Aimee Weinstein, Tokyo Writer

Lately I am having an issue with time.  Okay, so it’s not lately.  It’s a normal state of affairs for me.  Last week, my good friend Trish Wooldridge wrote a great posting about the reality of time – keeping track of the things that take up her time.  It really got me to thinking.  I’m not too concerned about the hours I spend on the kids or daily life stuff right now, but I am concerned with the amount of outside activities that take up the time I am supposed to be writing.

I do a lot of volunteer work.  I am on the Executive Committee of the Jewish Community Center here in Tokyo.  I am on the AUW Japan Support Committee and I also do work with another charity called Friends of Child Protection.  This year I’ve been doing some work with the parents’ group of my kids’ school.  I’m the room-mom for my daughter’s class.  I sing in the synagogue choir. Are you wondering yet why I haven’t gotten around to editing my still-in-first-draft novels?

This has all come to my attention more recently as my son’s swim team season kicked into high gear and I have to participate in his carpool a few times a week also, adding to my already-full schedule.

I seem to have an inability to say no.

Well, the buck stops here.  I cannot continue at the pace of sleeping only six or fewer hours a night and still function.  I cannot let my novels fall by the wayside like they have in the past few months.  If I want to be a serious writer, I have to make a commitment to it and concentrate on it.  Writing has to be my full-time job.

For the past two years I have participated in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, which takes place in November.  It’s one of those contests that everyone who finishes, wins.  The objective is to kick start a novel – write 50,000 words in the month.  That’s right, 50,000 words.  I did it two years in a row by canceling the rest of my life.  I worked on the novel alone.  I left a lot of phone calls and emails unreturned, but my friends and family understood.  My husband took awesome care of our kids on the weekends so I could pump out 3,000 words a day.  Somehow I did it.

There is no way I’m going to exist like that on a regular basis – in a vacuum. But something’s gotta give.  My goal is to spend some time over the next week or so figuring out what exactly I am going to remove from my schedule.   Happiness does not equate to a full schedule. Happiness equates to spending time on the things that make me feel good about myself – including things that make me feel productive.

Stay tuned to see how it all works out.  And wish me luck; this is not an easy task.