Tag Archive: Life

So this is the end of my second week of early mornings, and it’s working out fairly well. I fall asleep quite easily between 8:30 and 9:30, but still have a bit of trouble hauling myself out of bed. Also I’ve noticed that when I first started this I used to start writing right away, but now that I’m getting used to the schedule I spend time “waking up” with email checks just like I used to do in the evenings, so even though I get up 2 hours earlier, I only get about 1h20 of writing time in. And I hate when I’m on a roll and have to stop because I have to go to the real job.

This of course makes me flip flop back to ‘why not just go back to nights?’ If I’m going to ‘waste’ 40 minutes, I rather use that time to ‘wake up’ with a jog after the kids are in bed and then plow away with writing. That would also mean my social schedule gets less perturbed, and if I was on a roll I could run with it and push through work on less sleep, going to bed early to catch up. That inconsistent sleep schedule is bad for your overall health though. And my husband says I’m less cranky when I get up early, and less dead when I come home from work, heh. It’s what I’ve been doing all my life though, so I feel myself gravitating to it.

Re: The long, long road…

This week was also the first major discrepancy between what I wrote and what I kept. So even though I wrote 4969, only 4550 remain. That stung.

I should be happy that I’m up to almost 5k a week. In the beginning that seemed like something I would never reach, but I still feel like it’s not enough. Right now a lot of my weekly count is happening on the Tuesdays and Thursdays I have free. That’s going to end, and then what? Back to the 1500-2000 words a week? Can’t happen; I need to meet my goals. I’m impatient! The end of the road looks so far away, and then there’s editing, and cover design, and marketing, and business stuff, and mailing lists, and figuring out how to stay anonymous.

I read somewhere that whenever you tackle a long task that you should visualize yourself a year from now, and looking back would you have wanted to start in on it earlier, even if it was just a little bit every day? And of course the answer would be yes. Even if I only have half a book the answer will be yes. But once I’ve got my mind into something I just want to dive right into it and burn through it until it’s done. The fact that I can’t because of my job is killing me.

I used to love my current job; I even proclaimed that it was the best job in the world, and I really did feel that way. Now every tiny little thing is getting to me, even if 90% of the time things are good, the 10% eats at my brain. And it comes down to the fact that I still work for someone else.

That’s never really fit with me.

I started a dog walking business when I was 9. I did desktop publishing layouts in high school and early university but I felt more like a contractor. In my current part-time teaching job I feel like I’m in my own game, me and the students. I have a Department Head, but s/he doesn’t tell me what to do; I just give him/her the grades. There’s a freedom there. But in my bread-and-butter job I have a clear boss who I report to every week (and my new boss manages very differently than the old one. I used to feel like a team member whose ideas were appreciated; now I feel like a cog in the wheel who should just shut up and do the work.) While I enjoy the work and feel like I’m making a difference, the fact that it’s employment won’t change, and the environment is so very dependent on the personality of the person I report to. It’s the fatal flaw that’s gnawing at me, and making me quite unhappy with what most people would fall head over heels for.

I was reading on KBoards that there’s no need to try to advance in two careers at the same time, and it hit me that that’s really what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to get a promotion at work (largely so I only need to work one job to make ends meet instead of a full-time job plus a part-time job), and I’m trying to make this writing thing viable. I need to not give so much of myself to my day-job. I put in many hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime a year (I’m salaried, so it’s expected), but I need to start delegating and protecting my time. Something has to give, and I can’t expect my little boys to be the ones who have to go without their mommy. Sadly, that has been the case during peak periods at work, when they’d be heading to bed when I came home. That lasts 4-6 months. Brutal.

As an aside: I’ve never really blogged before I started this one, but man, writing all that stuff out is therapeutic. Reminds me of a study I read that showed that people who journal tend to have a better outlook, almost as much as those who go to therapy. I can see that.

Clearly I’m becoming one of those blog people who announce to the internet that they’re going to accomplish something great, only to peter out after the first few weeks of newness wears off. Or I could say that life got in the way, that my son was diagnosed with a condition that needed daily therapy and really wore us down, and it was just impossible to squeeze everything in, but it still feels like a huge excuse. Sigh.

I can’t believe I started this blog almost a year ago now. It’s funny that I should post around this time of year; it’s a time of revival for me, a time for coming back to normalcy. Basically from mid-July to around early-Feb my full-time job takes 150%; I’m talking evenings and weekends of overtime and some serious burn-out. Thankfully I’m able to balance this with some down time during the rest of the year, and plan to use my saved up time to only work 3 days a week for the next few months (told you it was a lot of overtime). I had cleared my slate to focus on the novel; no teaching, no more students to train, just freedom! Unfortunately things won’t work out perfectly though, as a colleague of mine took quite seriously ill and I have to make up her classes. So my free time is essentially going down the drain. Again. At least I can afford dry wall for the basement by picking up the extra work, heh. It just always seems that there’s more and more work to do, and my own goals keep getting pushed back.

Resistance is my #1 enemy. It’s hilarious that as part of my day job I help people plan out how to complete their own large writing projects. So I took one of the spreadsheets I make for them and made it work for me instead. There will be a mass restructuring at my day job in 5-years time, and I’m hoping to be well set up with my indie side income by then (HAH! But let’s pretend that’s a possibility for the sake of argument). Anyway, I worked out a spreadsheet that automatically generates a calendar to get 8 books out in 5 years. Each book is planned to be 100k and I’ll use 5% of my time for plotting, 70% for writing, and 25% for editing/proofing. The spreadsheet automatically calculates multiple deadlines for each book: for the start/end of each stage, and then at the 25/50/75% points in between, for each of the 3 stages. Basically I always have a deadline looming so it’s supposed to keep me on track. Even though I only use 70% of my time for writing, I still only need to write ~630 words/day on those writing days to get the whole thing done. Seems more manageable that way.

Another thing I’m doing is “Don’t Break the Chain”, which essentially involves printing out the whole year on one page and giving yourself an “X” when you accomplish your goal. So I bought a huge magnetic white board to put my “chains” on and stuck it on my dining room wall. Classy, no; motivating, yes. I’ve got the old standbys (exercise, eat better, get enough sleep), but also some personal goals (no more “dead mommy” syndrome / be in the moment). And of course, writing. But there I ran into a bit of a problem.

How do you track how much progress you’ve made with plotting? Counting words seems irrelevant, as there’s no end-point word count when you know you’ll be “done.” Counting scenes seemed silly. I wanted to have SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based), but in the end had to be satisfied with “progress” for that component. I’ll use my word count goal for the writing phase, but for the rest I’ll just use my deadlines to keep me on track. I hope.

And now I have to go to bed so I can get my “get enough sleep” check. Which I have set at 7 hours to be Realistic, even though I’ve already determined I really need 8.5 and so even achieving the goal is something of a failure. Baby steps!

I always dislike those blogs that start off with good posts and then randomly go quiet, followed by an apologetic post saying the author has to get back to writing. And yet here I find myself.

The good news is that I no longer have two jobs; my teaching commitments ended last week as I passed in over 200+ graded exams, so that was a great relief. I now only have one student to mentor through the summer, so my workload has drastically reduced — just one full-time job for the next 4 months!

Unfortunately my “life load” has increased… my oldest son was recently diagnosed with a medical condition which requires a significant amount of time and effort to help remedy, and this will persist for the foreseeable future. We weren’t surprised by the diagnosis (and are grateful to have it, as we can now obtain the therapy he needs), but it’s difficult to squeeze the extra appointments and sessions into our schedule. But we do it!

Awhile back, I wrote a post on how I’m trying to squeeze my writing into the early morning or late evening, but I found that if I stay up at night I just take care of random chores that need to be done; bring stuff like dealing with finances, trying to sell off the stuff in our basement, etc. If I went to bed early and tried to get up at 4am, I was still so tired that I’d just hit snooze even if I’d had 7 or 8 hours sleep by that point. I find this tragically ironic, because I always get up for work no matter how little sleep I’ve gotten, so deep down I feel like I just mustn’t be motivated enough to write.

I did a lot of googling when I was trying to figure out how to squeeze writing a novel into my already full day. I work full time, teach part-time, and have two young boys who want me all to themselves when I get home. Most sites seem to advocate writing while the rest of the family sleeps (either getting up quite early, or staying up late), but they seem to be written by people with only one job. How could I squeeze in a full-time job, a family, and another part-time job? My schedule looked something like this: