I just sat down at my desk for the morning. Normally, right now, I write in my journal. It is sort of like the morning pages from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, but not, because it’s not the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning and I don’t make myself write three pages (although after years of doing “real” morning pages, I usually do hit the three page mark.) Even as I’m walking down the stairs to my basement office I’m thinking about what I’m going to write. And as I was sitting down, I realized I wanted to write this one as a blog post rather than in my journal. So please forgive if this gets rambly…

Yesterday I ordered my first copies of Finding the Ruby Slippers. I’m still basking the glow of that accomplishment a little bit. I am in no way close to being “in a good place” or “done” with that project, but still, it feels good. I know I need to dive into the marketing for it. But the editing, the designing, the writing, that’s all done. It’s awesome.

A few weeks ago I read 168 Hours and did a time tracker for a week, then came up with an ideal daily schedule in order to get in all of the stuff I need to do each day. I followed that ideal schedule for exactly zero days before something came up and made me change it. But I do know this: my beta time is in the morning. I need to spend my mornings writing.

I need to spend my mornings writing.

Still, today, the day I can actually write again because I don’t need to read or edit or design, I’m thinking about all of the other things I need to do: Outreach for my job with NoiseTrade, marketing for Finding, prepping for an interview I’m conducting, which leads me to finding people to interview me about the new book, the kitchen counter literally has a mountain of papers on it that need to be sorted (I gathered them from all over the house and made one pile to make it easier to go through…four days ago) I should be at the gym, there’s a yoga class I could take this morning that would be awesome, I have a painting project i want to get started, Chris and I need to trade offices because the internet is so much better in mine (and I don’t need internet to write), I want to look for grants to maybe fund the publishing process for Home, I need to look for some contests to start submitting short stories to, and I have several pieces that need to be critiqued for my online writer’s group.

Oh…and I need to figure something else out for dinner tonight because it was supposed to be Chicken Caesar Pitas but we had chicken and rice last night that we ended up putting caesar dressing on (so very good!) so it would be basically the same meal. The real problem was I thought we had a roast in the freezer and we didn’t.

I also want to find a good day planner to help me organize my days. (Something like this.)

Or maybe I could just print the schedule I made for myself, blow it up to poster-size at kinkos, and hang it on my wall so I remember what I’ve determined would be the most productive use of my time.

Now, though, I’m going to Rdio to find some good writing music, and I’m going to dive back into the re-write I’m doing of Clouded. Because the one week I spent on it went really well, and I’m excited to be writing something new.

Here’s hoping the words come…my butt is in the seat. That’s all it really takes.