Busy weekend!

We've had a nice productive weekend here. Sean's busy working on the music for the trailer for Shimmer's Pirate issue (you should be able to see something fabulous on Talk Like A Pirate Day, Sept. 19th). It's lovely to see him so engaged in something. He's enthusiastic about his writing and about his classes and about his future in teaching - but none of those things absorbs him quite the way music does.

And I've gotten a lot done this weekend, too. It's good to be productive instead of overwhelmed. I continue to put a lot of energy towards figuring out the best way for me to work; I think this is highly individual. Everyone has overcrowded lives; everyone needs to balance their home and their day job and their relationships and their creative life and their other interests and their recreation activities. It takes some experimenting to find the best approach. For me, it seems that breaking every activity into bite-sized tasks ("read 1 chapter of 'War and Peace'" vs "read 'War and Peace'"), combined with limiting each day's To Do list to a manageable size, is the way to go.

I'm also focusing on one area of my life at a time. For a while, it seemed like the aspect that had most of my attention was my house: creating new systems to keep us clean and fed was more consuming than I expected it would be. But that phase is settling down, and the house stays clean and we have yummy meals every night and life is good. It's remarkable how happy it makes me to have a clean and organized home; it just seems to make everything else flow better. (Time committment: 5 minutes/day to pick up crap, 10 minutes to deal with dishes and etc after dinner, 45 minutes a week to do a thorough cleaning of the whole house, 2 hrs per month on special cleaning/decluttering projects.) But now, finally, that's almost under control, and I can focus more on Shimmer and my own writing.

btw, if you have any interest in the workings of a small press magazine, read John Klima's series on starting a zine. He's the editor of Electric Velocipede, one of my favorites, and he's offering lots of good information; read it!

He does mention how much effort goes into a magazine, but I don't think you can really understand it until you're waist-deep in it. And for me, more than the sheer amount of work, it's the relentlessness of it: today I can read 10 slush stories and get caught up; tomorrow there will be another 10. And that's just the slush pile: every other aspect is just as continual. The work never stops.

Which brings me back to figuring out how you work. How much can you do in a day, realistically? Where's the boundary between "protecting your free time" and "procrastinating"? What's the most effective way to get magazine work done, get the day job done, keep your life running, and be with your loved ones?

It evolves slowly, this productivity thing; but I know this: I'm happy when I've had a full and productive day, doing work I love. It really makes me feel I've earned my olivetini.