Life Happens

I keep telling myself that I will plan out time on a Saturday morning to write out a decent blog entry.  But life has a way of getting in the way.  After a nice workout, I had no time to really collect my thoughts.  My kitchen blinds needed fixing, the backyard had not been raked of grass clippings since I mowed the yard earlier in the week, a couple of rooms in my house needed to be cleaned, laundry was waiting, and I found out a friend of mine is in town tonight.

So the great blog entry has been reduced to this, just me trying to say something as the final load of laundry is running in the dryer.

Such is life.

Balance

I had made plans to write every morning before I went to work.  I would get up at 5:00 in the morning, head to the kitchen, pour myself a glass of cold water, sit down at my laptop and write for at least an hour.  A lot of mornings that’s exactly how it happened and I was very pleased to get a little further along with my novel.

But some days don’t work like that.  Rising at 5:00, writing, and then heading off to work makes for a tired guy.  Plus most nights I’m bringing work home, spending it on my work laptop doing updates and preparing for the next work day.

(And that doesn’t include meetings before and/or after work)

So there have been mornings when the alarm hits 5:00 and my brain cannot function enough to even generate a page.  Writing is important but so is rest.  Because the real world doesn’t care that you’ve got a notion to put down a story that keeps dancing around in your head.  It expects you to be at certain places and performing your tasks, sometimes beyond the level of expectations.

So how do I somehow keep all of this balanced?  It’s not easy but it’s a challenge that I accepted a long time ago.  It’s really about maximizing time.  There are 24 hours in a day and I try to take full advantage of them.  At times it doesn’t work and things get left undone.  But when I can make it happen, a lot of great things get accomplished.

Luckily, today is Sunday and there is no work pressure on my plate.  I’ll get a few pages of my story done and my work updates will be finished with no problems.  But Monday starts the 5:00 schedule all over again.  I’m just hoping I can stay on point all five days this week.