Time is Flying

                Two weeks have flown by with not one blog posted.  My writing life and personal life have exploded in an array of activities and I love it, but I find myself missing a little leisure time.  My typical week starts with a Bible Study in the morning, editing in the afternoon, a little family time, and a church meeting in the evening.  Tuesday is a little slower with writing activities mixed with house work during the day, a little family time, and a second Bible Study.  I am never quite sure my entire schedule on Wednesday.  Some mornings, I have my 4^th Day group and I like running errands.  In the evening, I did have photography class, but this is over and I am going to work at keeping this evening free though last night I helped my daughter babysit until two in the morning.  Uff da!!!  Thursday’s I get to stay in my pajamas as long as I like in the morning with writing and housework as my only must dos.  Every other Thursday evening I help with my daughters Girl Scout troop.  On Fridays, I usually get to rest, but this week I have to hit the editing harder; plus, we are having an overnight troop activity.  My weekends are quiet and calm with just church and cleaning a computer office building which takes a little over an hour.  However, after last night, I need to work harder on the writing.

                As I reread one of the middle scenes in chapter 5, I realize it was horrid.  I needed to do a 20 minute rewrite that I learned from Natalie Goldberg.  My verbs were at a 1:0 ratio of active verses passive.  Instead of a fifteen minute edit, this put me into an hour to two hour edit if I am lucky on one single scene.  My hope of getting three chapters done in a ten hour week crumbled.  I know the rest of the novel will be this way because looking at the edits from this spring, I only made it through chapter 4.  The book is 13 chapters with no ending as of yet.  I am not sure how many hours I will now have to do in a week to get the book finished this month.  I see my next three weekends packed with editing.  Ugg!

                My motto for the month is “just keep editing, editing, editing.”  One author I know via the internet talks about all the fun he has with his writing career.  On many days, I agree with him wholeheartedly.  Today?  I am not going to think about the long hours of polishing, pulling verbs out of thin air, sitting my butt in the chair, ignoring my poor gardens that need a fall cleaning, and all of that.  Instead, I am going to listen to loud music and thank God I don’t have a day job to make this work twenty times harder.  I am also going to hope that my family doesn’t notice the extra chores they are going to get in the next three weeks and the missing matriarch of the house.

                Blessings.