Day: October 8, 2024

The Post is 1277. The year is… 2013. Concerned about finding time for the words in a busy schedule, I stated:

 Writing happens twice in that sandwich of events, but it doesn’t happen well. I’ve taken measures to maximize the time I have–namely making sure I can compact the work stuff into the work day–but I still have one last stage to go. I need to establish a solid writing hour during the time the kids and I are both home. This will ensure a healthy respect for the writing process as well as my personal space and time. It will also give me a time of day to write where I can assure myself the work product will be valuable.

I was struggling with being a parent and a husband. Funny how the things you struggle with are sometimes the things you miss after they are gone. I miss having the boys around. I don’t miss being married to that person at all. I miss the comfort of wearing a wedding ring, though that ought to change soon enough. I still haven’t found the writing hour in these past eleven years. I have found time to sell two novels and two novellas along with twenty or more other books of smaller length in that time. What I’m saying is I figure it out when I need to. What I am also saying is I should have written 10 novels and at least 10 novellas in that time frame but I didn’t because I didn’t need to figure it out. I don’t have to rely on writing as a primary source of income so I don’t give it all the time it deserves. I never have. I should and I could. I could do a lot more with my time than I do and it takes the memory of raising three boys at times alone to realize that I used to be a lot better at this.

Time to get my hours right. I’ve been slacking so long that I actually forget what it feels like to not to.

I’ve decided on a quote to share with the world: “Life is hard. Becoming better is hard. Dying is hard. Being dead is easy.” I’ll work on that one. It does reflect an evolution of thought in terms of the eventual end. I do still fear such things, but I see that it is going to have to come my way eventually. In the meanwhile there is a lot of lovely life to be lived. There are going to be wonderful moments of emotion and joy and passion and even anger. There is pride to be had along with disappointment and unease and relief and of course, triumph. I’m here for it–all of it. Some of it hopefully in more measures than others. That is after all how we shape our understanding of living good and living not so good.

I’m living pretty good right now. I spent several hours today constructing a lesson for my classes tomorrow. I’m not done. I have one more to go but it involves a healthy amount of printing and I don’t see the value in doing that from home. Life has been good to me so far. The week has been especially good. I got to spend time with the youngest and see him be happy. The Lady Talis and I are experiencing a ton of happy times working on projects and basically vibing.

What? Am I writing? Well, yeah… kind of. I am in that pre-due date space of having the half formed ideas marinating inside my skull, slowly forming into that irresistible urge to write for hours. It’s a process. I’m in the almost there part of the planning and drafting stage. I suspect by Wednesday I’ll be pouring out content. Fits and Starts. I need to come up with a better method, but until I do that is where it lies.

How do you know when I’ve started getting going? I’ll probably talk a lot less about sports and even start throwing together decent Friday fiction. It is a strange truth that sports and fiction war in my head. It feels like I could’ve been an incredible play caller with a deep knowledge of systems or a prolific author who churns out fiction like clockwork. I settled for neither thus far, and I am not happy with it. I intend to get these thoughts and ideas under control–hopefully sooner than later.