Prioritize stuff and keep your head above the water

Oh my.

Sometimes that about all you can say. It’s the time of year where my wife (a teacher in her day job) goes back to work and things start picking up at the day job as the college kids start coming back to the university (where I work at my day job.)

Our oldest is also starting kindergarten, while our second-oldest is starting preschool.

And on top of all that, everyone in our household had a nasty cold for the last week.

We’re in full recovery mode tonight, but whoa, it’s taking some time to get everything back in order.

So…for the first time since 2010 (not counting paternity leave) the writing had to take a pretty large backseat to life. Not a huge deal, but it is easy to feel discouraged when I see my writing to do list miss every single task for five days straight.

And now with the craziness of fall (and I mean that mostly in a good way) it’s time to refocus and set some new priorities if I want this writing thing to work out in the end. The only way to do that is to focus on the most important things for the next month or two. Right now I’m going to keep this blog high on the priority list, so if there are days where I can only do bare minimum, it will be a regularly schedule blog post, podcast, or Five Links.

The next highest priority will still be to continue working on the fantasy novel. I’m making progress, but I’ll admit it is going very slowly, especially since I lost this last weekend. In a perfect world I’d have it written and ready to pitch in time for the Greater Nebraska Writers Conference in October, but let’s be realistic. I’ll have to wait until the Spring conference.

Anyhow, apart from Theme of Absence, that’s all I’m going to do. Everything else (writing related) is going to go on hold for a bit until I catch up both on writing and life. So that’s, I guess, my moral here. When you start falling–

Literally as I’m typing this, the cat just chewed through our Roku box power cable. Angry :<

So where was I? Oh, yeah. When you start falling behind, your only option to maintain sanity is to pick out the one or two most important things and focus on them. Everything else can wait. And for me, I guess that even means anything I planned to watch on Neflix this week.

Sigh. See ya soon, and just for fun, feel free to share your highest writing related priorities in the comments section.