About a month ago I started a new job that requires me to work 5 days a week. I generally work from 8:45 am until 6 pm. And because of this, the little time that I do have at home is dedicated to cleaning and spending time with the Husband and the Son. Thus, the time that I used to use to write is completely gone. I used to get up early and write, but I end up staying up so late these days just so I can have some quality time with my family; thus I can’t get up as early any more.
So I have adopted a practice that I picked up from the AW Forms http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/
called Ninja Writing. Ninja Writing is done while doing other task, like work. I am lucky because my job gives me plenty of opportunity and time to Ninja Write. I’m a receptionist at a local credit union, which means I have a big desk away from everyone else so no one can really see what I’m doing all day. All they know is that I spend a lot of time typing. Fortunately, the branch I work at is very slow, so there isn’t much else for me to do but write and read.
The only problem with all of this is that I have a hard time really concentrating at on my writing while at work. I can’t get into my writing groove as easily. I do get interrupted a lot and then I get distracted by talking to my co-workers. So in one day I generally mange to get out about 700 words. The most I’ve done in one day was a little over 1600 (a very good day for me and the muse). I guess I could manage to write more words if I didn’t have such a good work ethic for the job that actually pays my bills. But I really hate to be idle, so my first option at work is to find something work related to do, only then do I turn to writing. My very last resort is reading (I think reading on the job makes me look lazy).
Anyway, Ninja Writing has been hard as of late. I’ve gotten to a very important part of my WIP and I feel I need to have complete concentration to write it. I think my writing will suffer greatly if I try to write it at work and have it all broken up. Plus, I did a bunch of writing on one of the days I was home and then the next day, I looked back over my outline and realized I skipped over a very important part of the story. So now I’m trying to rewrite the parts missed, but I don’t want to kill all the stuff I wrote before (they don’t mesh well because of me forgetting the vital plot point). And then, when I’m at work, I don’t have the entire document with me.
See, in the morning before I go to work I e-mail myself the last page of what I wrote the day before. But, the day I wrote so very much, ended up being like five pages long. I couldn’t e-mail that much of it to myself and all the re-writing would be too much to do at work. So I wrote the one bit that I had left out and now I’m left with a lot of stuff I’m trying to work in, none of which can be done at work.
So today I thought, “Well I’ll just pick up where I had first left off and go from there.” I tried that and that’s when I realized I was getting to another part that I couldn’t write at work without totally killing my MS. So I gave up, e-mailed myself what little I wrote today and sat down to write this blog post. When all else fails, write a blog post!
