Time management, Pilgrim's Cross, and beauty

[vaneramos]

Today I designed a week-at-a-glance calendar to visualize my new routine. It's full of little boxes in rainbow colours. I've allowed time for fun, but all purposeful. There's not much room for waste. I'll need discipline to accomplish everything I want, so it helps to have a friendly framework to keep me focused. I've had periods of my life when time management worked for me, but only long ago. Can I make it happen again?

According to the schedule, I'll work on Pilgrim's Cross six days a week. I started today. It was strange rereading my first chapter written for Nanowrimo in November 2004. Such headlong words! It's wonderful having the storyline set down and fleshed out, but I probably won't use much of the actual writing. And I won't work that way this time: no word quotas, just time alotments. Today I spent an hour crafting my first paragraph.

Normally I am too scattered and pressured, but now the other anxieties that tug my thoughts have been given their own coloured compartments and are not allowed between 1:30 and 3:30. I have a green bar across the middle of my week. It says, "Novel." I love this luxury of time, the best gift, immersing myself in words.

Today lisalemonjello wrote Beauty like water about body imagery and the way we treat those we love. Read it. Words like these makes me glad to be part of a writing community.

Comments

[clairenolen.livejournal.com]

your schedule sounds good! I'm glad to hear that you are back at working on your novel!!!

[aboutlooking.livejournal.com]

photograph your calendar for us

and thank you much for this link

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'll photograph it tomorrow when I have some good daylight!

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

are you planning to make Pilgrim's Cross available to us, or will we have to wait for it? :)

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

It's a waiting game, I'm afraid. I need to step back from the performance aspect of publishing things sequentially online, and spend time with this novel in solitude. I need to play with words, experiment, and not feel guilty if I decide tomorrow to scrap (or rework) the paragraph I wrote today. I hope it will come out like aged wine. :-)

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

that makes a lot of sense, van. for a work like this, i can see how solitude would be necessary. you can go deeper and take your time without feeling pressed to perform. (i love that about nano, but my little stories are always fripperies, meant to amuse.)

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Well, I like the performance aspect, too. Especially the attention and adulation part! ;-) I'm grateful to have LJ for that, and have scheduled time for it, so the novel shouldn't interfere with my participation in this community. I tend to lose track of time on LJ, so it will be interesting to see how I manage with the time alotted: an hour for reading (usually over lunch), and an hour for posting.

[missprune.livejournal.com]

I love time management. Without setting boundaries and boxes in my day, it's hard ever to feel that I'm done, or off duty. It's brilliant to give hassles their own allotted time and banish them from other times.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Do you use a system like this, too? The hassles on my list include things like job hunting and housework. I've also designated a two-hour block on Monday evenings for "mailing and marketing", so hopefully I'll launch a fresh initiative to get some writing published.