Making Time

I haven't posted about writing much lately. That's because there hasn't been much to tell. Apart from marking up some manuscript pages with red pen and listing some changes for the first few chapters, I haven't done much. This has been gnawing at the back of my mind, and I've been wondering how to be more productive.

The question is, why is that a problem when I only have a part-time job?

When I first went to college, I had a hard time sleeping. Insomnia was really starting to mess with me before I figured out the cure: exhaustion. At school, I got to be busy enough that sleeping as soon as I went to bed wasn't a problem. Now, however, it doesn't seem like enough. I clean hotel rooms during the day. When I get home, my body is tired and sore from kneeling and scrubbing and carrying things. I'm usually tired enough that I don't want to even think about writing. Planning a chapter sounds exhausting. Still, it's a part-time job. There are lots of hours left in the day. And the troubles sleeping still sometimes come creeping back.

That restlessness is starting to bother me. And my lack of progress has been bothering me for a while. So I've decided I'm going to change to make time for my story.

I've claimed to be a morning person before, and now I'm going to prove it. My new goal is to go to bed at 10:30 and wake up at 6. And in the hour and a half before I need to get ready for work, I will write.

Maybe it doesn't sound like much, especially to those who have to wake up that early to work. But it's the act of prioritizing and changing that matters. I'm going to show my body and my mind that I'm serious.

I've often prided myself on being a hard worker. But priding yourself on your abilities should be a red flag for a Christian. I've thought and I've struggled and I've procrastinated, and the only thing I can figure is that I'm supposed to finish my story. If God's given me the ability to write and work, I can finish my novel. And I think I'm supposed to finish it.

And since I've chosen that, it's time to make a change. It's time to cheat my internal clock. It's time to make time.

Suffering

After weeks of late nights and little sleep, things get to be normal for a while. I was in a play that had its final performance last night. I had fun and was happy with how it turned out, and, bonus, it didn't actually kill me. (Sort of. I died in the play twice.)

For the last two weeks, I'd been averaging about five hours of sleep or less per night, largely because of rehearsals. This meant homework often got to pushed to 1:30 or 2 in the morning, and then I would wake up at seven and go to class. I understand some people have it worse, but for me, it was plenty bad enough.

One night last week, I went to bed past three, skipped my 8 a.m. for the first time so I could get some sleep, and woke up at 8:15 to write a paper for my 9 o'clock Bible class. It was about the argument of 1 Peter. I wrote that the main point was comfort in suffering -- Christ suffered, so sufferers are following in his footsteps. We should rejoice; greater things lie ahead of us.

As my Bible professor had us start discussing 1 Peter, I had an epiphany. What I had written about actually applied to my situation. No, I wasn't being persecuted, but surely Jesus had been tired and stressed out in his ministry on the earth. I could choose to rejoice, just as Peter was urging his readers. This idea pleased my overtaxed brain, and I was happy. I even wrote it down as a little life lesson. It was like a devotional, perfect, applicable, a real-life example.

Then my professor showed us a clip from a movie about Peter's inverted crucifixion, and also one about Christian children being fed to dogs in the Roman arena.

Yes, we can choose to rejoice in suffering. But for some people, it's a lot harder than others. I should have rejoiced because my sufferings were small. For others, having joy means defying every circumstance of their lives, because the only joy they have is in Christ.

I learned two lessons in class that day. One was indeed about comfort in sufferings. The other was this: don't take yourself too seriously.

Poor Life Decisions

Looking back over the last couple days, I can't say that things haven't been going well. I've kept up with homework, hung out with friends, and in general have been enjoying myself. Still, there are a couple of things I should not have been doing -- things that would make life a lot easier if I could plan better. They are, in no particular order:

• Deciding to do Camp NaNoWriMo in what I knew would be an extremely busy month, getting ten thousand words behind in the second-to-last week, and being inconsistent about filling that gap because of such silly things as "being tired," or "not feeling like writing." Consequently, for the last several days of August, I had to spend several hours every night writing very very quickly and probably very poorly in order to catch up. This was aggravated by
• Closing documents without saving because I got confused because I had too many documents open because I was trying to check my word count over various documents because I was disorganized because I need to figure out a better system to keep track of writing because I haven't bought Scrivener yet because I'm a poor college student. Consequently, I lost 2,000 words in a critical moment. This was stressful, since I had been
• Letting tiredness build up from sleeping six hours or less the past several nights, and then
• Playing the fifth game of mafia with people in my dorm when I really needed to go to bed before having to wake up very early the next morning, and then
• Deciding to play board games the next night with people I love outside my dorm, because obviously I hadn't had enough yet, culminating in
• Playing a three-hour game of Cities and Knights, in which my exhaustion was almost causing me fairly serious emotional problems, and which could and should have ended an hour and a half earlier.

Six short hours of sleep later, I woke up for my 8 a.m. class, really feeling pretty good for all that. But now daylight is telling me things I should be doing:

• I should read the play for which I need to organize and find props before tech weekend three weeks from now.
• I should take a nap today. Really.
• I should talk to the freshmen on my floor and make sure everyone's doing okay with the transition to college. I should also make some time to pray with them.
• I should  probably be doing homework instead of writing a blog post.
• I should figure out what happened to my Fit for Life syllabus.
• I should try much harder to find someone to permanently switch work shifts with me, since I have a class when I'm supposed to work.
• I should write some personal letters I've been meaning to get to for the past two weeks.
• I should take a minute to be quiet. That is all.

This sounds like a lot. But even in writing these lists, reviewing all the things that filled my time, I don't regret anything (well, except not writing earlier... that could have solved lots of problems.) But I got to be around really awesome people. I stayed busy. And I accomplished lots of things, despite having to work around many obstacles. Last week was great. But, in light of all this, I can try to make next week better.

Late Nights

As I understand it, college students often stay up til two or three in the morning or later. I can't do that. If I go past midnight (like tonight), weird things start happening. Hyperness sets in. The internet calls. And when I crash, as I inevitable do, the day following is full of mini-crashes, particularly around three or so in the afternoon.

I am naturally a morning person. For that to work, though, I need a good night's sleep. A slow groggy waking is the enemy of those of us who can annoy people with our morning cheeriness. It turns off our smiles. It demands sweatpants and hot beverages. It makes us morning people ..... grmphple.... just like everybody else.

This next week I am going for an 11:30 bedtime. In theory, this should get me eight hours of sleep, quite the sufficient amount. The reality is, though, I will be up reading or writing, and when that quits, my mind doesn't. I check my roommate's glowing clock across the room. 12:36, again?

The cure seems to be to slowly shift cycles back to my natural equilibrium. But college life is against me.