Making Time and Space
(Cross Posted at FlagShip). I'm working on an outline for a new fiction project, which is exciting. I've never really been an outliner, and getting some things put together so that I have an idea of where things will go is proving to be an interesting exercise.
However, lately I've found it particularly hard to get into "writer mode". Maybe you've had that issue at various times. Day job, family trouble, the heartbreak of simple chronic halitosis… all kinds of things might be getting in your way.
For example…
The day starts about 6:30, trying to wake up and get moving after having been up 'til about 1:00 am the prior evening. At that point, it's all about getting the daughter up and moving and down to school, and getting myself ready and out the door to work.
Last night, I was at work until about 6:30, because of an after-work meeting. Some interesting things dropped during that meeting that have a particular impact on me and my family, so there's a great big swath of mental space being consumed right now by that process. (If my brain was a computer, I'd be looking to get more ram right now. And maybe an upgraded processor. And a new graphics card. And I'd be using the Task Manager to kill processes like "worry.dll". But I digress…)
Immediately after work, I took my wife to run a necessary errand. She's just gotten her real estate license (yay! know anyone looking for a house in Austin TX? drop me a line.) and she needed a laptop. Craigslist led us to a nice secondhand unit with a Core 2 Duo, xp, 2 GB RAM, and a not huge but adequate hard drive. We got home at about 7:45. (Took a little longer than we'd hoped.)
Change from work clothes as fast as I can, scarf down some dinner. (chicken breast, baked in Rudy's bbq sause. Yes, that's how they spell it.)
At 8:00, Galley Table kicked off, and we were talking until… 9:30? Something like that? Good discussion, really enjoyed it. So, 9:30? I think? At which point, I took my wife's laptop and started installing updates, anti-virus, and MS Office. That always takes longer than you really want it to, so by the time it was all said and done, it was about 1:00 am, and I had to get up for work in the morning.
That's not going to happen every night, but it seems that these kinds of things have been occurring with more and more frequency. And it's not necessarily the errands and the laptop maintenance. It's the mental creep that I've been getting from the day job and my volunteer work and…
I know, I know. I'm whining. The fact that I'm complaining about it in the first place does bother me. But I know I'm not the only out there who struggles with this, and I'm sure there are people out there who deal with more and bigger issues, but still manage to create that space and time to write. I've started experimenting a little with meditation, but I'm only in the bare beginnings of that.
So, I'm wondering – what do you do to get around that? How do you clear your decks – both in time and in thought – so you can sit down and write? Or do you not have this particular problem?
