I was able to attend our last meeting for Lancaster Christian Writers for the year this past Saturday.  Our guest speaker was Lisa Lawmaster Hess and she shared ways that ANYONE can find some time to write most, if not all, days.  She presented the material and a fun way and shared some of her personal experiences.  Basically, the following is the plan and you can use it and tweak it any way you need to:

Ready   —     Set    —    Sprint!

1 hour

1,000 New Words   (These 3 items, above the line are the Gold Standard)

Daily

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Split Sprints

Set a Timer

Half Sprints

Double Sprints

You may be wondering what all of this means.  Well, so many people tell you that you MUST sit down and write EVERY day.  They say your goal should be 1 hour and/or 1,000 new words a day.  This is a great goal, but it’s not really realistic for most writers who have many other responsibilities in their families and lives or who still have to work a full-time job, outside of writing, in order to pay the bills.

So, look at the ideas below the line:

Split Sprints — This simply means that you do your best to try to get an hour in, but you may not be able to do it all at once,

so you split it up into pieces that work for you, which may be only fifteen minutes four different times

throughout the day.

Set a Timer — This is to help you meet your goal time.  Set your timer for one hour when you sit down to write.  If you get

interrupted and can’t complete the hour all at once, stop the timer, but record the amount of time you did

spend writing.  Then try to get back and finish the hour later, but even if you don’t get the hour finished that

day, you will still see that you have made progress, because you did spend some time writing.

And,  * “Any time you can put into your writing, is better than no time at all.”

Half Sprints — This simply means splitting your hour long sprint of writing time into two half-hour time slots.

Double Sprints — This is a bonus for the times when you sit down for you hour and find that after your hour, you are still

going strong and have had no interruptions, and you manage to put in two hours!

With all of this said, you have to understand that “writing requires intention and planning”.  Therefore, you need to plan some things before you sit down to write:  1) Will you use your entire writing time to work on just one particular project or will you divide it between two or three projects; 2) Will you use your entire writing time to write all new words or will you spend some of your time editing a project; 3) Or will you spend some of your time marketing?

Stopwatch vs. Timer — Use a timer when you have to be done at a specific time; Use a stopwatch when you want open-ended space to just keep track of time spent writing.

I hope you will find all of these wonderful ideas helpful in your writing life as well.

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Now, for the update for anyone who wants to know about me and my health.  I am healing very well from my surgery and feeling quite normal.  I am able to eat anything without getting sick, but still need to be careful with sugar and carb intake because of my diabetes.  I also am trying to be careful because I don’t want to gain back the weight that I have lost, and would like to lose some more.  My doctor still wants me to lose more weight as well.

I am able to live my normal lifestyle again, but must limit the amount of weight I lift to 25 pounds (my surgeon said that needs to be my limit for the next six weeks).  I told my husband I think I’m going to make that a permanent limit for myself because I am getting older and I really don’t want to experience another hernia of any kind.

Thanks to any of you who have been praying for my recovery.  I hope to be posting regularly here again,  now that I am feeling healthy again.