Yesterday I work until about 7:30, with the idea that I would be able to cut two hours off of my workday, and spend at least one quiet hour in the sun room revising chapter 15. Of course, that’s just impossible. I’m sitting here about an hour and a half after my planned work day should have mostly ended, and I’m still fielding e-mails, shoving budget requests off until tomorrow, and thinking hard about my current problem. This problem is extra special. I WISH it were about writing. I’m sitting here staring at survey results and trying to decide if my model for estimating community income should be partially replaced with a boot-strapping approach. The sticking point is all of the various pieces of missing data. Anyhow. I’m not going to continue to bore anyone with this problem. No doubt I’ll crack my head against it for an entire day tomorrow and come up with a solution that I’ll feel good about. For now, my head is splitting, and my alarm to go get the kids from school just went off. I think all hopes of working on chapter 15 seem more or less dead for the day, and I managed to waste the only 5 minutes I had to do it, writing this blog. Oh well… Maybe tomorrow. I suppose I should focus on the important things in life: Did the children remember all of their homework, and what the hell do I cook for dinner?
Category Archives: life-work-writing balance
Do I have to?
Okay, this is totally a rant, so ignore it if you’re not into that sort of thing. I’m struggling to get into my story, and I’m going to blame life. This week started out as something of a panic attack. I had Monday off, but still had phone calls from work (This is generally okay, I’d rather have the discussion on sampling difficulties real-time than weeks later when nothing can be done about it.) Then, on Tuesday, I spent most of the day memorizing four slides of a presentation I’ve already given, along with a good 40 pages of supporting material. (I love the State’s public process. It makes me feel good about the state we live in – everyone can have a say in regulation, but when you work for the state, it can sometimes feel outrageously onerous to prepare for a presentation for a proposal that could very well be DoA.) Sometime during this memorization process, I got an e-mail asking to submit an abstract for the ‘little triple-a’s’ (This is cool and all, I mean getting to stand in front of folks and say: I help to manage the largest data-set of subsistence information in the world and now I’ve got a super-shiny way for you to look at our data, is super-neat. I mean, what I’ve got to present becomes a bit of an ego-trip.) sort of no-problem (I cheated and submitted the same abstract I used for a presentation at a climate change conference in November), except that I’ve already got 4 30-page survey instruments to finalize, and finish the database redesign project I’ve been promising for the better part of six months, and also the one major analysis project I didn’t delegate is four months behind schedule. At the end of the workday, with all this on my mind, I keep opening the file containing the first 12 pages of chapter 11, scanning to the end, and staring blankly at the last paragraph. I KNOW what needs to go there, I can see it, it’s not long, or even difficult to write, yet I can’t get there. I’m just too distracted by work!
Ahhh -now that’s off my chest, I’ve got an hour before bed. I think I’m going to close wordpress, pour a nip of the cheapest whiskey I have in the house, and stare at that chapter for a while.
Stuck today
Today was one of those days where I couldn’t get anything written. I had a particularly intense day that had me fighting off a panic attack by 2. This is, of course, the sort of thing that happens when you’ve got 1 month to complete 1.5 months worth of work. Sigh. I’m tired. As a result, I really didn’t have the mental energy to solve my chapter 3 problem AND put it into prose that is at least an approximation of ‘not suck’. All that said, I had a good run today, and while I wheeled around the small gym track some forty times, I managed to come up with something like a solution. There are a few sticky details to work out, but once I actually sit down and put myself into the main character’s shoes in the scene, I should be able to see exactly how he manages to squeeze out of it. It’ll be difficult, for him, but I think it should be. So, tomorrow, after I’ve thought about it for a while, I’ll sit down and make it happen. For now though, I think I’m going to check out a nip of single-malt, and get some sleep. Tomorrow is likely to be just as intense as today.
On Writing Dragons 