Monday Morning Compliments

On monday, Vylar Kaftan posted this on her blog.

I noticed that nobody responded for several days and posted this in response:

Funny. No takers.

To which she replied as advertised:

Rick, I admire the way you’ve committed to your writing despite such incredible time pressures. I’m astounded by how much you manage to get done without much time in which to do it. Kudos to you.

So let's talk about that for a little bit. Lack of time is the worst excuse for not writing because if it is important to you, you will find or make the time.

I'm saturated. I have my hands full with a full-time engineering job that includes conference calls to other parts of the world at odd hours. I have 3 kids who all seem to have a crisis at the same times. I have a geriatric mother-in-law in the house who needs help getting dressed and using the facilities. I have a wife who just had elbow surgery and can't lift more than 3 pounds with that arm right now. I get up at 5:00am have an activity almost every night. Many nights, I don't start writing until 9:00PM or later. Sometimes, I'm just too tired.



That said, I wrote a 115,000-word novel, a project I started a week before my mother-in-law broke her hip. I've written 11-1/2 short stories this year, totalling over 30,000 words. I'm half way through a collaborative project that sits at 4500-words half finished. I wrote a screenplay outline. I sold 13 short stories in the past year by keeping at least 90% of my inventory in submission at all times.

And no, I don't write at work.

Not enough time is an excuse I don't buy. I don't have enough time to write. I have time pressures that would make most people quit writing, but look what I did this year.

Am I satisfied with those results? No. I've achieved only about half my goal for the year. I wanted 2 novels, one screenplay outline, four short stories, plus a collaborated short story. I won't finish the second novel, but I will make serious progress. I wanted 300,000 words, I'll be lucky to hit 200,000. But I'm much closer to my goal than I was in January, and I have a novel that I finished under extremely difficult conditions.

And Vylar, I admire the way you can weave words together and make your prose sound like poetry.