O Muse Where Art Thou?
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007
You know how all those writing books say “If you want to be a real writer, you have to write every day”? Well, most of my life I’ve ignored that axiom. I’ve always been a fits and starts type writer. Nothing for months, then 4 or 5 hours a day for a few weeks. Rinse and repeat.
Well, a few weeks ago, my Muse came knocking for the first time in months. So I did my normal write until all hours of the night, every night routine. Except now I’ve got a toddler who likes to go to bed at 8:30. Great–the rest of the evening is free for writing. However, the Punkin likes to get up at 7-7:30 in the morning. Not so good when Mama only collapsed onto her pillow at 3 a.m. And sometimes the Punkin comes wandering in at 0 dark thirty (i.e., 5:30) wanting a diaper change. Double plus un-good.
So, I decided to be a (somewhat) good girl and write from 10-12, then try to be asleep by 1 a.m. And that worked really well. I was flying along, getting tons of stuff accomplished on my massive rewriting campaign. I was rather surprised–gee, maybe this every day business had something to it after all.
But then I missed a day, and then another. I was too tired, or too busy, or just not in the mood. My muse doesn’t like being ignored, and so she’s gone off now. And I’m left wondering if I had spent just a few pages every day with her, maybe she’d still be here.
Between attempting to keep three blogs going, a quilt designing business, writing, raising a kid, keeping a husband, dancing, church, extended family, something of a social life, etc., I just don’t have large chunks of time anymore. And I’ve always been a large-chunk-of-time person, whether it’s for writing, or designing, or sewing. As the song says, “With me it’s all or nuttin’.” Nor can I keep up this 4-5 interrupted hours of sleep a night. Yup, the old grey mare, she ain’t what she used to be.
The question I’m coming up against is this: do I really want to be a writer? For that matter, do I want my quilt business to take off? If so, I need to become quite a bit more disciplined, to take what time I can when I can instead of waiting for those nonexistent large chunks of time (and not squander my little chunks playing Mah Jong, Free Cell, or Minesweeper. Or getting lost in Wikipedia.). And it needs to be every day.