photo by Sarah L.
My day is split into chunks of time. Often, I set the timer to remind myself not to let time slip away. Forty minutes of spinning. Thirty minutes of napping. Fifteen minutes of meditation. Ten minutes of blogging.
Today’s post includes a bit of horn-tooting (for which I dearly want to apologize, and am telling myself that I needn’t and probably actually shouldn’t, and so am compromising with this lengthy expository aside).
A friend sent me a photo from a review of Girl Runner in Bust magazine (US): Look, they gave me 5 out of 5 boobs! Or could be nipples! But definitely bust-related!
Also, the lovely people at Two Roads in the UK made this graphic with actual quotes from the Daily Mail review, and look — no nots between the nice words. (I still haven’t read the review because I don’t read reviews, and I’m not just saying that; I really don’t. We can chat about this later if you want, but basically, I find it stirs me up inside, for good or for ill, and whenever possible, when it relates to my writing life, I like to avoid being stirred, shaken, or otherwise muddled.)
In other parts of my life, I don’t object to being stirred. Fun is stirring, for example. And this was a weekend when I didn’t feel I needed to try to have fun or be fun; fun was just there, inviting me out, into the world, to share in its exuberance. See the above photo: cross-country skiing yesterday with friends in a winter wonderland, the trees blossoming with hoar-frost.
Ding-ding-ding. That’s my time.
xo, Carrie
Congratulations on the review! I like your idea of dividing the day into chunks of time. I have Mondays off from teaching (ESL) and I found that so far, I’ve spent ALL of today, save for a nice walk with my dog, on my Masters studies. Now I’m faced with dinner to make and a lesson plan to do. It would be nice to squeeze some writing in. I also have 4 children, but most are grown up and only 2 are at home. I really don’t know how you do it, so I’m going to launch the “chunk and timer” thing and see if it helps.
Cheers,
Jennifer
It doesn’t always work as smoothly as yesterday, did, Jennifer, but the timer method does seem to help me prioritize and think more carefully about what I’m doing with my hours. Good luck! I hope you find/make time to squeeze some writing in.