Ready, Set, Write

A few weeks ago I accidentally wrote a blog post about how awesome my life is. What I meant to write about was writing, that is, the difficulty of making the time to work on my own writing being virtually the same now that I am a writer as it was when I had another job taking up all my time.

Of course, then I stumbled upon myself writing the phrase, “now that I am a writer,” and got all sorts of sidetracked. Can you blame me? It was a really exciting thing to find one writing about oneself.

But I’d like to regroup. Now that I’ve already paraphrased the quandary in which I find myself I guess I’ll jump right into,

Isn’t that totally weird?

I guess back when I was working a gazillion hours a week for someone else’s bottom line, gleaning out a few minutes to do some writing when I could manage it, I imagined the life of a writer being entirely different. As the master of my own schedule wouldn’t it be easy to designate big, hearty Timeslot A for my own writing projects and work Timeslots B-Whatever around that?

Yeah, I suppose if I wanted someone to repossess my car that might work out OK. But as it turns out, while I spend most of my time writing or in pursuit of a story, thus far all of that writing has been – again – for someone else’s bottom line. Not that I’m complaining about my work. I literally love every single client I have, and I’m privileged to write for all of them. So much so that I’ve focused 100 percent of my time and energy into them. Yea for me!

But boo for me too. Because I have projects – utterly unpaid, self-appointed projects – that I am completely and madly committed to pursuing. In fact, a part of me believes that I have been working on these all along, just not today because I’m too busy today. And it’s always today.

So here’s where I am: I’ve tried making a daily schedule. I’ve tried clearing out entire days. I’ve tried changing work locations. No go. I’ve been working away all along, but I can’t get out of the endless chute of I’m-just-too-busy-today-today-today-today-…

I have a new plan. I have a hunch that if I commit myself to blogging about my writing projects, the time I need to work on them will suddenly appear. I mean, it will have to; if I’m going to blog about them I must work on them or I’ll have nothing to write. I’ll just be posting about my failures, and nothing motivates me like avoiding failure.

That’s right: I’m a half-assed overachiever, a 4.0 procrastinator who refuses to fail only slightly more vigorously than she refuses get her shit together. I know the numbers don’t

work. I’ve consulted my abacus too, and it seems that if you can’t find the time to write in the first place, finding the time to blog about writing and then actually write too is highly improbable.

Lucky for me, I’ve always found the improbable far easier to achieve than the mundane. So here we go. This is my first blog post about writing. In a week I’ll return to boast or confess the progress I’ve made on the following projects:

• Sweden, the never-ending memoir/psychological non-thriller
• A blog about planning a Michigan-made wedding (I know! It is an awesome idea!)
• A blog about writing (See what I just did? I tricked myself into starting that one already. Genius.)

Wish me luck.