My schedule feels busy.
Unlike summer, winter has me working five whole days in a row pretty much every week. Insane, right? What’s more, I’ve been training for that half marathon. Running four times a week at three to five miles per run is taking up a pretty solid chunk of my time. It only grows from here until May.
Then there’s the boys’ schedules. Isaac is in tennis, getting better at it and enjoying it. Gabe is in a dance and tumble class, though he admits that the tumble half is really the better part. Twice a week I find myself sitting at the Rochester Athletic Club waiting for a class to finish. Often, I write during this time, but it’s a small piece of writing time and there are plenty of distractions.
Mondays and Wednesdays I write during my lunch break. Soon, Wednesdays will be consumed by the running schedule.
Cub Scouts also takes up a fair amount of time. For some reason Cub Scout events are clustered, several in one week and then almost nothing for a few weeks. This past weekend I took the boys on an overnight camping trip in the Science Museum of Minnesota. It was just about exactly as wonderful and uncomfortable as a person would imagine. I loved it, but I do feel that my five mile run the next day may have suffered.
I haven’t brewed a beer in a couple months, which is not good because my kegerator is nearly empty. I also need to carve out a half hour to make a new batch of root beer.
I’ve been reading more. I’m taking time to consume more fiction on the hope that I might learn something or at least enjoy a good piece of writing. I’m still a slow reader, though, so my fiction consumption rate is still startlingly low.
The schedule is, indeed busy, but when I look at it I can see a pattern. Almost everything that fills this crazy schedule of mine is fun. I like it this way. I go to bed tired every night, but not exhausted from long, long days at work. I go to bed tired because I’ve been doing what I love.
The latest book, which I have now named Humble, has been inching along at a very slow pace because of this crazy schedule. I don’t mind, though. The story is there, just waiting to be written. I find it’s easy to write whenever I get time to do it. To help me carve out time for this I’ve decided to post word count progress on my fancy new Twitter account. I currently sit at 15,421 words with an end goal of something around 50,000. At my current rate of 3,000 words a week, I think I have a long way to go.
But I’ll get there.
Justice in an Age of Metal and Men will be out soon. I’ll set a release date as soon as I get the final cover image from my artist. He’s nearly done. I like the look so far and I’m pretty excited to get that project out the door.