It’s been a while since I’ve written any words of encouragement here at Make Time. I suppose just making the time has been all I can do. The idea of making time took on new meaning for me during the stay home orders of this pandemic. Time became this new resource that I suddenly had a lot more of. To be honest, at first, I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I eventually found ways to fill all that time. The usual writing, reading, and movement (especially yoga), but I also got better about practicing guitar and started lifting weights. 

What I find most remarkable is how because I was no longer moving around in space as much (busy, busy, busy!), I found new space for self-reflection. I hired a life coach for a few months to help me with that work. I’m still the same old me, but I have learned to be kinder to myself and trust myself a little more. It’s an ongoing process. 

My writing plan for the school year is Monday to Friday, getting up at 4 am to do the work. This means going to bed at 8 for me, but it’s worth it because there is just no denying that morning is the best time for me. My mind is fresh and I have solitude. I’m working on a novel now that is slow-doing. I’m just about 30,000 words in and this is the work that I’ve been doing during the entire pandemic. 

The novel alternates between three points of view and at one point I decided to pull out two of the perspectives and just focus on one. I wasn’t happy with how that changed my story, so I’ve since put the other perspectives back in, plus added some flashback bits. I’ve also got a short story collection simmering on the back burner. I’m working with Home as a metaphor for inner peace and making connections between the literal physical space we call home and feeling at home in our bodies. 

I did publish two stories from another collection. You can read “Hungry” at Adelaide Literary Magazine and “Desire” at Penumbra Online.

I found a new writer’s group online through Inked Voices that is working well for me. It’s a small group and we use that platform to submit pages and give written feedback, then we also Zoom every couple of weeks. I haven’t been a fan of Zoom teaching, but I do appreciate being able to meet with writer friends from all over the country and go to my guitar lesson two minutes after I finish tossing the stir-fry I made for dinner. 

I will keep writing here about this extremely lonely work of making time to create in spite of the fact that you are often your worst enemy and the world doesn’t make it easy either, but I also hope to write here more about other aspects of my life. Such as, the fact that I’ve had a mostly booze-free summer and am feeling really good about that. Such as, I love to cook and am vegan. Fitness is an important part of staying balanced for me: yoga, running, weights, walks, etc. Such as, I’ve got some true stories to tell here. Point is, I’m letting this little blog grow. I’ll still be here with my encouragement and advice for getting focused and getting words on the page, but I won’t only be talking about that. 

This blog is not going to be a blog for you if you’re looking for advice on how to write a bestseller so you can quit your day job and write all day. I’m never going to talk here about canned plots, meta-data, or even finding an agent or getting published. I do aspire to get my work out in the world, and I do care about some topics related to that question about how to get published and be successful. This is not my main focus, though. I’m never going to quit my day job (well, until I retire) and what I want to talk about here is far more interesting to me than those practicals. What do I want to talk about here? How do we focus our distracted minds to get deep in flow? How do we keep writing when we get stuck? How do we renew our faith in ourselves as writers? How do we allow ourselves space to play and write whatever without self-judgment? How do we refill our creative wells? How do we write what’s true instead of avoiding it? Questions like that. 

If you’ve read this blog before, you probably already know that I am a high school teacher in the daylight. We just started a new school year, masked and in person. Having started last year on Zoom, I’m leaning in hard to the opportunity to connect to kids. I’m also taking some risks in the curriculum that involve more creative writing tasks. I’m emboldened as a teacher and a writer when former students come back and say things like they’ve held on to the poems they wrote in my class. This is just what a former student said to me the other day when I responded to the news that her book would be coming out early next year. I am of course delighted that the subject of this book is a topic near and dear to my heart, this blog, my own novella. If you are reading this, I hope you too pre-order a copy. 

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone