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.