New Additions on My Desktop

What better way to start off the New Year than with calendars!

I've made some additions to my web site Michael A. Lewis Writes!, including a Calendar of Literary Events for Santa Cruz, featuring readings and other events at local book shops.

I've also added Hayduke Blogs and From  My Desktop... for easy access from the one web site.

Hayduke Blogs now has a Calendar of Environmental Events to keep up with the busy activist activities in Our Fair City By the Sea.

Scheduling... everything

I've was never a scheduler when I was employed by someone else. The structure of my job always provided all the scheduling necessary. My schedule was determined by others.

Now that I'm self-employed, I am the one who supplies my daily schedule, and I find I really need that structure to keep me on task, for example, writing this blog post. 

More importantly, I need to schedule my non-work time as much as my work time, maybe even more so. If I don't block out parts of my day to do non-writing tasks, they quickly take over and become excuses for not writing. There's always firewood to cut, birds to feed and water, a bottle of tonic to buy for the afternoon G&T, the garden to admire, waves to be counted at the beach, cloud formations that just must be studied.

So, in the morning, before my wife goes off to her job, I go through email, read the news, send out Tweets and Facebook posts; I do those things that do not require rapt, creative attention. Then, when I'm alone in the house, I turn to blog posts and creative writing until 11. 

11 to 12 is my time to hop on my bike and run errands or just go for a bike ride (I ride my bicycle to ride my bicycle). Then, lunch at noon with my wife, and a two mile walk around the harbor. Then when I get back home I'm ready for an afternoon of creative writing.

Just to keep me from procrastinating or getting distracted by things far more interesting that formatting my novel (ugh!), I have my schedule set up in iCal with task prompts that appear in my tasks email folder and in my home page in my browser. That way if I get tempted to look at email, or browse for "research," I see guilt-instilling reminders of what I'm supposed to be doing.

I probably ( I hope) won't need these crutches once I get fully into the flow of full-time writing, but write now they constitute the road map of my daily work. 

Taking the Plunge

As of Friday, December 30, 2011, I retired from the workaday world of employment, embarking on this new quest of freelance writing.

It's time.

I've been more or less steadily employed since 1965... that's 47 years for those counting. Sometimes part-time, sometimes full-time, never amounting to a career and always interesting.

I started writing in high school, that would be 1964, with pencil on legal pads, then on a portable typewriter my Mother gave me for Christmas (Whatever happened to it?) I stuill have thpose early scribblings, "cloud" writing, articles published in the lcoal newspaper and regional house organs.

Now it's time to return to my first avocation.