About The Site

Life abounds with so much to do. I find that there is never much down time, and quite honestly, I would barely know what to do with it if I stumbled across it. When I am presented with quiet moments I feel bad if I don’t do anything with them. And I use that word very seriously, and it might be a problem, I feel bad about wasting time.

My life is relatively busy as it is. I teach at a local primary school. I am in charge of a few sports teams and the entire school technology program, which means I have an entire network plus over a hundred computers, a few printers, two photocopiers and countless ancillary problems to solve every day. It is heading into reporting time, which means lots of data input, comment writing, then I am in charge of merging the reports for every student into something that can be sent home, over 360 reports to merge. Fun!

Each day I go home, usually ride home when weather and laziness permit, and then do some moderate exercise. Sitting in front of a computer all day long just makes me want to hulk out and get the blood flowing. After a shower and dinner chores I have roughly four hours left in my day/night. Pretty much every day I use this time for writing. Every day I do this, it seems perfectly natural to me, but then I think about it and it really doesn’t seem it. Everyone else wants to go watch tv, play computer games or just get drunk. I sit down in front of my laptop and write for four or more/less hours while surfing the web. I am either researching things for my stories, or just amusing myself. The other day I found that you can read Jonathan Nolan’s short story “Memento Mori”, which inspired Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece Memento, on a website for free, click the title of the story to follow the link. But it is free I tells ya. I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, but I know where it is and I know I will one day. When I get some free time.

I just wouldn’t know what to do with my nights if I weren’t writing. If I kick back and watch some teev, just finished the first season of The Wire, and hot damn was that some good writing, I enjoy it but I always feel guilty in the back of my head. Like I could have spent that time working, writing, doing something more for myself. Each day/hour/minute/nanosecond I spend writing is that one piece closer I will be to breaking it. If I add up every extra minute I write before giving in for the night I know they will add up and I will finish a piece a day quicker, a week, a year. It all adds up, every little bit. So there is nothing to waste. Though I work all day, I know I then have to work all night. That’s just how it is.

The other night I had two hours before my bed time, and yes I have a bed time, or at least a time that I know I should be asleep by so as not to become the walking dead by work the next morning. In those two hours I packed a bunch of bags to be transported for my coming house move. I read over the last pages of my friend’s script and made notes for him (it needed more cow bell). I did some wwInterweb research and I wrote a thousand words on my novel. I try to get a thousand each day, I figure at that pace I might get it finished somewhere close in the new year. I settled down into bed, a little after my bedtime, and realised that I had been very busy. But I don’t know any other way to do it.

I have so much I want to write, and it certainly is not going to write itself. So busy I shall remain.

Posted on November 5th, 2008 by ryan
Filed under: Writing, life