Sunday, November 01, 2009

Balls in the Air

I'm a deadline person. As a due date approaches it draws my full attention like a beacon and I focus until I've met my goal. This process has worked well for me for 35 years, but I'm currently finding myself with quite a lot of beacons causing light pollution in my brain.

First and foremost, I'm a mother, now. And not just a mother, but a mother of children who have activities and responsibilities. School, classes, meetings, conferences, therapies, sports, commitments, stuff, junk, and above all, PAPERWORK. Keeping on top of all that could easily be a full-time job.

But it's not because there's no time for it to be!

There's the need to exercise. And eat right. I find focusing on those two activities much easier when I can let other things go. Like housework, which I can't let slide too far because it seems I'm having people over a lot lately. So there's hosting/event organizing for the list, too.

And editing my work in progress. And freelancing to pay the bills. And, oh, look at the date! November is National Novel Writing Month and I'm nearly 2000 words into my new novel.

Plus we have this influenza A/H1N1/swine flu joy, which hobbles us all. (Ellie's the one who's sickest at this point, but she's on Tamiflu and she's doing OK. I'm trying to embrace the required quarantine and see it as an excuse to loosen the schedule a bit.)

Despite all the more immediate activities, I can't forget that Christmas is coming and homemade gifts don't make themselves the week of December 20th.

So forget fun things like reading novels and watching television and playing Nintendo. Perhaps I'll work them back into the rotation in January!

4 comments:

Rob Monroe said...

We could do Christmas between our households on MLK Jr's Birthday! That would give all of us quiet time between Christmas and New Years to finish things up! I'm just saying...

Kathy G said...

A couple of decades from now you'll have come through all this and wonder if it was really as bad as you thought...

In the meantime, you can clean your house aerobically while dictating notes to yourself about your novel into a tape recorder hung around your neck :-)

Sarahlynn said...

Rob, I'll pull it together. I will! If all else fails . . . I'll just buy presents! Yay for shopping!

Kathy, that's hilarious. Thank you!

Sarahlynn said...

I should note that while I'm on my elliptical machine in the basement I let myself pause ever 15 minutes to straighten/reorganize something that's driving me crazy. So that feels productive.

And while I'm jogging on my mini trampoline upstairs, I catch up on recorded tv shows. I love multitasking!