Spent the evening wandering through a Christmas light display. I still cannot get over the fact that Christmas arrives so soon. Thanksgiving leftovers are still in the fridge. Still, the lights are up and the neighborhood is buzzing with the energy of the coming holiday. We have two houses and we’ve decorated one. The other remains untouched on the outside and in. We’ll get to the inside tomorrow, but beyond that there are mostly questions. I don’t really like the two house system. I don’t enjoy feeling like that second house is secondary and largely belongs to the five boys and their endless hours of gaming. Yet this is the way. I need to sit with my partner and together discover how to forge a new and integrated way. Maybe we sell the second space. Maybe we blend them together more fully. Who knows?
What I do know is that I need to get back to writing more. I’ve noticed that as I write less and less outside of the blog the blog becomes one giant stretched out thought scattered of periods of ten minutes and few words. It is hard to get a lot down in ten minutes when your word stamina is so low already. I’m tired of needing to tug at my thoughts in order to crank out another blog. It ought to be coming naturally. Sure, some of it is age and diet and lack of sleep. I can control two of those variables. The third and most important variable of the four is the butt in chair variable. I’ll get back to it tomorrow.
I’ve realized that 3-5 hours is a solid writing window. Anything outside of that range is either too little or overly draining to the point where it impacts me the next day. This top end may be mitigated by breaks, but the floor is lava. Nothing below that time frame of three hours is worthwhile creatively for me anymore. I need to sink in and connect with the reality I’m trying to shape through words and that stuff takes solid time. Next week I’m going to devote a chink of my vacation time to writing. 3hrs a day is too much to ask for the whole week, but I’ll get a few days in. Moving forward I am going to put the focus back on the words and on a schedule that allows for that 5 days out of the week.
The gaming? It’s going to happen, of course. However, it has to be reduced. 1 hour? 2 max? that’s 5-7 hours a day that I would be spending doing me. That is a lot. I don’t know that this sort of thing is fair to my partner. So, I have some real choices to make about how to spend time. I’ve spent ten minutes just getting to this point right here…