Where's My Time-Turner?
Jim-
First up, apologies if this has already been asked. It's a long thread, and I just found it today.
Without going into too much detail, I'm as green as it gets. I said "I want to be a writer" for the longest time, but am only now realizing what that really means. Because I'm insane, I'm not throwing my hands up into the air and going into something both more lucrative and less demanding, like pornography. Also, within the extremely raw material I've been perpetrating until now, I do really believe there's some talent. And bottom line, I love doing it.
But I've got one question that's bearing down on my mind like a freight train on a puppy dog. You touched on it way back on page one, saying that back in the day, you set your alarm clock two hours earlier so you'd get those two hours to write. I can do that, or, if it turns out another way works better, hit my head to the pillow two hours later. There's my time to sit at the computer and put words on the screen.
But what about the rest of it? There's rewriting, revision, research, reading (for fun and profit), and oh yes, working that 9-5 (or, more likely these days, 8-6), eating, sleeping, cleaning various objects that must be cleaned, writing checks to people who simply insist on not giving me things like a place to live and health care for free, obtaining supplies for all of the above, and the ubiquitous "having a life" (which would, ideally, include somehow finding true love, which I currently define as a person willing to do some of those things for me when I just plain can't because I've got a spaceship hurtling towards a black hole over here that isn't going to save itself). And that's just now, when my stuff sucks*. Once it's good**, add in agents, contracts, trips to the post office and bank, and all the legal/tax stuff that comes with being a freelancer, even one with a day job.
Simply put: How the frell is this possible? Am I nuts, or does that add up to more than 24 hours in a day? I'm OK with making sacrifices, but we're almost talking Mayan proportions here. Or at least that's how I feel.
The writing (and in this sentence I mean everything that relates to moving a story from the beginning of its creation to its end) has to fit in there somewhere. For someone who's still a working stiff, where? How do I spin straw into time?
* defined as "won't make it past the slush pile"
**see above definition, but replace "won't" with "will"