I just ordered a planner completely themed around being a writer. Yup. They have those. How I only thought to look for them now, I have no idea, but there are apparently plenty of them – some of which are plenty expensive as well. But, they are so cool! They let you track your word counts, goals, tasks (writing or otherwise related), have character sketch pages, plot pages, and any numerous amount of things that you didn’t even know you needed until you saw it! I looked up several, but narrowed it down to the two presented by The Writing Pal, and almost against my better judgement, went for the expensive one. The WriteMind, which lets you customized. To tell the absolute truth, I kind of liked the idea of the Novel Planner better, but I simply fell in love with the planner covers in the WriteMind. Also, apparently it transports better, and that is kind of important. I can’t believe I spent that much on a planner (I have a hard time spending that much for shoes!), but at the same time I am super excited.
Writing, or rather, editing, has been very off and on this week. We are training in a new person at work and between that and meetings, it has been hard to squeeze in long enough lunch breaks to actually have time to edit. I am still working my way through Writing Magic, but decided to skip the writing exercise for today because it is a long one and would take most of the time and I wanted to write a blog post for no particular reason (except maybe to avoid editing).
I’ve also cut my 45 minute lunch break down to 30 minutes so I can leave work earlier and work out in the gym downstairs but still get to drive home before traffic gets horrible.
It can be very hard figuring out priorities. Cutting out 15 minutes of writing/lunch time doesn’t seem like much, but add in heating up and/or prepping food for lunch and suddenly your time has dwindled to very little indeed. But – I want both to write and to lose weight/get in shape/be a healthier person. And, as I am discovering this week, I am apparently more likely to actually work out if I do it before I get home because once I get home I just want to settle down and enjoy the evening after a long day’s work. So I am going to try this for awhile and see what happens. Hopefully I’ll get into enough of a groove that I can settle down to writing pretty quickly – and either way it is still more than I have been doing!
Anyway, good luck to all of you who are also trying to balance life and writing! I know I’m not the only one.
Forest Idylls 