Thanks, invisible people! I managed to slash everything off my weekend list, and once again, it was a great motivator to know that you were watching. (Or not watching, in the case of a lot of you–was it all parades and circuses this weekend? Because wherever most of you were, it wasn’t here. Are you ready for your Funky Winkerbean quiz? Put your books away and take out a clean sheet of paper.)
Oh. I didn’t cross absolutely everything off my weekend list, you say? That is true. Have a look at the post below. I put two hours as my writing goal for the weekend. But I didn’t write for the other hour that I’d put on the list.
These are the writing lessons reinforced by this experience:
- Do put writing on the list, or writing really won’t get done.
- Having put it on the list, prioritize it. At least, don’t clean the kitchen first.
- While it’s sometimes useful to put down goals in terms of time spent (e.g. when beginning something new), it might have been better this weekend to put the goal in terms of quantity.
- Since it really helps me if everyone else is either absent or unconscious while I’m writing, get up early on weekends (which I usually do anyway) and write; don’t use that time for other things just because I don’t have to get ready for work.
I can’t be too specific about my writing goal for the rest of the week, but it is attainable even within the context of my lousy rotten schedule, assuming no one gets the stomach flu and that we stay otherwise disaster-free this week. And with that, I am off for the rest of Terrible Tuesday. This T.T. should be pretty okay, though, because: 1) I got a good night’s sleep ; 2) I am not trying to finish grading for my Tuesday or Wednesday classes during it; 3) My Wednesday morning class is doing an in-class essay, so prep for Wednesday consists of preparing the essay topic. It’s still, of course, a day that runs from 7:00 A.M. to 10:30 P.M. including commute time, but courage! That mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.
Literature Should Mean Something in Your Life 