Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

Of aspiring writers….

It’s not that plans went awry so much as they just never really went anywhere.

The week following my last log was crazily busy with work. There was a lot of being out of the house, attending a lot of events, and meeting a lot of people. In the spaces in between work I ploughed on with the Sirius interlude that I had been trying to write. I finally got it complete on Saturday and I posted it up with a rush of satisfaction.

Slate finally clear, last Sunday, I had plans.

I had a lot of writing plans.

I had plots ready and waiting to be written.

I figured that I would get the next Interlude out of the way and ready to post by Wednesday, move onto the next Aftershocks, and circle back to my Big Moxie Q1 story.

But then there was cleaning to do. One of those cleans which is needed in order to get a whole house back to rights after you’ve had guests and a busy week.

Sunday disappeared between the physical activity of the clean, and recovering from the cleaning.

Suddenly, it was Monday morning again. Back to work on another busy, busy week. There was a lot of ground I needed to cover on Monday. I worked late to get the professional article finished for Wednesday. The next day I was out to meet a client in the morning and had a series of calls scheduled for the afternoon. I was an exhausted pancake by the end of Shrove Tuesday.

By Wednesday, I had a paragraph of the next Promises Interlude. Not to worry, I told myself, looking at my very busy diary which had meeting after meeting scheduled for two days, some out of the house and in-person. I’d replan, do the Interlude to post on Saturday – it would be a nice serendipity as Saturday was International Women’s day and it was Andromeda’s Interlude.

Thursday evening rolled around with my cancelling one event because my body was making it known that it had had enough. I curled up in front of my laptop and watched Daredevil: Born Again.

I woke up feeling very exhausted on Friday. I reprioritised everything else to write my Friday article and do a coaching call – and that was my limit.

I still had the same paragraph of Andromeda’s Interlude written.

No more words.

No more progress.

I spent yesterday writing in between periods of rest.

I’ve taken the weekend ostensibly off from everything including the weekly clean although I’ve done an odd job here and there.

The last two weeks have been just been too crazy with work. Yes, it was good to accelerate potential leads for paying work, but bad for writing.

My eternal quest for finding a balance seems still out of reach. And yet…

I know I scheduled too much. I know I scheduled too much travel out of the house in too short a period of time, and my body rightly protested. I’ve made a lot of good progress on the health front, but it is an ongoing management of pain and energy. I got my tactics all wrong over the past two weeks, especially coming off the back of the Great Chester Treasure Hunt which meant I could barely walk for two days.

So where am I now?

I feel like I’ve swam really, really hard against a current for the past two weeks, but I have managed to finish the Andromeda Interlude and I did get the Sirius one posted last week.

I am very behind on what I wanted to accomplish in my writing by this time in March when I look back at what I had anticipated getting done back in January.

But, all is not lost.

At the end of the day, it isn’t actually an issue. Nobody but me is standing there frowning at my not hitting the deadlines on my original schedule.

I am pleased that I am actively noticing the root causes of the problem and taking stock of what needs to change. It’s far too easy for me to slide into old habits of “busy-ness” and I know I need to redraw the lines. I need to find a way to be more tactical about how and where I’m spending my time at work. I need to leave enough time and energy for my writing.

It is my constant challenge, but the fact that I’m questioning and challenging myself over my decisions shows me that consciously I am no longer content to prioritise my work to the detriment of my writing, and that’s a huge step forward.

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