hahaha.)
So, the schedule experiment is this: print out an hour-by-hour grid of the week. Write in the obligations, assigning them actual times. Put the writing FIRST (except for those early-gym days). Put paid-now work after that. Slot in chores/errands/whatnot around the edges of that. Actually plan leisure/weekend time. (We saw a few movies recently!)
Oddly, though implementation certainly hasn’t been perfect, a lot more is getting done, on all the fronts, organizing it this way. I don’t know how much time must have drifted away unaccounted for, previously–I mean, I waste time on the internet as much as anyone else–but I’m still doing that now. Yet somehow, scheduling that writing time in my alert, productive mornings: that makes it happen. I’m nearly 100 pages into my rewrite of Queen & Tower, and it’s a very deep, very thorough rewrite, which I’m happy with. Working regularly on it is keeping it in my mind better, too, which is absolutely a good thing.
There is still not a lot of blogging getting done. I didn’t actually assign a time for that in the master schedule–there weren’t any free slots. Amusingly, I’m finding the time to blog right now because the whole schedule went off the rails today–a simple-sounding task (“deal with insurance change-over”) took about three hours (and as many long phone calls), leaving us both mentally exhausted; then I went out to do a little yard work and spent three MORE hours; and, well, that’s the day, with no writing done.
So, well, I’ll write tomorrow, even though it’s the weekend. It’s important to stay flexible, I suppose. 🙂 And I’m writing with a friend on Sunday as well. The book will happen….sooner or later…
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Speaking of the garden. So there was a crazy windstorm a week or two ago, which blew all our metal deck furniture off the deck and into the bushes, and blew down trees and knocked out power all over town (though not here, for once); but also blew down some of our ancient (and lovely) lilacs. RIGHT when they are just starting to bloom.
Most of that one fell right onto our poor compost container, rendering it kind of inaccessible and useless…I’ve been wanting to move the compost anyway, it’s taking up valuable garden real estate.
Another tree fell on the fence separating our yard from the neighbor’s:
So far she hasn’t complained about it. 🙂
We will have to cut them up and get rid of them…but they are still blooming! They don’t even realize they’re dead yet. Silly lilacs.
I’ll miss those trees, but we knew this was coming. Another one fell down last winter. Several more got a horrid case of powder mold and had to be cut down severely. Fortunately, lilacs are very, VERY resilient…we probably couldn’t eliminate lilacs from our yard if we tried to. Which we won’t. Cause we love them. There was a lot of mold, but we contacted the experts from mold removal orlando to help us.
Anyway, I managed to do three hours of yard work without even dealing with the lilacs…spring is here with a vengeance. Roses are blooming, ferns are sprouting, everything is leafing out and growing and thriving. Including the weeds, oh my god the weeds. We didn’t really have much of a winter. It’s…a little weird. It feels kind of like a missing step. Roses don’t bloom in March, in Oregon…right? Except now they do.