author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

I have some more leftover thoughts from last week. They regard an incident I've already regaled y'all with before, but that blog post was more than three years ago, and besides, it turned into such a tangent during the initial draft of last week's "here's my schedule" post that I can only conclude that it's important that I get it off my chest. Again.

If you followed that first link, the one to the post from November 2018, you probably see what I mean. If not, 's OK, you don't have to. I'm going to rehash it here.

So, last week, while delineating the Afternoon Shift part of my Monday through Thursday schedule, my first instinct was to describe those tasks as "real writing." You know, as opposed to the stuff I do during the Morning Shift that doesn't really count as writing and I only do it anyway because I'm a wannabe-writer loser who's constantly Wasting This Precious Gift of Time and playing around instead of working. Well, I corrected myself and said "career writing" instead. But even that phrase is a problem. It contains a tacit admission that what I do with my Morning Shift is orthogonal, irrelevant, to my writing career. As though the elements of my writing process that support and enable the creation of publishable works, but are not themselves directly involved with creating those publishable works, aren't part and parcel of my writing career.

This is not an original metaphor, but: As well tell a professional football player that nothing other than the actual game counts as part of their career. Not stretching before and after practice, not cross-training, not sports nutrition, nothing. As well tell a musician that scales and arpeggios and practicing specific techniques are wastes of time. Unless they are practicing the piece they are going to perform, or actually performing it, or maybe writing a piece they intend to perform or record, then they're not really making music.

I know this. I feel it. Yet every time I mention morning pages or my daily freewriting or even the Friday Fictionette project, I hear those condescending voices in my head saying, "But, Niki, after all that, what time is left for you to actually write?" And feel obliged to justify why morning pages, why freewriting, why this weekly self-publishing project that I'm constantly behind schedule on and stressing myself out over, when I could be taking all that time to write and sell more short stories and maybe finally a novel.

Why? Because those daily and weekly exercises are part of my creative process. They are part of my practice. They make the publishable works possible and they are non-negotiable. And I need to stop giving in to the guilt and shame I feel when I tell my co-writing colleagues that I'll be working on one of those things during our next sprint. I'm going to feel guilty and ashamed, sure, because brain's gonna brain and what can you do, but I don't need to act like it.

(I mean, yes, I'd like to begin getting up a little earlier so that I can do my morning pages before co-writing rather than during, but only because that would mean two sprints available for that day's Friday Fictionette efforts rather than just one.)

Hell with it. I'm going to Own My Damn Process and spend a few blog posts talking about why these exercises are valuable to me. And yes, I've blogged tiresomely on that precise subject before. But it's a new year, and I have new thoughts about them. Or new ways to word the old thoughts. Something like that. It's worth taking a look and seeing what's filed under those categories in my head right now.

On a maybe related note, I'm rethinking what days I can blog on. I got so very much stuff done yesterday, just this amazing amount of stuff, not a moment of time wasted whatsoever, and yet I didn't get to the "daily" blog post before it was time to get ready for roller derby. I guess that means there really is no room in a Tuesday for blogging. So maybe blogging happens on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays? Or maybe just Wednesdays and Saturdays because Friday is a day off? Except I'd really like to post more than twice a week? Which I haven't in a really long time?

Argh. Look, I'm gonna feel it out and see what works. Stay tuned.