In today’s Journal
* Quotes of the Day
* Happy Thanksgiving
* Finding Time to Write
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quotes of the Day
“A champion is afraid of losing. Everyone else is afraid of winning.” Billie Jean King
“[I]t is … important for me to write in tranquility, trying to write as well as I can, with no eye on any market, nor any thought of what the stuff will bring, or even if it can be published….”Ernest Hemingway
Happy Thanksgiving
My wife reminded me yesterday that today is Thanksgiving. (grin) I hope it will be a good day for everyone who’s reading this. I’ll write what I can early, then spend the balance of the day with my bride and our two cats.
I’m thankful for what I do (writing) and for all of you. I hope the twin topics today will help those of you who need them.
By the way, I was going to give you a two-fer in topics today, but I decided to save one for tomorrow. They go hand-in-glove, so I hope you will read both. Tomorrow, “Turning Fear Upside Down”.
Finding Time to Write
Unfortunately, the DWS lecture I told you about in yesterday’s Journal isn’t free after all. Another writer told me she checked, and it costs $50 now. And the coupon code on the page apparently doesn’t work.
I can’t be sure the exercise I was going to outline for you is in that lecture anyway. I have the lecture, but by 2018 when it came out, I didn’t need it.
So I thought I’d go ahead and outline a way for you to find time to write. Like I was going to do yesterday.
Like Heinlein’s Rules, this exercise isn’t difficult at all to do, but it’s difficult to follow through. So you might have to do it more than once before you’re successful.
First, in a notebook or on a sheet of paper, list the times of your waking day down the left side of the sheet in 15-minute increments. So if you get up at 6:00 a.m., your list might look like this:
6:15
6:30
6:45
7:00
7:15
7:30 and so on until your normal bedtime.
If your weekdays are all pretty much the same, I recommend you make a sheet for at least one weekday. If both Saturday and Sunday are the same, do one for one of those days too.
If you attend services on Saturday or Sunday, prepare one sheet for that day and one for the other weekend day.
For the weekday(s), you can also omit any committed time you have if it’s every day. For example, if you work from 9 – 5 and you have no free time during that span, you can omit putting those hours on the list.
The purpose of this is to track what you do during your “free” time or leisure time.
Second, after you’ve prepared your sheet for the day, out to the side of each time increment, write a quick note about what you do during that time.
- Eat breakfast or supper? Put it down.
- Watch a movie or a half-hour sitcom? Put it down.
- Work in the garden? Put it down.
- Spend time on the phone with a friend who calls out of the blue? Put it down.
- Impromptu conversation with the postman or neighbor or old friend? Put it down.
- Stare off into space daydreaming? When you come out of your trance, put it down.
- Reading? Put it down.
- Writing? Put it down.
- Shower or toilelt? Put it down. (You can put more than one thing on one line.)
List literally everything you do during your waking hours until the sheet for that day is full. If you don’t list everything, you won’t get the full impact of the list.
You can probably see why I said this seems easy to do but that it can be difficult to actually follow through.
This exercise will serve two purposes:
One, it will show you, plainly, any wasted time.
Two, it will show you, plainly, where you can change or reset some of your priorities.
Again, I hope this helps.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
Writing Into (not in) the Dark
The Numbers
The Journal……………………………… 680
Writing of Blackwell Ops 14: Charlie Task
Day 1…… 1359 words. To date…… 1359
Day 2…… 3002 words. To date…… 4361
Fiction for November…………………… 56729
Fiction for 2023…………………………. 375373
Fiction since August 1………………… 40069
Nonfiction for November……………… 20930
Nonfiction for the year……………… 248820
Annual consumable words………… 620686
2023 Novels to Date……………………… 8
2023 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2023 Short Stories to Date……………… 7
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………… 79
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 9
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)…… 235
Short story collections…………………… 31
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Disclaimer: I am a prolific professional fiction writer. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Unreasoning fear and the myths of writing will slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.