In under the wire…
Posted by Cathy on 10 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: Chit Chat
So here it is, 5:00 pm (Central time) and I’m just now sitting down to write my blog entry. Sigh… Lately it seems like everything is “right in under the wire.” On time, well done, but with no leeway, no breathing room.
I wish I knew what the cause was. It’s not so much that I’ve accepted too much work. Most of it is little stuff—a 500 word article here, a 5,000 word short story there, a quick guest blog or this group blog that I know I’ll have every single month. It SHOULDN’T be so difficult.
But real life keeps intruding. I didn’t plan on a slew of baby goats. We keep the males and females separated, after all. Different pastures, locked gates. Yet the babies started coming nonetheless. Mind you, I LOVE baby goats. They’re like little Tiggers, bouncing on legs loaded with springs. I didn’t plan on difficult births that forced me to call the vet to save the mother. I didn’t plan on two of our dogs getting into a fight that left multiple puncture wounds on legs and faces that forced us to build a third kennel for when they have PMS. Yep. No kidding. Our dogs get PMS and have nasty tempers. We’re in the process of spaying them, but we had to wait until they were old enough.
Then there was the refrigerator dying in a plume of smoke that made me call the fire department. No damage done, but days and days of getting rid of old food, shopping for a new unit, filling the unit, and getting back to real life. It never seems to end.
And yet, through it all, I LOVE this job. I like sitting and staring at the walls and creating new worlds and then having the time to actually write them. It’s fun and challenging and makes me happy to turn something in. The more we do it, the more things we get INVITED to do, too, which is fun. But it eats away at the time and one of the things getting chewed into this year will be conferences/conventions. While I’d love to go to ALL of them, I just can’t and still get out the work. We went to six last year (as I discovered with shock while preparing my deductions for the accountant to start doing taxes.) This year—it might have to be TWO. I’d love to say National was going to be one of them. It probably won’t be. RT might be out too, but that’s still up in the air since we’re up for awards.
How do the rest of you guys manage it? I don’t even have kids! I can’t imagine how it works for you who have to juggle school and sports and PTA or even day care. Yikes!
Let’s hear your horror stories, or your best tips for time management. 
It sounds as if you’ve had a hectic time of it!!! When my boys were at home, it was very hard to write, mostly because I was unpublished at the time and felt very guilty taking time away from the family to write. My husband was very supportive and took over most of the cleaning and cooking, though. That was a huge help.
March 11th, 2008 at 4:31 amIt does get harder to balance time-I have 4 kids between the ages of 6 and 19 and they are all still at home. School schedules change and some days I end up picking and dropping off kids all day which doesn’t help the writing!
March 11th, 2008 at 9:50 amI love kids-the goat kind!
Cathy, I thought I had a handle on this when I decided to close my travel agency to concentrate on writing full time. Then my first round edits came in and I thought great, no problem. This is a full time job just like any other. No problem meeting that deadline. But life happens. Storms and computer issues and other things. So even though I was on schedule, by the week the ms was due I was pushing that deadline and carving out anything that wasn’t essential.
March 18th, 2008 at 11:50 amI’ve decided that if something is going to go wrong it’s going to happen when I have a ms to send in. So maybe if I just count on that to happen and work way ahead it won’t catch me unaware. (And I did manage to bring the ms in one day ahead of deadline.)