Day 71: Juggling Work and Writing

It's Day 71 of the Journey and I've been a litte remiss in posting this month, but it's not for lack of writing. In fact, it's because of the writing. After a brief hiatus on the job front, I'm back at work. This time around I'm associate producing for the reality series Alaska: The Final Frontier. That means I'm now spending at least 10 hours a day doing things other than working on my writing projects. The past two months have been a luxury for me on the writing front, and I made good use of my time. But now I have to rejoin the real world and start paying my bills. This is where the rubber meets the road.

I've made it habit to do some writing everyday and now that my schedule is more constricted, I'm hoping that habit has become solidified. My schedule is packed from now until at least the end of March and I am going to have to really carve out some time each day to accomplish my writing. Unfortunately, my goals for this month are extreme in light of the hours I have to give to my writing, so it's going to be a particularly challenging month. On one hand, I'm off to a good start, but on the other hand I'm failing miserably at my stated goals. In order to accomplish those goals, I'm going to have to let some things slide, like making daily posts and website updates. Even so, I'm finding it hard to make my daily goals.

Instead of the 800 words a day I hoped to make for NaNoWriMo, I'm only able to pull off about 400 per day. Still, I've managed to write about 3600 NaNoWriMo words plus another 1200 for an essay on homelessness. Taken together I've written about 20 pages of material. And since this is prose as opposed to a screenplay, it's denser writing, meaning more words to a page. Translated to script, I'm probably close to my 30 page minimum for the month, so I should far exceed my minimum monthly goal. But it also seems fairly obvious that I will fall far short of the NaNoWriMo goals I stated on Nov. 1. So it's looking like a mixed bag at this point.

I am finding that if I work away from home, say at the library, I get more done as there are less distractions. I will put that to the test tonight by staying at the office after work and do some writing there. If that seems to work out, I'll put that plan in place for the rest of the month. I should have a slight reprieve at the beginning of the December as I transition from Alaska: The Final Frontier to another reality series, Livin' Lozada. But first I have to get through this month.