Writing at Entropy Central
If you are a writer with offspring living in the house, You know very well that the chaos that erupts from “special events” can completely derail writing time.
The real problem is that “special events” happen all the time. Over the past several months, the “special event” calendar has looked something like this:
College Applications
Spring Break
Financial Aid Applications
Graduation
Graduation Party
Road Trip to attend somebody else’s graduation ceremony.
Preparing son for 10 days of backpacking at Philmont
Driving Lessons for third (and thankfully last) child.
Yikes! That list is not sequential, and the events often overlap. And it’s just dealing with the kids. It doesn’t mention anything about filing taxes, spouse-driven activity, fledgeling business, death of a pet, care for geriatric pet, or home and yard maintenance. You get the idea. Where’s the writing time in there?
And still, I managed to finish a novel amid all that chaos.
It all comes down to priorities and time management, with heavy emphasis on the latter. Whether you budget a set amount of time to work on writing, or you budget a word count that must be done before other things, time management is the key.
Nothing on this list is any less important than anything else on the list, at least collectively as a family. The worst thing to happen is take that novel and kick it down the road, kind of like our congress does with budget decisions. Sometimes kicking the can is the right decision, but it must have a brick wall the can will not go through and the writing must begin.
Wednesday Writer Status
An administrative note: The Wednesday Writer feature is not done. I have a lineup coming but, well, the above-mentioned list did force the generation of new interviews to a lower priority for a short time. I intend to bring that back in July.
#SFWApro
