Robin Burgoon's Blog

Earlier today, thanks to a post from whom I follow on Twitter , I discovered the website “The Creative Penn” by Joanna Penn.  From her most recent blog post (“How To Write About A Real Location If You Haven’t Been There”), I saw and followed a link to a related post entitled “What Will You Give Up To Write Your Book?” (posted a couple of weeks before the start of NaNoWriMo 2009).  Her list of tips, along with her statement, “You cannot give up your family time or your job,” really got me to thinking what I can do to find more writing time, since that is my biggest challenge at the moment, complicated by the fact that most of my family time is also ‘work’ time, my full-time job, since I am, before anything else, an at-home mom of a toddler, a preschooler, and a Kindergartener.  I must admit that sometimes I would actually like to have a bit LESS family time.

Joanna suggests giving up 5 activities/parts of the day:  1) TV  2) gaming  3) some social time  4) one hour of sleep and 5) a relaxed commute.

Since I don’t ‘game,’ I don’t have to give up that time suck.  I don’t have an out-of-the-home job, so I don’t have a commute (although sometimes I wish that I did, because that would be the ONLY time in my day that I could read or listen to audio books or podcasts without interruption).  (I use my only guaranteed ‘me’ time to WRITE, and it’s only guaranteed 90% of the time.  Snow days may be fun for the kids, but not for me!)  Although I have accounts on Twitter and Facebook, I usually log on to those sites to check what others are saying.  Some days, I’m too busy to log on to either one.  Most certainly I do NOT play any of the time-wasting games on Facebook.  On Twitter, I ‘listen’ more than I ‘talk’, although I do want to change that, because I do want to build relationships there.  I’m definitely not wasting precious writing time on social media sites–when I log on to them, it’s usually when the kids are interrupting me, anyway, which is not conducive to writing, at least for me–but I do need a better plan about how and when I participate.

The only way that I would find time to write by giving up sleep would be if I actually gave up TWO hours of sleep.  For the past six weeks, just when I made a resolution to get up an hour earlier than normal, before the rest of the family, to write in peace and quiet the way I did when I was in high school, my youngest (almost 27 months) started waking up at the same time, two hours earlier than usual for her.  Since that has been her pattern all of this time, I think that this hour is her new wake up time, no matter how much I’ve tried to change it.  So, that hour for me is out, since I need to get up, make her breakfast, and be in the same room with her, since she will get into trouble or wake up the rest of the house otherwise, and she will not leave me alone to write.  Going to bed later isn’t an option, either, since my daughter still wakes up in the middle of the night, and I’m usually awake at least an hour then.  I was already down to the minimum number of hours of sleep that I can have and still function, so getting up an hour earlier than the toddler is waking up now is not really an option.  Grumpy Mommy is not any good for the family.

So, if I don’t have a commute or gaming to give up, and can’t give up more sleep or social time, that leaves TV-watching as the only activity that I can give up, at least in part, in order to have more time to write.

I’m already pretty judicious about my TV watching.  For my own entertainment, I watch six hours of TV a week, when the series that I watch–“Amazing Race,” “24,” “Lost,” “Survivor,"Burn Notice,” and “Caprica”–have new episodes.  That isn’t to say that the TV isn’t on more than that; it is, far more than I would prefer.  My family can be watching TV—especially PBS children’s shows or educational shows on Discovery—and I can be in the same room and tune it out to write.  It’s harder for me to tune out the sound of my boys’ play—imitations of ambulance, Police Car, and fire truck sirens, among other noises—than it is to tune out the TV.

Although I like to see the locales on “Amazing Race,” I am content with reading the online recaps of each episode of this series and of “Survivor,” although I must admit that I’m looking forward to the upcoming “Heroes and Villains” ‘season’, featuring some of my favorite (and some least favorite) former contestants.  (Go, Rupert!  Go, Stephenie!)  Both “Caprica” and “24” are, as with “Lost,” series to watch either all of time or not at all.  If you miss an episode, you’ll be lost when you tune in again.  I’ve been a fan of “24” since its first episode, and I’m tuning in to “Caprica” because, despite its flaws, I loved the reimagined “Battlestar Galactica” – my second favorite TV series of all time!  I could give up watching “Burn Notice” before I gave up either “24” or “Caprica.”

If I could watch only one TV series, had to choose only one hour of TV a week, it would be “Lost,” since this is the series’ last season and I have watched every episode since it began in 2004.  I’m definitely going to miss that series!

My Kindergartener already enjoys learning about different places around the world, so part of our family time does include watching some of both “Amazing Race” and “Survivor,” even though the shows focus more on the challenges than on the locales where the games take place, so I don’t see myself giving up either one too often.  Even if I did give up watching “Amazing Race”, and maybe “Survivor,” I doubt that I would actually be able to write during that time, since my children are just getting to bed during that hour, whether they watch any of the show(With) or not.  I’d have more luck giving up “Burn Notice” to gain one extra hour of writing time, although my husband would protest, because that is sort of our weekly ‘date night’ show.

So, I guess that I really don’t know what I could give up in order to gain more writing time.  I don’t have any other activity that I can give up in exchange for writing time.  I’ll just have to write when I can, around caring for my children and house.  Since I managed to write over 52,000 words of a novel (for NaNoWriMo) during only 24 of the 30 days in November 2009, I have proven to myself that I can find enough time during the day to write, even if it’s only a few minutes at a time, although it doesn’t ever seem to be enough.