Finding time

This has been a busy, busy semester.

For example, this is what I wrote this morning:

This course focuses on the concept, practice, and issues of case management. Students will develop skills in communicating with clients, discerning intercultural issues in practice, and using best practices in documentation. This class will prepare students for case management positions in a variety of venues including geriatric case management, psychiatric case management, and disaster case management.

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I am becoming frustrated, because I’m having trouble finding the time and the brain cells for my writing. I don’t even know what I’m going to write for NaNo in November!

I need to find time. I think I can schedule after school, except on those days I have meetings (every Thursday, every Friday, and occasional Tuesdays). You see the problem, don’t you?

I need to plot some sacred “you can’t touch this” time.

I used to do this early mornings, but I’ve managed to put work-work (you know, work-work as opposed to writing-work?) into that time because I went to sleep thinking about that course description. My semester is busy enough that I think about work at night.

I’m thinking about evenings, from 6 to 8, at the Board Game Cafe. Every weekday. Even if I can’t write on my story, I have a routine going.

Let’s try that.

In-Between

I gaze out the window at the Toledo train station, watching the rain bead off the windows. The train has been in the station for a while — a half hour, a day, forever — I’m too tired to figure it out.

This train ride will carry me from the joy of discovering home to the duty of another year teaching college. It will be my 21st year at Northwest. One of my first students is sending her kid to college. I still feel like I’m in my thirties despite my arthritis, and all my memories jumble into a timeless mist.

I will return to an abrupt transition to beginning of the school year meetings. But for now, I’m on the train, in-between everything.

My schedule and writers’ block

I am frustrated because my routine is out of whack.

I never thought I was one of these people who needed a routine. It’s out of step with my vision of myself as an artistic free spirit — you know, wait for inspiration, do as you feel moved to do, be spontaneous…

That doesn’t work when you have a day job. My day job (being a professor) has a definite schedule arranged around when the classes I teach are scheduled. Those have first priority, then meeting times and dates and office hours fill in the rest of my time. I try not to schedule large gaps in my day because those will become de facto office hours and I will struggle to get work done in-between students.

So during the school year, I tend to find some time to work in my office hours, although that’s rare; work on classroom type stuff tends to happen on weekends and afternoons; morning is when I write creatively. A perfect schedule.

Then summer throws it off — at least as much because the nature of the work changes as much as the arrangement of the time. It would seem I have a lot more time with school “out” for the semester. But my workload is very, very different. I supervise 23 interns, and scheduling meetings with them is somewhat random. Other than that, my job work includes writing a chapter for a book I’m editing on moulage and volunteer management for disaster training, and revising two classes, one of them pretty drastically. I tackle these first, because they keep me fed. Then, my online class (I’m the student, not the teacher) requires attention because I don’t want to fail my first class in years.

Finally, I can schedule working on this blog and working on Prodigies and then Whose Hearts are Mountains. The blog gets worked on first, because it’s an excellent warmup to writing, although I’ve been writing really short entries lately. My readership has fallen the last couple days, too.

At the end, I’ve had writers’ block when it comes to the written projects. I schedule them for late afternoon/evening because I don’t often get out (I’m in a small town and schedule my coffee times during the day), but by then, I don’t feel very motivated.

I think I have to have a good talk with my characters tonight. We’re just about at the climax of Prodigies, and they’re strangely reticent. Right about now, they’re having their last supper before the operation in which they’re going to save a packed General Assembly room at the UN from being set on fire. Time for me to listen to them — if I have time.