But the road keeps coming at you, and you find no place to rest...

[leahbobet]

One of the things I'm liking less about the dayjob beat -- although this isn't entirely the dayjob's fault, but also my overfull plate o' projects -- is that I spend a lot of time very tired or kind of brainburnt. So on the weekend I sleep and sort of let my brain cool, and by the time it's fit for work again it's late Saturday night. Which leaves me one functional day to do any writing: Sunday, between the laundry and groceries and cleaning and what social time there is and so forth and and. And, well. Late Saturday night. Like now.

I think I went through most of a pint of Haagen-Dazs (coffee caramel, thankya), two pots of tea (apple ginger and Stash acai) and five tea lights, but I got some work done tonight.

I need to find a way to balance my life out enough that this, just this, doesn't feel like a monumental accomplishment.

Comments

[msagara.livejournal.com]

I wrote on lunch when I worked full time and managed the bookstore. I had one of the ibm "portables" (2 floppies, no hard drive and you could break your foot and the flooring if you dropped it).

It was not terribly easy at the start, but a) I am not a foodie in any way, so eating is something I did in order to not fall over later and b) I wanted to write when I had brain cells that were functioning. C) would be the month I spent writing a couple of sentences or even a page that I would then delete the next day.

But my subconscious finally rolled over, said Uncle, and at that point, I could reliably write three or four pages a day in the back room on lunch.

[gwynnega]

Oh boy, I can relate. Alas.

I write during lunch during the workweek, but the weekend is the only time I can get longer stretches of writing done.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

My sympathies.

Lately, it's feeling like a monumental accomplishment when I don't sleep or wander aimlessly without direction all weekend. So, I wish you very good luck.

[dreamnnightmare.livejournal.com]

Good writing at any pace IS an accomplishment. Full-time writing for Asimov was a couple of pages a day.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

I get up half an hour early and write in the morning before I leave for work. No TV, no newspaper, 15 minutes to check e-mail and LJ before I head out the door. There's been times when I've written at lunch during the day job, but that doesn't seem to work as well unless I'm either really on fire or doing edits. Sometimes I can write at night but night usually seems to be the best time for doing edits--and then maybe extending the earlier bits by a couple of hundred words.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm a night writer. Or at least, I have trouble getting into the proper brain when I know I only have X minutes to do it and then I have to get to work; I need to not have to think about time to get anything done really. :/

[msagara.livejournal.com]

I'm a total night owl, so writing during lunch was hard -- I think I only managed to beat the subconscious into shape because I wasn't going to get it done otherwise. Which desperation meant I had to take the time I could get, even if it wasn't the time I actually wanted.

This doesn't mean that it would work for anyone else, but to borrow a phrase from matociquala, the guilt monkey would work on giving me ulcers if I didn't come up with something, and I also wasn't willing to totally give up the comfort of the social life I did have.

That said? Tanya could edit in the back during lunch, but she found the phone ringing and the constant little interruptions annoying when she was trying to break new words.

Whereas I was one of four children, born in 5 years, living in 2 bedrooms, and we were all as opinionated as me... so I was used to a constant stream of noise and interruption and would have failed life entirely if I had not been able to block a lot of it out, and I realize some people actually lived in quiet households and did not, for reasons of sanity, develop this.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I do better small-scale revising in the afternoons. Large-scale revising is actually...worse than writing. I need total uninterruptible focus. And I do it by the light of my screen and some candles, because it's like even the possibility of visual distractions that I might see is too much.

It is also possible that I just really don't want to be revising this book any more, and any port in a storm. *g*

[wirewalking.livejournal.com]

*blink blink*

You can eat most of a pint of ice cream and then put the rest away?

I am in awe of this, for it is beyond the scope of my discipline.

Butyes. Balancing = hard. May you have better luck with it than I do.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

My refined sugar tolerance is really not what it used to be (she said, rueful). Things do tend to last around here, especially when if I finish it, I just have to put on some pants and go downstairs for more. Huff. *g*