I had a good vacation, but I also ended almost every evening feeling somewhat less than successful.

Penny goes to bed, usually, around 7:30. Sometimes she's up as late as 8, but that's our "hard" bedtime for her - she goes to bed at 8 whether she's tired or not. (So far, we haven't had to really enforce that; the few times she's stayed up that late, she's gone to sleep quickly.)

And she's usually up between 6 and 6:30. (You'd think there'd be a correlation between the time she goes to bed and the time she wakes up, but there isn't. I'm only grateful she's no longer waking up at 5.)

So Matt and I have been gently pushing our own bedtimes back into the adult range. I mean, a year ago we were going to bed at 9. Now I'm going to bed closer to 10, and Matt usually stays up a bit later.

So I've got a good solid two hours every evening which are uninterrupted by the demands of parenting. That doesn't count the time I got during the days while Penny was napping. (She usually takes two naps a day, about an hour and a half or so each, give or take. Also a vast improvement over her half-hour power naps she was taking only a few months ago. They say that at Penny's age, toddlers will start sleeping less, shorter or fewer naps, but so far she's shown no signs of wanting to do that, and we're not going to push it.)

So a minimum of two hours a day. More like four, really, if you count naptime. Granted, during some of that time I was doing chores. But not for all of it. And I'd really meant to spend some evening time working on writing. I think I wrote a grand total of about a hundred words over the whole four-day stretch. (Just to give you an idea - the previous paragraph is just about 100 words.)

I didn't beat myself up over it too much - I was on vacation, after all - but it felt a little ridiculous, being startled by the sudden disappearance of my time every night. Penny would go to bed, and I'd sit down and think, Okay, I'm going to [insert mindless activity here] for half an hour, and then I'll get some writing done.

And I'd play on neopets or I'd watch a movie or I'd organize photos, and I'd look up and it would be 8:30. Okay, I'd think, just a little more, and then I'll do some writing.

And I'd finish the game or the scene or the section or whatever, and then I'd look up and it would be 9:45 already. Too late to think about getting any writing done. It was like the hour between 8:30 and 9:30 only took fifteen minutes to actually pass. And that happened every night. It was weird.

So I think I'm going to go back to having a weekly writing goal.

When K.T. and I were working on Circle in the Sand, the goal was 3000 words a week, each. (And most weeks, we easily exceeded it; once or twice we even tripled it.) For whatever reason, I've been so hideously scatterbrained for the last year that there's no way I'd meet that goal now. I don't know if it's a side effect of doing near-daily editing as part of my job (K.T. and I found that it was nearly impossible to edit and write at the same time), or if it's a leftover hormonal thing from being pregnant, or if it's because my brain has adjusted to match Penny's short attention span. Whatever the cause, I just can't do it anymore. I hope to get it back someday, but it's not going to be this year, anyway.

So I'm starting with a tentative goal of 1500 words a week. It looks pathetic. It should be a snap - this journal entry is already half of that - but journal entries aren't really "writing" so much as they are "talking." I don't go back and correct my journal entries for flow, and I don't usually try to establish a specific rhythm to match the mood. I just write the way I talk, more or less. And I don't have to try to worm my way into someone else's head when I'm writing journal entries, or worry about plausibility. So "real" writing is different.

I didn't keep very close track of my wordcount when we were writing Circle in the Sand, because I didn't really think I'd have much of a problem meeting the goal. Toward the end, I'd assign myself specific scenes or chapters to complete, just to make sure they got done, but I didn't worry too much about the wordcount.

This time, I think I have to keep track, and so that I feel accountable, I'll be reporting my progress at the end of each week.

It makes me sad, that I have to make an assignment out of my writing in order to get it done.

But not nearly as sad as not doing it out of sheer simple laziness.

--Liz