Discipline!

“Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.” ― Gustave Flaubert

Earlier this week, I decided I needed to institute some self-discipline when it comes to my summer writing schedule.

Why?

Because this keeps happening:

And you can overwrite FaceBook with Wikipedia, YouTube, or Scribophile. Point being, I’m not getting jack done on my novel(s).

But I have approximately six weeks and three days left until my summer vacation is over, and it will be back to the full time teaching thing. That isn’t counting the two days of mandatory gap analysis (where we analyze the gaps in our students’ test scores, I kid you not), or however many days I’ll need to spend getting my classroom ready for the start of the school year. Because:

And yes, I made both of those memes.

So in my brilliance, I took about fifteen minutes on Monday afternoon and created a “Summer Schedule” for myself. If I don’t institute some self-discipline, dammit!, I’m not going to get anything done.

I even titled my schedule “Stop being a lazy bum and follow this schedule so you get something done!”

(It sounds cooler than it actually is.)

The tricky part was determining the balance between writerly things and regular life things. So here’s the gist of it:

Sunday

Go to church
Write critiques on Scribophile (at least 3)
Laundry
Say rosary
Read a book
Family dinner

Monday

Workout (no later than 3pm start)
Write critiques (at least 1)
Work on novella project
Read a book/say rosary

Tuesday

Workout (no later than 3pm start)
Write critiques (at least 1)
Blog (either food or writing)
Run errands
Read a book/say rosary

Wednesday

Workout
Historical Fiction WIP revisions
Novella project
Critiques
Read/say rosary

Thursday

Workout (are we noticing a pattern here?)
Novella project
Blog (whichever wasn’t done on Tuesday)
Clean house
Read/Rosary

Friday

Workout
Work on short story
Work on queries
Read/say rosary
Date night with the hubs

Saturday

Work outside (weeding, etc.)
Go for a walk or go swimming
Critiques (at least 3)
Read/say rosary
Time with the hubs

And that doesn’t include the list of “other things” that need to be done before August 31st, like our vacation, the baking of cookies and pies I’m doing for a friend’s wedding, or the time I’ll be spending in my classroom.

You may be wondering how it’s going so far. Well….. parts have worked out okay. Not so much the workout part. Or the cleaning the house part. We could probably overlook the fact that I’m blogging on a Friday instead of the scheduled Thursday.

I don’t mean to be a rule breaker. In my defense, life has thrown some curve balls this week. Like having to wait 6 hours for the Honda dealer’s service department to change my air filters and transmission fluid and service my A/C system, instead of the quoted 3 hours. Thank God they gave me a loaner vehicle. At least I could go to Barnes & Noble and the mall. But that was a wasted day.

But, in the semi-infamous words of Captain Barbossa (okay, maybe I just like quoting from PotC), it’s “more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.”

Now go away so I can get some work done!