I haven’t been making much time to write lately. Some of it is familial obligations; some of it is me deliberately pushing it aside.
Familial obligations: I visited my grandfather a few weeks ago. Shortly afterward, he died, and I returned to attend the funeral and catch up with grieving relatives. My mother is due to visit next month; I believe other family members are too; another one has been here since July.
Deliberately pushing it aside: there are things I want to do with friends and family this August and September that it feels like I just can’t do if I write with the same daily dedication (however shaky) that I have been. Friends are in town; at least one other friend is due to be in town; they’re all around about once in a blue moon. I could host them without spending so much time with them, but why would I want to do that? I want to finish my work for the day so I can spend chatty nights and leisurely afternoons with them, while they’re still here. A memory with them sticks around far longer than a memory of finishing a work task, however important or fun the job.
Now, the first work to get done when my time feels limited and those treasured people are Right There is the work with deadlines given by other people. That means that my hobby-work—in this case, the novel-writing—gets shortchanged (to say nothing of drawing).
My mother likes to say that writers need solitude. That may not be as true for others’ practice as it is for my mother’s, but I am very much like my mother. I was also not expecting to have so many familial obligations and social events piling up one after the other, and having this upcoming September feel “booked” is the tipping point that will stress me out if I don’t talk about what I’m feeling with friends and family first. Nobody should feel guilty here, and I don’t want to shame my friends or family members for happening to show up around the same time as others; it just happens.
I’ve been posting biweekly to keep my head in the game about novel-writing, and this post almost feels like an…anti-accountability post. Wait, I actually have done that before. Man, as much as I would like to relax in the exact same way that I did when I posted that, I’m running up against my deadlines now. Catgirl System might have what is considered a “healthy backlog” on most websites, but Patreon is 15 chapters ahead, and feels down to the wire. About half of Book 3 is still in sloppy draft form, and what has been polished, I won’t feel secure about until I check it over again. Plus, I’ll need to draw maps for several of those chapters.
Hm…when I spell it all out, it doesn’t feel as impending-disaster as I thought it would. I always have a nervous disposition about it, though, and am always wanting more—here meaning that I want more security, more chapters already done. Eh, I guess it’ll happen.
Given how unpredictable life is, I guess that’s all I can say for now.
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