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During the course of the last month, I feel as though I’ve been on a giant learning rollercoaster that’s emblazoned with the word “Balance”. There have been some good days, so many bad days, and some in between. I’ve tried writing randomly as the mood stuck me all around the clock, just in structured time slots with one specific task at hand, doing different kinds of jobs in different parts of the house and yard, working with people in coffee shops, working without people in coffee shops, writing during writing groups, and so many other things.

Mostly, though, I didn’t get as much writing in as I had hoped for. I didn’t get as much of everything done as I wanted to, for that matter. I tried to do too much. Again.

So two weeks ago, I started keeping track of what threw me for a loop. I tracked my time throughout many days in 15 minute increments. I wrote down both what I was supposed to be doing and what I ended up doing instead. Threw all of that into a spreadsheet. Re-learned how to make a pie chart. Fascinated my kid, who wants to make one of his band director’s life now (sorry Mr. Labordus).

Last weekend I bought a little wish bracelet from a shop in the mall. It serves as a reminder of what I’m trying to do: be balanced in all things. It’s cute and designed to fall off the moment you achieve your wish, which means this baby’s going to be around forever. Hahaha.

From my pie chart, I learned that the amount of time I want to spend on things is, in fact, fairly balanced, and when things go my way, I’m good to go. Things rarely go my way, though, and most interruptions to my flow come in the form of kids needing to be picked up or dropped off outside of their regular hours, my spouse’s job scheduling his meetings over his lunch hour so he has to come home at a different time, and small explosions here and there from organizations or friends unexpectedly needing something.

So I’ve started a new plan, which is basically to schedule everything into those 15 minute blocks I talked about before. Quite a lot of my life can be arranged in 15 minute periods. It takes about 15 minutes to get to each kids school and from one school to the other. The library and building where my other group meets are about 15 minutes away. It takes about 15 minutes to do a round of dishes in the sink or the dishwasher. 15 minutes to vacuum & mop one room. 15 minutes to make an image for social media. 15 minutes to plan which updates need to be done at what times. 15 minutes to set my tasks and alarms for the week, etc.

Writing, however, can’t be tamed into 15 minutes at a go. It needs more like an hour and a half per shorter non-fiction item written. An hour and a half to edit something the same length into something usable and send it off. Same for poems. Short stories can take a solid week of those hour and a half slots just to write. Novels are nigh near endless.

So I’ve chucked my original goal to be done with this novel by the end of the year. I have too many other shorter obligations to finish in the meantime. I will finish out the year working on those items, working on the marketing class my friend Marsha and I are taking, meeting with my new brainstorming partner Debora to help me figure out the itty bitty plot details I’m trapped in, and running last years NaNoWriMo novel back through to write, since I did not manage to do more than one short chapter last year.

Here’s hoping that I achieve some balance soon.

I started feeling sick last week, but I knew it was “just another sinus infection” and that I was supposed to see my doctor last Thursday, so I just kept running along and doing my thing. Well, the appointment day came and literally as I was walking out the door, the doctor’s office called to say that my doctor was out for the day and would I like to reschedule. I said sure, thinking they’d put me in within a couple days. Nope. They rescheduled me to February.

The next day my spouse was also supposed to see the doctor. Same doctor. Same walking-out-the-door phone call, but this time they said the doctor was out sick. Interesting. He got an appointment rescheduled for the day before mine.

By Monday, I was so dizzy that I felt like the world was swirling around me, which did not bode well for my speaking engagement. I called to see if I could get in to see another doctor for my antibiotics and steroids and they said yes, but not until Thursday because they were swamped with my regular doctor being out for the next month, sick. Hmm. Methinks my doctor has Covid.

In any case, I went to my meeting and was prepared to run it…I thought. Unfortunately, there were no instructions on the computer station on how to run the sound equipment, there was no former President to walk me through it (he was out sick), and our tech guy turned out to never have used the system before. Oh bother. It was chaotic, but we got through it. We never got the speaker/microphone working. I ended up in the middle of the room, cell phone on speaker in my hand so the Zoom participants could hear, and I muddled through about half of my presentation before all the interruptions started to really kill my focus. Well, not just the interruptions, but the sinus infection.

So the next morning, I made a video of the entire presentation, including the slide show, which I didn’t get to really use during the meeting. I added captions to my video, uploaded it to the writers guild’s youtube account, and sent a “thanks for putting up with the chaos” message out to the members. They seemed to like that. I got a ton of email messages thanking me and asking about the future of the guild. That part was very nice. I spent the day working on writing and attended my Spiritual Practices class. Oh, and I got a rejection of some poems I’d sent to a literary journal way back in October. They liked them, but they weren’t right for their vibe.

Wednesday I collapsed in a puddle for the most part, though I did attend both a writing group meeting and another meeting, and later went out for tacos with my long lost artist friend, the other Lisa H. See, I use my rest time well, right?

Thursday morning, my midkid surprised me with the news that he wanted to enter into a writing contest. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was kind of expensive to enter into, but it provides professional feedback on four short stories he will send in. So I registered him and then thought about it and registered myself, too. I will talk about that in another post.

I finally made it out to see the doctor that is my eldest son’s primary care doctor, whom we affectionately refer to as Dr. Dudebro, due to some entertaining messages he sent the kid after his last appointment. In any case, Dr. Dudebro was way overbooked and everyone AND the nurse all had Covid (I love the thin walls in this office). I made it out of there mostly unscathed, I think, but I have not just a sinus infection, but an ear infection in both ears. Yay me for being a medical overachiever!

After that was another writing group, the brainstorming fantasy writers group that I just joined a few weeks ago. They are a great group for brainstorming with and really got to the center of the problem in my novels in a way that I hadn’t seen before. I got offline and spent the rest of the day shifting POVs around and making my stories more cohesively plotted in both that novel that I shared a chapter of with them and the one I’ve been working on all this year.

In sad news that day, I found out that one of my favorite high school teachers had passed away earlier in the week. I will write more about that later, I’m sure, but I am just not up for it yet.

Friday I continued on my merry way, getting more stuff set up for the East Texas Writers Guild and putting more plot notes into various novels. I basically spent all day at the computer, then went to bed at 9:30pm.

This morning I got up and saw first thing that a different one of my poems had gotten accepted for publication by another anthology. Wahoo! Way to go, me! I celebrated by going to a marketing webinar about newsletters. 😉 I really know how to party, right?