Back to writing!

Sometimes things look almost perfect: you make a schedule for yourself, you stick to it and get brilliant results. You’re thrilled and want that to last forever. But then… life happens and you get overwhelmed again, running in all directions like a headless chicken: precisely what I’ve been doing for the past, uh… 3 months? Unfortunately, I didn’t get to do actual running, which I usually do during the spring to shed the extra pounds gained during the winter; I only got to make money, which admittedly had become my top priority: going hungry from lack of money is not my preferred weight loss strategy.

Sigh

It’s okay; I know I’m not good with changes, and going from unemployment to working over 50 hours a week is one drastic change. But now, things are settling down, I’ve reduced my working hours to 40-50 hours maximum, and now I’m ready to rethink my schedule. It’s irregular because of my husband’s schedule… but upon the whole, here’s how my time is distributed:

Okay, so this doesn’t look too bright (aside from the colours I chose): 5.5 hours is short for me to research/write/edit/revise a blog post, but it’ll have to do. I’m not too happy with having only 7 hours a week to write fiction either, or only 3.5 hours to read, but there isn’t much I can do about it. It’s more than I have for, say, exercising.

I’ll try to steal a few hours when my daughter is playing alone (I’m encouraging her to play alone because that’s something that doesn’t come naturally to her) and the necessary house chores are taken care of to get some writing or blogging done. I might consider handwriting short stories or making detailed plans on paper during those times. I’ve been thinking about writing a series of “episodes” for Wattpad or this blog, or both. That might not even be possible considering speech is the one thing that makes it impossible for me to focus and my daughter is talking all the time, but… I’ll see.

I could also go jogging with my princess in the stroller when it doesn’t rain.

I wish I could cut my hours of sleep to 56 (8 hours/day), but with the pills I take, even sleeping 9 hours a day is a stretch: ideally, I’d sleep 10-12 hours a day. So much time lost.

I can do this!

I hope. Very honestly, I feel tired just thinking about it. But I have to do this. I want to. That’s the way forward, the one leading to my someday being able to call myself a professional writer; the one that won’t make me feel like I’m wasting my time. Not to mention that this schedule will end with the summer: this fall I’m taking a creative writing course and so I’ll free 8-10 hours/week off my work schedule for that purpose. My schedule will still be tight, but a bigger proportion of it will be devoted to writing and that’s encouraging.

Seriously, I can do this.