For the last seven weeks, I’ve been away from home, helping
to take care of my best friend and her family during the end of her life. I had
no idea how hard it would be, but we did well by her and her passing was
peaceful, attended by great tenderness and forgiveness. I stayed on for another
ten days to organize the memorial and transition for her family.
During this entire time, one of my personal anchors was
writing. I loaded up my netbook with current projects and took the folders with
checklists for various Book View Café projects I was working on. In this way, I
created a portable office, albeit one that lacked all the resources I had at
home. For example, although I had access to the internet through my carrier’s
website, I didn’t have my address book files. I learned to “work around” these
limitations, focusing instead on what I could do, delegating and asking for
help with things I couldn’t, and postponing other tasks. As a result, I was
productive with some projects but “on hold” in others.
Now I’m back in my own office, resources at hand. I’m facing
a dual challenge: coming “up to speed” and getting back into balance. What do I
mean by balance? I mean reapportioning (or rather, un-deapportioning) my time
and focus. Rarely have I been so aware of the many activities involved in my
life as a writer. These include, to name a few, original fiction writing
(drafting, revision, revision-to-editorial-request), other aspects of book
production (proofreading); editing anthologies; beta-reading and editing books,
often for other Book View Café members; writing blog posts like this one;
keeping up with professional communications (reading and responding to email
from fellow writers, fans, and editors, not to mention news of the publishing
world).
