15 September 2011

The New Gig and Guarding Time

A week ago, I started my new gig as the Development Manager for the TKE Educational Foundation and what a week it's been.

The new gig's got tons of writing coming up that are a nice combination between my journalism past and my more current fundraising writing experience (one of the reasons I wanted this job...). For example, if all goes according to plan, I'll be on the phone with a 2-star General and former Teke for a testimonial piece. Getting to interview and interact with that kind of people of prestige is a huge draw to this job. Telling their stories is thing that will keep me getting out of bed in the comings months, and hopefully, years, for this job.

The new job's also got a longer commute to work. Not as a long as Stacie's daily drive, but long enough for someone used to about 8 minutes to get to work (and that because of two school zones.) Since I've started the job, I've finished reading one book and gotten about 60 pages into a second because I don't have as much reading time. Of course, one audiobook is almost done and I'm already thinking about what I'll listen to next. That reading time is because very precious.

The real place where I'm trying to guard time is the novel writing. With longer work days, it's tempting to sleep in and not keep the alarm set for the early morning writing time. Or, it's tempting to use that morning time to catch up on chores (like how I'm remembering there's a load of clothes in the dryer....)

But, I'm here, in the den, at the computer to write. The novel and the blog posts are the morning fair that have to get done in this time. Especially with all the writing at work, the morning time just sets the tenor for the day. A good 700 words or more in the morning propels all the writing for the day. A lousy morning of 50 words is OK too, because it means work can be the place where I write the thing I'm most proud of that day.

I've been asked about NaNo for this year and again, it's a no for me. My writing time is too precious right now to squander on 50K words that may not go anywhere.

And I've got to save some brain space for work writing.

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