I’m officially old

joannaauthor ♦ April 14, 2018 ♦ 1 Comment

I haven’t got the AARP card application in the mail YET, but I got the second closest indicator of oldness- a Facebook invite to my 20 year high school reunion in October. Now I can do math (a fact that’s debatable if you’ve been to board game night with me and watched me struggle to add scores), so I know 2018-1998=20.  It’s just that the logical math fact that I graduated 20 years ago doesn’t compute with my head memories.  My head tells me I was in high school “about 10 years ago” and in college “about 7 years ago”, ignoring the logical fact that I’ve been married 11 years next month and I met my husband when I was starting graduate school  and married him 2 weeks after I graduated.  Graduate school? That was 3 or 4 years ago, right?  Never mind, that I’ve been in private practice for 9 years this year,  and logically, I couldn’t practice until after two years after graduate school (the time it takes to earn your licenses).

My friends seem to suffer from this mental math block too.  I don’t know if they personalize it to their own lives and careers, but we definitely think that the 1990’s were 10 years ago, 15 at best.

So how does this affect my writing?  Well, I just don’t seem to have the energy I used to after working a 12 hour day to pull out the laptop and squeeze a few 100 words in.  Working four jobs (I calculate it in my head as three, since two of them are very occasionally, funny, the IRS calculates them as four) and trying to still lead an active social life seems to be draining my creativity tap.

I will think of great scenes  for the novel here and there,  but they get fewer and far between.  Making the time to write is another challenge. I WILL be working at [occasional] job  4 next weekend, so hopefully, that might allow for a few hundred words to find their way to the hard drives.

Remember when I used to blog about February and March being my busiest times for not being able to write because it was “Walk Season” for ALS? [Occasional] job 3. (I should specify that the job is running two of their support groups, chairing their Walk committee was purely voluntary).  Now we don’t have a Walk to Defeat ALS where I live.  That should give me more time.  Of course it doesn’t!

NOW, I try to host a fundraiser once a year in the area where I live to raise awareness and funds for ALS so that people won’t forget that we are here.  Want to know the difference between chairing a Walk Committee and doing your own fundraiser?  There’s still about the same amount of sleepless nights, just with your own fundraiser you are starting from scratch when you are begging for donations and volunteers. (My ALS is For the Birds volunteers- aka, my family, friends, and interns that have been forced into this because they couldn’t come up with a quick enough excuse not to, I DO love and appreciate all of you. )

All of that being said, share your tips, busy writers, with how you squeeze time in to write.  I had a doctor tell me she wrote 3 books in between patients.  I’ve thought about that, and might have to start dragging the tiny laptop to work with me for those pesky no shows and last minute cancellations.  I could also schedule 2 hours a weekend to devote to writing.  Two hours isn’t much but it’s better than nothing.

Keep Writing, and send some energy to me!