Colletts on the Move

Every Sunday Kaye posts some questions for reflection on her blog. You can check out today’s post here.

Today’s questions made me think hard about this challenge/project and about what place I want writing to have in my life. So I thought I’d share my answers here.

What are your key responsibilities that cannot be put aside for writing? 

• Marriage
• Day job
• Pet care (although I do have help with this-I get home before Daniel so must take the dogs out and feed them-that takes 30-45 minutes as soon as I get home)
• Housework (again, I have help, but Daniel can’t do it all, though he will willingly do more)

What priority does writing take in your life? 

Writing is important to me. Has been for years. But for so long it has scared me, so I pushed it to the back of my life even when I said I was working. But now I’ve released all those old expectations. Now I just want to write for the sake of writing. So writing is important to me, but not the most important thing.

What would you be willing to give up, for just 30 days, in order to have more time to write?

• Riding the train (I learned over the summer I don’t write well on the train-my good intentions fail miserably-I often doze off or read on the train)
• Mindless TV watching (you know how you turn on the TV just to have background noise but end up binge watching old episodes of Law and Order SVU that you’ve seen 300 times already instead of doing what you intended to do)
• Getting home from work earlier (so giving up the train would get me home about an hour earlier-tested this out last week-what if I take that hour to sit at Panera close to the hospital and wait for traffic to thin out a bit and write)

What are some obligations and commitments you currently have that you can reprioritize and/or reschedule in order to build more writing time into your daily schedule and give your writing the priority in November?

• Easier meals and/or weekend meal prep
• Write at least two hours per day while we’re on staycation the week of 10/31-that should get me a good head start

One thing I’ve recently realized is that I’m okay if my dream of being a traditionally published novelist never happens. I used to think I would die if that never happened. But I have no control over that. What I can control is my work, my writing. And I’ve realized that writing for its own sake is worthwhile for me. But a haphazard approach is not. Therefore, I’m taking this #FirstDraft60 challenge seriously, putting myself into it, and learning to enjoy the journey instead of looking toward the destination.