How to reset your writing goals for the rest of 2023

 How is your writing year going?

Have you kept up with the ambitious goals you set way back on January 1st? Are you crushing them? Great!

This story probably isn’t for you.

Then again, who knows? Maybe it is. Maybe it would help to see that while you are out there exceeding your every expectation for writing in 2023, most writers are not.

Me? I’m not even close.

I don’t even know what my goals were!

I’m sure they were appropriately ambitious, befitting of New Year’s goals (dare I say resolutions?) across time, space, and memory.

They were probably way too ambitious.

Most likely I was going to write two-dozen full length novels, a short story a day, a poem every hour, and three-a-day blog posts to recap, all while keeping my day job and making enough time for my wife and dogs, a handful of close friends, and every “optional” after-work function that came up.

Sound familiar?

Probably not, unless you’re a lunatic.

Or a writer who’s trying to make up for lost time. Like me.

The truth is, I have no idea what my goals were at the beginning of the year. I’m sure I wrote them down, but if they were in a notebook, that notebook has been lost to the chaos of life. If they were in a Word doc or Google sheet, I can’t figure out where on my laptop they might be hiding.

It’s entirely possible I ripped the pages out of the notebook or deleted the doc in frustration sometime in March or April, despondent and hoping to erase the evidence of my failure. I really don’t know.

But perhaps that’s a good thing.

You see, my year has been wild and wooly. I started 2023 doing the best I could to support my wife as she recovered from a major back injury. Once she was back to work and things started to calm down, I took a breath and set about reprioritizing my time and goals. This was how I spent April — struggling to get back on some sort of track that accommodated work, writing, hitting the gym, and maintaining the semblance of a social life.

Then, on May 2nd, while sitting at my desk at work, I had some chest pain that lasted about five minutes.

I very much wanted to blow it off as an anxiety attack, but I’m fifty now, gifted with the accumulated wisdom of middle age and the almost certain knowledge that I have less time ahead of me than behind. So, I did the sensible thing and went to the emergency room.

Three months and one triple bypass later, I sit here this morning trying to get a handle on the rest of the year. My health is good, likely better than it’s been in a long time. My wife is healthy, and our relationship is thriving. I’ve found more time for friends and family, partly because I had more time while recovering from surgery, but mostly because there’s nothing like a mild heart attack followed by a triple bypass to make you understand how valuable your time really is.

I’m also back to work, which is a good thing. But also a difficult thing, because I was just starting to feel well enough to enjoy the bit of freedom that not going into the office for 40+ hours a week offered.

That leaves writing.

Hopefully your year has been smoother than mine. Or maybe it’s been tougher by far. We’re not here to compare. Life is almost never smooth, and there are always challenges, interruptions, and distractions around the next turn of the calendar to disrupt even the best laid plans and the most disciplined people.

Okay, maybe not the most disciplined people. But those people are outliers, true freaks of nature who get it done day in, day out. They probably would have been writing as soon as they were out of the ICU, and putting in extra words to make up the lost time.

For the rest of us, there are a couple of choices.

1. Let life be our excuse. Scrap the whole writing thing, enjoy the rest of 2023, get our Halloween costumes ready, start our holiday shopping, run up our credit card bills, take up a new hobby that takes more time than we have, and prepare to lament the whole thing and set brand new, overly ambitious writing goals for January 1st, 2024 so that we can start the whole cycle of failure over again.
2. Use today as a restart day. Set reasonable goals based on your available time for the rest of the year. Build some positive momentum leading into 2024 so that you don’t have to restart all over again on the most pressure packed day of the year, January 1st, when hope springs eternal and optimism couples with regret to make setting any sort of reasonable goals for the next twelve months almost impossible.

As appealing as option #1 sounds, I’ve been there and done that.

I’m going with option #2,

Which begs the question…

What does a reasonable goal look like?

Well, that depends on what your life looks like. Really, setting a reasonable goal is all about figuring out what available time you have and deciding how much of it you want to allocate to a given activity. In this case, writing.

“But Joe, I don’t have any time!”

I know. It definitely feels that way sometimes. A lot of the time, actually. Life is very busy, and the days get away from us before they even get started.

But you do have time. Trust me.

It’s just that you spend it doing other things.

For example, last week my phone told me I spend an average of 4 hours and 17 minutes of screen time every day. And that was down 29 minutes from the previous week.

Well, yeah, I went back to work. Those eight hour days sure cut into my social media browsing.

Seriously, though, 4+ hours a day of screen time, just on my phone. What the heck am I doing on there?!

I thought some of that time could be attributed to listening to audio books and podcasts, which is what I do when I’m driving, showering, and working out. A quick Google search informed me that, no, my phone does not count that time as screen time.

Wow. So I spend 4+ hours a day looking at my phone? I mean, I’m curious and Google a lot of things — everything from who an actor I recognize is when I’m watching a movie, to wine ratings when we are looking at the restaurant selection, to how many galaxies there are within 50 million light years of the Milky Way. (I’m a writer. It’s research…)

But I can’t possibly be spending more than a half hour a day looking up stuff. Forty-five minutes tops, right?

I also read on my phone, probably a half hour to an hour a day on average. But that still leaves three hours of screen time!

I’m spending an eighth of my day on my phone and I couldn’t even tell you why!

So, yeah, that’s got to get cut down significantly. And if I can take away half that time and turn it into writing time, imagine how much writing I’d get done?

I write about 1000 words an hour on average, assuming I write as clean as possible. Some things, like train of thought blogs, are a little faster, and some things, like fiction, are little slower. But 1000 words and hour is an easy number to work with, so let’s use that.

If I do nothing else but cut my screen time by 90 minutes a day and use that time to write, that works out to 1500 words a day. Simple math says 1500 words a day times 365 days equals 547,500 words a year.

If a typical full-length novel is 90,000 words, that means repurposing that ninety minutes a day gives me time to write six novels. Or five novels and about one-hundred eighty 500 words blogs.

That’s damn good productivity, and all I’m giving up for it is scrolling on Instagram and avoiding political posts on Facebook? I’m in!

What’s Important?

You might have other things you spend your time on, and maybe they’re important. But chances are, some of them are not.

So step one is figuring out what’s important. I mean, really important.

Obviously, if you have bills to pay and aren’t independently wealthy, work is important. So start there and block out those hours as necessary. However, if you are lingering at work or letting your work take over your whole day because you work from home and stretch your eight hour day into twelve, that’s probably worth looking at. Truth is, you could probably get your eight hours of work done in five or six hours, which would free up some time.

Unless your company is monitoring your screen time and activity, in which case I hope you really love your job, because your company sucks.

But let’s assume work is important for most of us. Same thing with sleep. So there’s 14–16 hours a day gone right off the bat in all likelihood, at least five days a week.

Hopefully, you work out and stay active, so let’s assume another two hours a day are gone because you take good care of yourself in order to live a long and healthy life.

And I assume you have friends and family that you want to spend time with. If not, get some. Socialization is as important to your health as exercise, maybe more so. But either way, let’s be generous and give up another two hours a day to maintain our relationships and enjoy the people we care about.

16 hours work/sleep + 2 hours active/exercise + 2 hours friends and family = 20 hours.

Bonus time with friends and family if you can be active and exercise together! That’s a really good idea, by the way.

That still leaves four hours a day for us to spend.

Apparently, I was spending my four hours looking at my phone.

Still, there are little things that take up time. Let’s call it another two hours of dining, using the bathroom, showering, shaving, getting dressed, and who knows how many little miscellaneous moments that occur throughout the day. Individually, they take only a minute or three, but they add up.

And honestly, we don’t want to spend our days rushing around any more than we already do. So that two hours is a little generous, perhaps. Especially if we include at least one meal, maybe two, as part of the time we share with friends and family. But we’ll start there to illustrate the point.

That leaves us two hours in the day. Two hours to do whatever we want.

Even if we go ahead and spend one hour on something random, like video games, television, reading, or whatever floats your particular boat, we still have an hour left over.

An that’s an hour to write.

Disclaimer: I don’t have children, just a couple of dogs. As needy as they are, they take no where near as much time and energy as children.

Now, I know your life may be different than what I laid out here. It probably is, but the point of this isn’t to try and fit your life into the layout I’ve given as an example.

The point is to look at your days and weeks and make an honest assessment of what you are choosing to do with your time.

Start small, especially if the thought of discipline is overwhelming or frightening. I’m sure you probably feel busy, but that feeling may not be the truth, and it may be what’s holding you back from following your writing dreams and achieving your goals.

Even if all you can find is fifteen minutes a day, and you have to create it by waking up a little earlier, staying up a little later, or barricading yourself in the bathroom and writing on your phone (ack, more screen time!), you can make a start on your commitment to writing today!

And when it comes to all the other things that you do with your time, some of which you may feel very attached to, you might have to make some choices.

Do you want to be a writer?

Well, you may have to sacrifice some of the other things you enjoy doing to achieve your goals and make your dream a reality.

It may not be easy, but if you are like me, if the writing bug has been with you for as long as you can remember, if it keeps coming back no matter how little time you give it, making you feel guilty for not writing more, for not committing, for not following your passion and giving it the time it deserves, the sacrifices will be worthwhile.

Start small. Fifteen minutes. A half hour. An hour.

Maybe all you have is an hour on Sunday morning before the kids roll out of bed.

That’s okay. It’s a start.

Commit to beginning, mark that time out in bold on your calendar, and make sure everyone who might interrupt it knows how important it is to you.

All it takes is that first word.

Life can change in an instant

You know the expression, "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans?" Of course you do. It's a quaint expression, but it's true.

A month ago today, I had a mild heart attack. I experienced chest pain in the morning at work, and I ended up in the emergency room. A week later, I underwent a triple bypass, and five days after that, I came home to my wife and pups.

I'm so fucking happy to be here. Had I not gone to the ER, I probably wouldn't be.

It's not shocking to me that people, mostly men, ignore chest pain. When it happened to me, I was terrified, confused, and wanted more than anything for it to be indigestion or an anxiety attack. I was convinced it was right up until I got the results from my catheterization

Three arteries, two completely blocked, one ninety percent.

And I'd thought I felt fine right up until the chest pain. I even felt fine after.

But those five minutes of pain and discomfort changed my life. Saved my life, even.

So here I am, a month removed from the pain. I'm mending well. Nothing is perfect, but I feel better every day, and for the most part things are going according to the recovery plan. I'm able to walk for thirty minutes straight now, albeit at a slow pace, and I should be starting cardiac rehabilitation soon. I'm eating well and have lost twenty-two pounds since I left the hospital three and a half weeks ago. I would like to lose another thirty, but slow and steady wins the race.

I even got to enjoy a couple of glasses of wine this week. Nothing has ever tasted so good!

And I'm getting bored, which I take as a good sign. I was never bored in the hospital or for the first ten days I was home. Scared? Yes. Worried? Yes. Overwhelmed? Fuck yes! 

I don't think you can be bored when you are in survival mode. I never was. I don't think I had the capacity for it.

How can you be bored when every little thing your body does is a question you need to ask the doctor about? Why is my chest creaking? Oh, that's normal? What about my blood pressure spikes? Also normal? And the bleeding from my chest tube wound that went on for two solid weeks? Normal? Oh, right, drainage.

I wish they had a list of all the things that could and would probably occur after open heart surgery that were normal. It would have saved me a lot of anxiety.

But yeah, I'm bored.

I'm still healing, and I have a long way to go. I have to take it slow. I have to get back in some kind of shape, and then surpass that and get in the best shape of my life. I want to take this moment and use it to make sure I get the most out of the rest of my life. I'm fifty years old, and if I can get another fifty years, I'll take every moment of it!

The funny thing about all this is the clarity. I always thought I was afraid of dying. I guess we all are. It's part of being human, right? We grow up and develop the knowledge through observation and experience that life is finite, that we will all die. It's the one thing we all have in common.

But I never appreciated life as much s I do right now.

How sad is that?

Fear of death as a vague future occurrence is one thing, and that's scary enough. Now that I've been through all this, fear of death has gained a reality that I've never before experienced. 

I never knew what I feared before. Now I know.

It's not death that's scary and upsetting.

It's no longer living.

It's the realization that someday I'll stop spending time with my family and friends, stop snuggling my pups, stop reading and writing and speaking. Stop playing video games and eating and drinking and laughing and loving and smiling and crying and trying. Just stop.

It's not the dark specter of death that I'm afraid of anymore.

It's the loss of this beautiful, precious, amazing life.

I always liked the song, "Live Like You Were Dying," by Tim McGraw.

Now I really understand it.

 I don't know how much time I have, but I know I'm above ground and more or less upright, breathing, smiling, and somewhat terrified.  I know I love my family and friends and want to have as many moments with them as I can. I know I want to be healthy and make the best of every single day.

And, as always, I know I'm a writer.

Write, fool. Live, love, eat, drink, smile, weep.

Write,

How to Live the Life of Your Dreams, Prologue

Commitment is difficult.

The act of doing something day after day is valuable. It is how we make progress towards anything. 

Why, then, is it so hard to get started? To keep going?

I know as well as you do that its all about habit.

Our lives are the product of our habits. Who we are, how we view ourselves, and how others perceive us are all based on our habits. We are the direct outcome of the things we do (or don't do) every day. Therefore, if we are unhappy with ourselves and our lives, we are really unhappy with the result of our habits.

But habits, as the word hints at, are hard to change. And new habits can be incredibly difficult to create.

So how do we go from a life and self-image that we don't like, perhaps ever abhor, to one that we love?

There are a million answers on the internet. Many of them will offer you a quick solution. If you just wake up at a certain time, drink this tea first thing, and workout until you have no time for anything else, in 90 days you'll have the life of your dreams.

Yeah, right.

If the life of your dreams is working out and drinking tea, I guess that might work. But if you have any other aspirations, you might want to try a different path. Not that working out, drinking tea, and getting up early are bad for you by any stretch, but they are not in and of themselves a way to the life of your dreams. They are small parts of a bigger picture that might help you. Or they might not. It depends on your goals.

Your dream life is different than mine. It has to be, because we are different people. While many people may share similar dreams, in that one aspect of their dream may be the same, their dream life cannot be the same. We as individuals are too different and varied to allow such uniformity in a thing as broad and all-encompassing as a dream life. There can be no uniformity when confronted with such infinite variety, except by happenstance, or through rigid compliance to a set of values defined by someone else.

We give up enough of our time to values assigned by others, in the form of a job or career whose primary purpose is a paycheck that will hopefully leave you enough breathing room to pursue the rest of your dreams in your remaining time.

Now, maybe you are further along the path than I am, and you have a job or career that aligns with your dreams. That's fantastic. Seriously, no sarcasm intended. But even then, you have found your way to that place by figuring out what habits and actions will get you there, and by avoiding the one's that won't, particularly those that take you away from that place.

I have a long way to go. 

The good news is I have a pretty good idea of where I'm going. I want to be a fiction writer, poet, great husband, great friend, and healthy enough to enjoy it.

Everything else is meaningless. 

But I spend a lot of time on everything else. I have habits that are not aligned with the vision of where I'm going. And I lack habits that will help me get there.

Well, then get rid of everything that doesn't help you on the path to that vision, and spend more time on everything that does.

Simple, right?

Sure, as simple as starting new habits and stopping old ones.

Over the next month, I'm going to try and change my daily, weekly, and monthly habits. I'm going to eliminate the things that take time and energy away from the life I want. I'm going to cultivate new habits that bring me closer to that vision. And I'm going to blog about the process. I'm going to share my struggles and my successes, in the hope that someone might find this useful.

And when I'm done, I'm going to compile all these blogs as a book and publish it, so if you are into that sort of thing, you'll be able to get all of this as a book, physical or digital, 

Join me tomorrow for chapter one, Clarifying Your Vision.

Werewolf nights and worn down days

Yesterdays Words - Blog 609, Fiction 0, Total 609

Challenge Total - 4519

I slept about two hours last night. No clue why. Started with my brain worrying at work an hour after I'd gone to bed, and progressed to a restless night where even the dogs wouldn't stay still.

I think it's the full moon. Really. I've noticed that I sleep worse the days around a full moon, and can only wonder if my ancestors were lycanthropes. I think it's a pretty common thing, though. Just one of those nights.

Dragged myself through a productive day. Now that I'm home, all I want to do is drink hot tea, eat a few cookies, and read. Still working my way through Lee Child. No attempt at writing fiction tonight.

Overall, a very slow start to the challenge, but I'll take the five day blogging streak and the almost 2000 words of Catpocalypse Meow and roll into the second half of the week with high hopes and good intentions. 

I'm actually very excited to get the story moving forward.

Spent a few minutes reading about John D Macdonald this morning. His commitment to making it as a writer when he left the military never fails to inspire me. In case you are unaware, he was determined to make it as a writer and spend his first four months out of the military working 14 hours a day at his typewriter, churning out short stories to the tune of 800,000 words. 

That's a lot of stories, well over a hundred, probably, and a heck of a way to learn your craft.

I'd like to get going hard over the next four days, and come out of the weekend with a nice showing for the first full week of the challenge. Gonna set a few daily goals here for the next four days and see if I can hit the mark.

Tomorrow - just the day job on the agenda, so I have the morning before work and the evening after free. Let's push hard and go for 4000 words.

Friday, work and then game night with the boys. Not much time, so let's mail in 1000 words and call it good.

Saturday, work in the morning for a few hours, plans in the evening for dinner. maybe four hours free in between, plus a couple in the morning. Let's go for 5000 words.

Sunday, Easter with family in the afternoon. All morning to write. Let's book another 5000 words.

Tat's 15,000 words over the next four days, which is very solid. Add that to the 5000 words I'll have after this blog and that's 20,000 words over the first nine days of the challenge.

I'll be pretty happy with that.

For now, time to have tea and unwind with Jack Reacher.

See you tomorrow.

Progress and small sips

Yesterday's Word Count - Blog 368, Fiction 779, Total 1147.

Challenge Total 3910

Yesterday was a long day. Full day a the job, then took Meg to physical therapy. I usually read on my phone while I wait the hour in the car, but I didn't sleep well the night before, so instead I took a half-hour nap. 

I'd intended on the full hour, but I was woken by a text from work. They were having issues they couldn't resolve. In the end, I had to go back and spend forty minutes getting things straight while Meg took her turn waiting in the car.

All that resolved around 7pm, which mean a very late dinner and a bad jump on any writing. I'd only gotten yesterday's blog done in the morning, and when Meg turned on the Yankee game, I was hard pressed to do anything but sit back with my feet up and watch Aaron Judge and crew dismantle the Phillies.

I did just that for the first inning and a half, then decided I wasn't going to bed two days in a row without getting some fiction words done. I grabbed my laptop and lap desk, sat back in my comfy chair, the chair where I spend most of my evenings reading or watching a little TV, sipped my tea, and started working on Catpocalypse Meow. 

Over the next hour, I filled out the prologue a bit, adding about 300 words of depth, which I'd characteristically left out. I have a weird habit of not describing what I see in my head when I write unless I make a conscious effort to do so. 

It's not difficult, but I spent a good part of that year of intense writing learning how to make sure I put everything on the page and left nothing in my head. As a result, two disembodied voices turned into two characters talking in a setting-rich place. 

I considered tossing it in at that point. I was tired and wanted to read a little before bed. But I thought I should at least start Chapter One, so when I picked up today, I'd be in the middle of something. I've found the old adage that's it's easier to pick up writing in the middle of a sentence or scene to be true. It's difficult to start from the beginning. It's the equivalent of a blank page.

I got almost 500 words in the next half hour, setting the scene a bit and getting things moving, and decided that I'd flexed my brain enough for one day. i let the pups outside for their bedtime relief, grabbed the book I'm reading, and went to bed. Managed about 20 pages before I nodded off, which is no comment on the quality of "The Sentinel," by Lee and Andrew Child. I'm enjoying the story - I was just dead tired.

Today should be a bit better, and I'll push myself with the fiction tonight. I have nothing to do after work, though I do have an even fuller day, 10 hours versus 8.5 yesterday. Still, I'll be home plenty early to sit down in the chair, enjoy a couple of cups of tea, and get in at least a couple thousand words.

I'm trying to be flexible here as I establish the habit. Things will happen, and it's very easy to blow off the writing when they do. I'm trying to not do that. Even if I only write a little bit some days, the momentum will build and the word count will add up. 300 words is better than 0.

Breakfast time. See you tomorrow.

A new Oscar and Midge novel coming soon

Yesterday's Word Count - Blog 1017, Fiction 0, Total 1017

I got wrapped up in my own head yesterday and by evening realized I'd been avoiding writing all day. Not sure why, other than that old anxiety of not being good enough. Probably spending two days in a row writing about how much time this was going to require put me there. 

It's pretty easy to start seeing all that time as work, especially when starting out. It even feels like work, since I haven't gotten back in the habit of writing every day yet. So perfectly normal, but something to be aware of before I let it get out of hand.

Instead of talking about the words, today I want to tell you a little about what I'm working on.

The short novel I began yesterday is the climax to the Oscar and Midge stories I've been writing. In comic book terms, you might describe it as an Annual issue, where major storylines are wrapped up before the new year of stories begins. In episodic terms, it's the last episode of a season.

I love writing the Oscar and Midge stories. They are light-hearted and fun, but occasionally delve into surprisingly emotional depth, and I can go pretty much anywhere I want with them. And for this season-ender, I definitely have.

The novel is called "Catpocalypse Meow," and wraps up the Snowy storyline that's been carried through the first two short story collections and even the Oscar and Midge holiday novel, "The Dogs of Christmas Past."

Hoping to gain speed on the writing over the next couple of weeks, and my goal is to have this new Oscar and Midge adventure available by the end of May.

I'm also working on getting everything I've written so far available everywhere - three novels and six short story collections, plus a number of stand-alone short stories. That' probably going to take me the rest of the year. I'll announce them as they become available. Right now you can get everything digitally through Amazon.

Anyway, it's Monday, so I have to get ready for the day job. See you tomorrow with a nice fiction word count from this evening's writing.

The first steps - getting started and building a writing routine

Yesterdays Word Count: Blog - 947, Fiction - 799, Total 1,746.

I started back writing yesterday, both blog and fiction. It's going to take me a little while to ramp up my production to the point where I can compete with the word count I'm looking for - about 4000 total words a day. Assuming I write at about 1000 words an hour, that's four hours a day of writing.

I probably write the blog a lot faster than that, because its mostly train of thought. Closer to 2000 words an hour, I'd guess. So figure the blog will take me anywhere from 15 to 35 minutes a day. Let's call it a half hour. My plan is to write the blog every day after walking the dogs. Routine, remember? That's how I'm going to get all of this done. 

The other 3000-3500 words of fiction? Well, that's a little harder to predict.

Which is why I'd better figure it out now.

Carving three hours out of the day sounds hard, but it's probably not, especially if I treat it like three separate hours, or even six half-hour chunks. Three hours all at once is hard to come by, unless I write off my entire evening after work to writing, but I know from experience that plan doesn't work. Evenings after work are when I run into the most friction.

It's pretty normal to spend time with family and friends in the evening, so there will always be things that come up after work, and fighting that is a losing proposition unless I'm willing to become an antisocial hermit. I'm not, despite what some people may think. I enjoy my social time, and look forward to time hanging out with friends and family. Even though I'm an introvert and often need time to recharge, I still look forward to spending time and doing things with people.

If I can't reliably spend my entire evening writing for three hours, what then? Well, that's where breaking it up into manageable chunks comes in.

First off, I need to get an hour (1000 words) done in the morning before anything else. If I do that and the blog before I leave for work, I'm halfway to my daily goal. That means I need to structure my morning and wake up a little earlier. I've been getting up around 5:30 every day, and besides walking the dogs and eating breakfast, I haven't done much else besides reading or scrolling on social media. I probably already have a good bit of time available - I just need to retcon it for writing.

That still leaves 2000 words, or two hours. 

I'd love to say I can write 500 words on lunch, but I can't. I don't even reliably get lunch, depending on how the day is going. I suppose I could force it into an earlier slot, but even when I'm at lunch, I'm often interrupted by people who need me for something quick. Not a productive environment for writing. I'm better off trying to enjoy some reading then, or maybe having a notebook and doing some rough poetry or idea work or something.

Which brings me back to evenings. 2000 words still outstanding.

Let's start by saying I'll find an hour before bed to bang out the last 1000 words. That's probably doable, and I can make it part of my routine easily enough by coupling it with tea time. A good cup of tea, three or four cookies, and 1000 words before heading to bed seems like a good time, honestly, and a good way to wrap up my day.

Still, there's 1000 words hanging around unwritten.

It's tempting to leave them for the weekends. I mean, 1000 words a day Monday through Friday means 5000 words extra on the weekends, when I should theoretically have more time. But that means instilling a ton of discipline on days when I am most likely to have other things to do. 

Not just plans with friends and family, either. The yard needs maintenance. Chores tend to slip to weekends. All very manageable until you add 3-4 hours of writing to each day, at which point they are still manageable. But that's the normal expectation now.

Add another 5000 words to the weekend means I'm either spending six-7 hours a day writing on both Saturday and Sunday, or I'm spending 10 hours on Sunday parked at the writing desk. No to mention, I work a half-day at the job some Saturdays.

Yeah, that just won't work.

So either I write less, or I split the words between morning and evening.

I'm not writing less. In fact, the plan is to slowly ramp up and write as much as humanly possible.

So it looks like I'm getting up even earlier, and maybe staying up a half hour later. 

Not perfect, but not that big a deal, either. Once I get past the feeling that I'm missing out on things and get to the point where I look forward to the habit of writing, to the feeling of getting lost in the story, I'll probably get aggravated when I have something to do other than write.

This is a lot of process, I know, but I believe it's important. If I don't take an account of my time and how I spend it, it would be very easy to say I simply don't have enough time to write.

Lots of people say just that.

But I don't want to let my dreams wither and die while I spend time I could use for writing scrolling through memes on social media, or even consuming other people's stories. How sad would that be?

So, despite the tension I feel right now, it's time to get disciplined and consistent. The tension will ease in time, as it does with all new habits.

I mean, if I can give 50 hours of my life up every week for a paycheck, I can find another 25-30 to pursue my dream, right?

Don't settle, folks. Life is too short. Figure it out and make it work.

I'm doing my best.