just a few words

I have to face it: my time is at a premium right now.

When the kids are up and about (that’s from about 8 am till 9 pm), I’m busy nursing, diapering, schooling, playing, sporadically cleaning, fetching this and carrying that, mediating sibling squabbles, admonishing, disciplining, reading aloud and once in a while, cooking. Often I’m doing two or more at the same time (before you ask, I have not, as yet, mastered doing *all* of these things simultaneously). After the baby goes down between 9-10 pm, I have some time to do uninterrupted cleaning or take care of personal needs, such as taking a shower. Even then, I’m “on call” for night feedings. Oh, and I need sleep, too.

Needless to say, my writing time is limited.

I used to be one of those people who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) write unless I could be assured of having an hour or more block of time to slip into The Zone and produce a lot of wordage. Since now the choice is between writing a little and not writing at all, I’ve started to use those 10-15 chunks of time I can steal from the rest of my day, which has netted me a daily few hundred words.

The quality of those words is not important to me right now: what I want is to create a habit of daily writing, a habit so ingrained that I feel antsy if I haven’t written all day. I’m pleased to say that tonight I did write, after having resigned myself to not doing so since I had a lot of cleaning to accomplish (I’m also pleased to report that the cleaning got done, too–go, me!). And the writing happened even though I was typing one-handed and had a sleeping baby on my shoulder.

Just a few words, but I feel darned good about them.

And tomorrow I’m taking a guilt-free evening off to hang out with my good friend and watch a movie. Writers just wanna have fun *grin*.