Small Tasks

I think almost everyone I meet talks about the difficulty of finding enough time in their lives.

Writing the novel, short story, article etc. seem just a small part of it sometimes.

Twitter, blogs, emails or marketing all eat into precious writing time, however, looking on the positive side most are activities that involve us practising our craft.  Though I do agree that if we spend all our time on the latter activities we'll never complete the former.  That's why I find it important to try and plan my time, though I'm certainly no master at this.

While I haven't formally set myself any goals (for so far at least!) I had a basic plan to spend the first two weeks of January finishing a few tasks that have been sitting on the To Do list for a while.

The biggest one of those was to revamp my website.  The pages are now uploaded, and you've probably noticed I changed the look of the blog as well.  On the website I've used some photos from my travels around New Zealand for each of the pages.  In Lives Interrupted I've mentioned pohutukawa trees several times.  They are out in full bloom here at the moment, and there is a photo at the top of the Novels page.

I've written a short article I've been thinking about for a few weeks and sent that off, and I'm now editing some short stories.  The stories have all been around for a number of years, and several have been published in literary magazines here in New Zealand, so I'm hoping to have those finished early next week.

I don't work well with physical clutter around me, and the same goes for mental clutter of jobs not finished, so I'm hoping that completing these tasks will help me get ready for the big job on my list.

I'm keen to get onto planning (or maybe that should be re-planning) the novel I partially wrote last year.  I've decided to work in a slightly different way for this book and I'm eager to see if it makes me more productive.  I'll let you know how it goes as I get into it.

Happy writing.