Right, so, about three weeks ago I put up a post about making time for the business of creating. At the time it seemed like a totally achievable, realistic plan; just spend one of my days off paid work to work on writing.

Seems simple, except that it doesn’t work.

A full day working from home, for me, is awful. I can get probably four hours of productive work done in the morning, but coming back to it after lunch – NOPE.

I find myself hard pressed to clear a whole day for writing. I come up with excuses, other stuff I have to do immediately, like go to the gym, or get coffee with someone, or visit a friend. Even read a book or stare into space.

Meiki, a friend of mine, talks about having a ‘people bath’ every day. For extroverts, or even partial extroverts, having conversations and interactions with other real life humans (online doesn’t count) is super important to motivation and happiness. For Meiki, that means bathing in the presence of other humans for a minimum period of time every day.

I am a pretty extroverted person. I love a good old chat, I like meeting new people, and nurturing friendships. So sitting on my own, at home, typing, for a whole day, is painful. Especially if my housemates aren’t home. I need alone time too, but a daily dose of people is definitely required.

I feel a revision of the goal is in order, just in time for New Year’s resolutions, too! At the moment I have three days per week of paid employment, so that means I have two weekdays available for sitting down and writing. I’m going to try using the mornings or evenings of both days to work on writing and schedule other stuff in the afternoons. Stuff like exercise, catching up with friends, generally getting out into the world.

The other road block that’s coming up is editing. I have a project from last year, my NaNoWriMo for 2014, which needs some serious rewriting. The only problem is actually starting it – it’s daunting to open up a hundred-odd page document and start fiddling. I suppose, if I’m honest, I’ve never really rewritten any long stuff. It feels like a really big task and I can’t quite work out where to start.

What I need to do is re-read the manuscript and work out what areas need the most attention and then just do one chapter at a time. Break it down into bite sized chunks which don’t seem so overwhelming.

The new plan for 2016, then, will be two chunks of three or four hours each week for writing. One for editing, and one for writing new stuff for competitions and magazines and blogs and stuff.

Next week I’m going to do a review of my 2015 goals and I’ll also be writing another New Years resolutions/goal type post too.

I hope you all have a lovely festive period, if you celebrate Christmas, I hope it’s full of delicious food, laughter, and love, and minimal bickering. And actually if you don’t celebrate Christmas, I hope that you have lots of food, laughter and love and not too much bickering.