There are advantages to having a day job. A steady salary. Employment benefits. Human interaction. If you’re lucky, tasks that are creatively or intellectually stimulating. But a day job does have a pretty substantial cost in terms of the writing life–a full-time job takes a minimum of eight hours out of your writing time. And during weeks when those eight hours stretch to nine or ten or twelve, I find that not only do I simply have less time to write, I have less energy for writing.
It was a workweek of long days; now, the week is nearly at an end, and I still haven’t met my word count goal.
The weekend, theoretically, should be a time of catch-up. I set aside some Chloe time this weekend so that I could buckle down and get the word count out after an anemic word count week. The problem with this plan might be obvious–if you aren’t in a good spot mentally or emotionally when the calendar flips to your two-day writing marathon, you end up spending a lot of time staring at the screen and the unmoving word count, and you risk being thousands of words behind your schedule, the deadline looming out there in front of you.
I’ve learned my lesson–500 or 1000 words may seem like an overwhelming chunk at the end of a work day, but that getting that chunk out of the way mean no weekend marathons. With a few thousand words still to go, that sounds like a good thing to me.