Writing Again...

As a general rule, I'm pretty good at time management. I think it's one of those things that you learn by natural attrition when you first hit out as a writer. I know that my productivity in the first couple of months after I left high school teaching was pretty much through the floor. The sudden luxury of being able to go to the movies in the middle of the day, or the beach, or the pool, or even just the post office, was one which pretty much killed my writing for a while there.

Of course, you very quickly work out that if you're not writing, then you soon won't be eating, and so like most writers I learned fast that if I wanted to get things done, then I needed to be more proactive (Urgh! I hate that word...) about making time to write. I guess most people would call it 'self discipline'

But, in the last 12 months, to be honest, I've slipped a bit. In 2009, I wrote roughly 100,000 words of creative stuff. Last year, I managed only 32,000.

This is just my creative writing, though. Last year I also put out roughly 50,000 words in lecture notes, 10,000 words in journal articles, and a good whack of time writing for this blog.

So I'm not a complete time-waster, it's just that I've allowed my writing to take a second place to some of the other writing priorities in my life.

Which brings me to my new year's resolution for this year. I'm going to do my darnedest to write for at least two hours every day. I've blocked out the first two hours of the day on my calendar, put a polite sign on the office door and now I get to work, turn off my phone, don't fire up my email, place my iPad in a drawer, and get to work. And so far this week I've managed to put out the best part of 5000 words, which isn't too bad, given that it always takes me a few days to get back into the rhythm of a book, especially if it's one I haven't worked on for a while. In this case, it's been six months since I wrote a single word of my current book, so I'm pretty happy to be getting back into the swing of it. It's kind of comfortable, falling back into a writing routine.

All going well, my current book should be finished in a couple of weeks (this is the long-awaited adventure thingy), and then I can turn my attention to a few other exciting little ideas that have been churning around in the dark corners of my mind.