Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Stealing Some Time

So I’ve been reading Writer with a Day Job, which is about what you’d expect: how to carve out writing time when you already work full time.  Get up early to write?  I get up too early as it is, and I started using that time for a short workout in the morning, so it’s taken.  Evening writing?  My brain usually feels like tapioca by the time I get home from work, so it’s usually dinner and then read for a bit before bed.  (Though they say exercise helps you feel more alert, so I’m hoping the aforementioned workouts will help with that.  Though I just started and I’m still in the OH MY GOD I’M SO TIRED stage, so it’s too soon to tell.)  So I’m still working on that.

But there’s also the concept of just grabbing spare moments.  The book references things like while you’re at your kid’s soccer game.  I don’t have kids, but I did spend a recent long, hot Saturday at my goddaughter’s softball tournament – watching a field full of 11-year olds play softball is an experience unto itself.  So I can get behind the idea of stealing time here and there.

Today ended up being perfect.  About ten minutes after I got to work our servers crashed.  So no email, no files, no internet.  Five minutes after that, the phones went out too.  We all sat there for a couple minutes trying to figure out what, as legal professionals, we could do with no phones and no computers, and then everyone got up to get another cup of coffee.

I got my moleskine notebook out of my purse.  I’m a sucker for these blank books – just nice enough to carry around, but not too fancy where I feel like every word I write down has to be part of an epic saga.  (I love fancy journals with handmade paper and hand-tooled leather covers, but I get a case of “what if I write something STUPID??” and then I end up never using it.)  Hey, if moleskine is good enough for Neil Gaiman, it’s good enough for me.  So for close to an hour, while the servers and phones were down and no work could be done, I rewrote a scene that had been bugging me.  Then the servers came back up, and I put the notebook away and reluctantly got on with my day  

I was so glad I had that notebook with me, and I was able to take advantage of that unexpected server crash.  Bonus writing time!

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