hrj

For a while there, I had a very productive, if grueling, writing schedule worked out. Wake up ca 5am, on the road before 6, in the coffee shop near work and write for 1.5-2 hours then be at work by 8. Write LHMP entries on my lunch hour. Off work at 5 (well, generally it slides to around 5:30 just because), gym workout and cleanup until almost 7pm when the traffic should have thinned out enough that I can get home by 7:40 or so, stuff something in my face and get clothes, lunch, and gym bag prepped for the next day, by which time it's close to 9pm and time for bed. Weekends are for everything else: yard work, housecleaning, shopping.

But that's the schedule for winter when there's no way in hell I'll be home during daylight so what's the rush to get there? Now that the days are getting longer and we've bumped over into daylight savings, there's the possibility of doing yard work on weeknights. So this is the proposed schedule: wake up ca 6:30am, on the bike to BART to bike to work hopefully by 8am. Do gym workout on lunch hour. Off work at 5 (I swear, 5 promptly, mostly), bike to BART to bike to home by 6pm which gives me at a minimum an hour of daylight to get some yard & garden stuff done, get inspired to actually cook from the garden and lay out clothes, lunch, gym bag, etc for the next day, by which time it's maybe 8pm. At which point I have, in theory, 2.5 hours before I need to be in bed which, in theory, will be spent on writing. In theory. In theory, there's also about a total of 1 hour on BART that can be spent either reading LHMP articles or writing on the iPad, but some of this depends on whether I get a seat or not, which is tricker with the bike.

Writing in the evening has proven to be less of a certain thing than writing in the morning. But writing in the morning is dependent on getting myself out of the house (because otherwise I'll just try to sleep longer) and that works if I'm driving but not if I'm biking. So I'm going to have to come up with some clear rituals to enforce writing time. (Later in the year, "write in the long twilight sitting in the garden" works, but that's not an option yet.) And now that I'm doing fiction in Scivener, I need to come up with some sort of system for drafting things in the iPad then transferring so I can write on BART. And how will I keep up with all the podcasts I've gotten used to following now that I won't be driving? (Except on Tuesdays, which are dragonboat days.)

I like rituals, but I also like shaking up my rituals and reorganizing them. The "write in the morning' change worked better than I expected. I still feel guilty about driving rather than BARTing (although the difference is cost isn't as much as you might think, since I'm only going to the east bay, not SF with all the bridge/parking foo). But I've really been looking forward to getting the bike back into the mix, and that necessarily means shaking up the writing rituals.