Balance of Work and Writing et cetera

I'm feeling pretty overwhelmed these days. I don't know if I'm wearing too many hats, or if I'm not managing my time well enough, or if I'm simply overthinking things and looking for stuff to worry about. 

I have this job that has turned into way more than it was supposed to, and I still don't have assurance yet that I'm going to be compensated for the extra work. 

I'm directing a musical. I've been in lots, but I've never directed one, and I'm feeling a little out of my element. There's that niggling feeling of being out of control. There's that weight of knowing that lots of people are counting on me yet only a hope that things will come together and fall into place. I don't do well with poor attitudes, so to have kids complain about their parts, or show any signs of lack of commitment really ticks me off. What I want to do is yell at them, but because I can't do that and it takes too much time to explain to them why they shouldn't do what they're doing or say what they're saying, I mostly just brush them off, and I don't know if any message is getting through. My wonderful musical director is much better at dealing with that stuff. I DO have cool ideas of how to stage it, but I don't know how much the kids are capable of... I know they'll surprise me and be capable of all sorts of things... Maybe it's just that things are still early. Once we get up on our feet and start blocking things may start to make sense.

Then there's my writing. I am committed to making room for it in my schedule, but as I said, work is seeping in where I didn't expect it to. So far, most of the days I have set aside for writing have been at one point interrupted by a need to deal with something work-related. I try to keep breathing and staying calm and turning the dial back to writing, and have been successful to a point: it takes time though, and is frustrating to not be able to completely focus on it. I know that it's partially my fault for choosing to deal with work things. But here again is that knowledge that others are counting on me. It's a tough call.

Everything would be better if I could only sleep past 5am!

[At the Surrey Writers' Conference in October some friends and I were discussing the word 'only'. Evidently it is the most frequently misused word in the English language. Now I get all worried every time I use it! Did I do it right? Oh no! What if I've used it incorrectly! Oh well, the sky hasn't fallen yet.] 

Same shite, different day

I managed to fit in a little bit of writing yesterday. This is going to be a very busy time for me, what with directing the musical at the school, work, FAT Jazz, Earth to Doris and family stuff. I've blocked aside chunks of time, and hopefully I will be able to focus well enough to be productive in those times. 

It's funny the things that occur to me. I was mucking away on a particular scene that has been plaguing me for several weeks. I left it to simmer over Christmas, and sat down to get some things moving, did a little, wrote a few lines, puzzled and puzzed til my puzzler was sore, left it, came back a while later, mucked about a bit, wrote a few lines, puzzled and puzzed...  You see where this is going, right? I didn't get back to it for a week or ten days or so, meaning yesterday. I was supposed to write on Monday, but this whole week has just been a "shmoz" as my mother would call it (find your own definition of that... I know what it means to me) and I didn't get any writing in. So there I was working on it yesterday, Thursday.

What came to my mind was this, "I like what I'm coming up with here, and the way the scene is progressing. Now, if I'd sat down on Monday to write, would it have come out the same way? Would I have written the same words? If they were different, I wonder if they'd have been better words, better lines, a better way of carrying on with the scene?"

I like to think that there's a reason I don't write on a certain day. I like to think that if I can't write on that day [ok, sorry, I'm getting distracted by the radio: they've just begun a documentary on teaching safe sex to seniors]. If I can't write on that day, then if I had I'd have produced nothing but shite. What I wrote yesterday was the best thing I could have written. If I'd waited until today, it would have turned out differently again. I kind of wonder what the scene would look like if I'd written it on a different day. Would the mood of the scene be more cheerful? or less? Would my word retrieval have been more effective so that the colour of the scene would be brighter, more intense? Or maybe it would have been yucky and boring. Maybe the only word I'd be able to produce is "sandwich" or "little." Or "the."

Thank goodness I wasn't able to write on Monday.

Another day, a few more words written down...

"So how's the writing coming?" asks Tom today. 

"Not bad," I say. "I'm doing a lot of brainstorming and mulling these days. A bit of writing, jotting notes, playing with ideas, and all that."

See, book three is tricky. This whole story has been based on the Fantasy role playing game my friends and I used to play; that's where a lot of the ideas came from--stories that had already been created. Mind you, very little that happens in the story actually "happened" in the game. There are really only a few events that I've used, and of course I had to create the story to go round them, not to mention flesh out the characters and make them real (one of the funnest parts of all this, I must say). Book one stemmed from Kyer killing Simon at the Burnished Blade. The rest of Dark Elf's Warrior came from my brain. Book two stemmed from an event in the game, wherein Alon Maer (Kien Bartheylen's wife) is terribly ill, and pregnant, and will die if our heroes don't find a cure. The visit to the wizard Kayme "happened" in the game, as did Kyer's rather nasty fall, and of course... The Gate. But now that I think about it, that's about it. The story surrounding those events was all me: The fact that the theme is Trust, the whole relationship with the Guardian, the antagonist's motivation and his goal (look at me not giving away spoilers!), the Indyn Caves situation, a certain pair of twin assassins named Misty and Juggler...

So why is book three so tricky? Now, here's why blogging is a helpful tool: I hadn't truly put those thoughts down in tangible form. I was thinking all along that I had to make book three up completely, but that's not the case. Sure I'm still not sure if they'll take that journey by ship, and if not, then that negates Skimnoddle's need to pose as the merchant Flavius. But if I don't use that, then it also means I lose Skimnoddle forcing Derry to be his lackey which is such a delightful abuse of Derry's gallantry. The battle with the dragon Greok is there, as is the ultimate confrontation... Ah, but IS it the ultimate confrontation? I'm not so sure. See, the Guardian is still around and is most definitely up to no good. Maybe.

Oh, it's such fun! I do have lots of things to work with, now that I think of it, at least as much as I had when I began Book Two. I just have to remember back to the time when I started writing it, and how long did that take? Crikey, I started it at the same time as Book One, because I had no idea how many pages the first part of the story would take up. The Kayme scene was the second scene I wrote, and much later realised that it would have to go in the second book. Sheesh.

I guess the message I am getting from this is that I just have to keep writing and it will all fall into place the same way the first two did. I don't have to plan everything now.

But yes, Tom, I will continue to walk round and round through my living room and kitchen talking out loud to myself to work out ideas. Writers, I think, have to be just a little bit crazy. And please, Tom, chat with Jock and help me with some brainstorming, ok?

Focus

I need a gear shift in my head. Or, I know! a few switches. I envision a switchboard like telephone operators used in the olden days, where they took a plug from one location and plugged it into a different outlet to connect two people together. That would be great! 

I have all this work in various locations, playing various roles and I literally need to remember who I am at any given time. Add to that, I'm trying to keep writing in my Off times. Add to that, I have to vote on Tuesday, Add to that, I'm the Chair of the Music Parents' committee at our middle school and we have our October Overnight Retreat this coming Friday, and I have a whole ton of wonderful volunteers to co-ordinate, grocery shopping list to create, shopping trip to arrange, many jobs to delegate, AND I have to work on that day til 4:30, which means I won't be there until about 5:30...

Hold on... it also means that I am forced to delegate, and will not have to do much work myself on the day. That's never a bad thing. I don't have a problem delegating, but being the one "in charge" I also have to think of everything and make sure I've told everyone everything they need to know. That's why I wake up at bizarre hours of the night saying, "The strawberries have to be kept out on the counter overnight so they're thawed in time for breakfast!" or, "The music teacher needs to ask the Home Arts teacher if we can put our perishables in her fridges and freezers, or else I'm going to have to store 7 boxes of frozen waffles in my mom's deep freeze!" or, "What happens politically in Griffin's sister Gillian's dance company that takes Gillian's dance solo away from Gillian and gives it to her rival?" [Must get together with dancer friend to learn about dance politics to apply to book]

[Geez, I'm starting to see a theme in these posts... time management]

So, you see, if I had a switch board I could unplug from the Music Parent Chair and switch into writing mode. Or switch from Work mode into Music Parent Chair.

Most importantly, I'd unplug everything so I could SLEEP.