Where Do You Find The Time?
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- April 17th, 2009 |
- Comments
I am often asked, “How do you it? Where do you find the time to activity a full time job and also compose books?” The answer is simple. I make the time. However simple the answer might be, actually doing it can be quite difficult.
I get up at 5:15 every morning. The first abstraction I do is trip my computer, and log into my office. I am the network administrator for an international shipping company. That means I have to make careful everything is employed properly before anyone else logs into the group. I do what I need to do thither, and so I exercise. Yes, that’s right, sit-ups, touching my toes (which I can allay do!) buttock tucks, the entire nine yards. After that, I get myself ready for activity.
Without fail, I meditate before I have breakfast. I credit my meditation practice with training me to have the concentration I need to compose. After I eat, I leave for activity.
I put in a full day, doing what network administrators do. Computers are my life at the office. I do anything and everything that needs to be done to keep an office of more than fifty people running smoothly. We also have international users that remotely log into our network. Part of my job is to make careful they are connecting properly, also.
Once I get home, I have any dinner. So, I start my writing day. Weekday evenings, I attempt to put in a few hours at the computer before going to bed. If I need help shifting out of the problems of my day, I consume music. I have a Bose Channel Machine and radio headphones that help me exclude the class and get into my writing area. I reread a page or cardinal of what I last wrote and hope that the next line will come. It unremarkably does.
The lion’s apportion of the writing happens on weekends. I unremarkably drop at least XII hours on Saturday and Sunday at my computer. Sometimes, it can be longer. On Monday morning, the cycle starts over again. Oh, yes, I took a week’s holiday to process Accept Me Thither. I had an April 15th deadline.
I lost any ground last February when I got the flu and couldn’t compose if my life depended on it! I had a fever of 103.4, the highest fever of my adult life! To catch up, I put in nine consecutive XII to fifteen hour days employed on my manuscript. I only obstructed to go back to process Monday, and to do the blogging week for Romantic Inks. Come Saturday, I will be back in the harness.
Now comes the real question! How do I do it? As I’m writing this, I’m cerebration no one is going to believe I keep this agenda. But I do. I’ve been doing it for almost cardinal years now, since I autographed my first contract with Kensington. Once I hit the cardinal year mark in June, I will have written III novels and cardinal novellas budgeting my time as I do. I haven’t missed a deadline yet, not even when my mother passed away last June. I came home from the funeral with page proofs inactivity for Sins and Secrets. I plunged in, read and corrected them.
Thither is a single driving force behind how I manage this. I am a writer. That is different than being an author. Being an author is an occupation. Being a writer is a body.
The intangible something inside that compels me to compose is not at all comfortable. The words don’t start in my mind. They appear to swell from my chest. Sometimes it feels like an alien is about to burst out. I fully expect one day Sigourney Oscine will surface in her Ripley costume, gun in hand, ready to accept me out!
No matter how beat I am, and belief me, I do get beat, I have to compose. The alien inside me needs to be appeased, or it will eat me alive! I am amused by the number of people who have said to me that someday, they’re going to compose a book. The only artifact to compose a book is to sit and do it! Procrastination does not a novel make. It doesn’t matter if it’s a blank page, or a achromatic check from Microsoft Morpheme on a monitor, it has to be filled with words. Those words are the writer’s responsibility. No one is going to do it for you. You have to do it yourself.
Of course, along with the fire that burns in the heart of a writer, thither also has to be abstract ability. To become a published author, you have to not only deprivation to compose, you have to be able to compose. It astonishes me at times when I meet people who can’t put III sentences unitedly in a coherent paragraph and expect to get published. The competition is extraordinary. You have to be good to get published. Period! End of account!
Endowment notwithstanding, you have to also be choice to do what I’m doing. Thither aren’t many published authors these days who can make a living wage writing. Certainly, I’m not one of them, at least not yet. That’s why I get up at 5:15 everyday. I have to pay my bills.
So, to finally answer the question I’ve been asked so many times, that’s how I do it. My artifact isn’t for everyone. But it’s employed for me. I have the books to prove it!