Hello there. It's been a while, hasn't it?
I've moved (again) and started my senior year of college. My Facebook feed is full of people posting "Last first day of school" pictures and I'm over here like, "Yeah, definitely going to go to school for another three years so this is not as monumental as it should be."
The boyfriend and I have a cat. His name is Obi (short for Oberon, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream and not the Jedi) and he purrs a lot.
Much to my best friend's disappointment, I am not currently working on the third book. I am waist deep in the shit that must be fixed in B&G before I can resume querying and quickly realizing that this semester might very well make that impossible.
Me being me, this only makes me more determined to be a time management Olympian and find a way to get good grades, go to class, workout consistently, hang out with my friends, pet my cat, drink copious amounts of coffee, spend time with the boyfriend, eat, sleep, and work on a book.
I know I exaggerated that list a bit but really, you should see the reading I have this semester. Yikes.
I can do it because I learned way back when I was in high school how to manage time like a boss (which I use ironically and not at all because I am too tired to think of something less cliche) but the result of it is that I end each day utterly and mentally exhausted.
I think it's important to make a plan now, before life spirals out of control in the most maddening ways possible, for how you are going to keep doing the things you love. For me, that's writing and I do not want to sacrifice it. Not this year.
Because while this was not my last first week of school, in some ways it is. Law school is a whole new kind of monster, one that I suspect will not leave much time for revising a book. I will not have the same time I have now again for a long, long time. So I plan to use every bit of it as much as I can.
I suggest you do the same because once we enter the mystical 'real world' we will not have the luxury of sleeping past 6:00 a.m. and we will be forced to go to be by 10:00ish every night, only five hours after we finish working.
You better learn how to fit in the things you love now, because it's only going to get harder. Habits are harder to make than they are to break so make them now. Without rhyming, if at all possible.
