Time Keeps On Slippin’

I have to admit that my focus in the month of October has not been on editing my story.  It’s not for a lack of desire.  It’s lack of time.  Even though I was not working on my novel, I was have been busy with novel related activities.

Sometime during the second week of October I looked at the calendar and realized that NaNoWriMo was a few short weeks away.  Now I’ve known that November and the attendant writing frenzy was coming up, but that was the first day it sank in about how much I had to do.   Not only was I going to attempt to do 50,000 words in one month, but I also have two holidays, a convention, a concert, my birthday, and an anniversary that is an emotional trigger.  This is in addition to a doctor’s appointment, my role-playing gaming group’s usual get together, my 40-hour-a-week day job, and taking care of my mother.  Overprogramed?  Me?  Nah.

So I decided that as much as I wanted to be editing, I wouldn’t have enough time to do so.  Instead I’ve been pre-writing posts that I could put up during the month of November.  I figured that I would be able to churn out four or five posts (like this one) so if I didn’t write something during  the week, I would have something I could post during the month.  If I didn’t use them in November, I could use them later on.  I got through two of them and then had to stop to work on reviewing the manuscripts for Convolution’s Writer’s Workshop. (I mentioned how that went earlier.) Then I had to turn down the offer to work on something that, while it would have been fun, would have been a large time drain and wouldn’t have been publishable.

What I wish I had known before I started writing is that my time would be so impacted.  I’ve stopped reading books, or at least the physical act of reading books.  Fortunately, my day job does allow me to listen to audiobooks, so I’m able to listen to some.  But it’s not the same.   There’s also these other things I feel that I should be doing on a daily basis, like tweeting.  But most of the time I feel like I’m playing catch up and that the conversation is over by the time that I’m learning about it.

So I’ve got to figure out a better way to schedule my time.  There are things that I can’t shift, like the time I spend at work.  There has to be some built in flexibility, given the situation with my mother.  I need to be more consistent on working on editing, as well as getting involved on Twitter.  I have a feeling if I learn to balance my time better, I’ll find more to do other things.  Or at least it will feel that way.

Word count as of this post: