“There’s no such thing as time to kill
Nor time to throw away
So once for the bright sky
Twice for the pigsty
Trice for another day.”
I have written over eighty haikus the past week.
Why?
Well… I got behind.
Remember that I was trying for a haiku a day in 2021, part of a few New Year’s resolutions that are meeting different stages of success? Adapting to those kinds of changing circumstances is good, overall. Some of that adaptation stems from a natural sense of lost time, a sense increased since we appear to be re-entering the end of the world. Forgetting to send a piece of mail for a week, or taking as long to respond to emails. My own birthday already nearly a week gone, and with it August and summer.
It’s interesting, as I’m editing and rewriting my books (more on that in a moment), that I should arrive today at the line:
“The change in seasons always made him feel as though he wasn’t getting enough done.”
(Line subject to change in rewrites, obviously…)
2022’s creeping up already. NaNoWriMo’s only two months off. Work has yet to feel the effects of this next wave of COVID, and for that I’m forever glad. Keep up the pace, keep making people happy, keep thinking up new drinks. All this, and I’m releasing the next book in the Freedom and Control series in December. The pace of life never slows, the clock never stops ticking.
Things get forgotten. Not all of them inconsequential, and not all of it unintentional. There’s that maxim that floats around the internet, right? Don’t mistake my free time for my availability, or something like that. I would even argue not to mistake my free time for my free time. But maybe that’s not even right. At the worst, those long stretches of temporary unemployment, what we had wasn’t free time. It was empty time. We had to fill it to even consider it free time, or it really was lost. We had to make choices, we still have to, all of us, about how to use the time we have.
Part of the difficulty in the age of COVID, of course, is how used to long stretches of empty time we’ve become accustomed to. I think I’m feeling that pressure now that things like social interactions and trips are creeping back into the calendar. Not that there’s anything wrong with seeing friends, or going to shows, or flying on a plane (upcoming!). I love all of those things. My friends are scattered across the country, and seeing them is rare for me as it is. I was just beginning to go to concerts for the first time in my life when COVID hit. But gone are the long, empty days of writing with a cheese board and a bottle of champagne on my desk. There are things to DO now. A life to live.
Maybe I miss those days a little, and maybe that’s this tension I feel. I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to admit that, and it’s not as though I would want to go back to that. The last stretch of empty time I had came when I actually tested positive for COVID. There was a lot of writing and drinking then, but there was also incalculable stress. At its worst, near the beginning, I kept a scented candle near me and smelled it every hour, just in case. I know now, as I sort of knew then, that there were worse outcomes than just losing my sense of taste and smell (granted, that would probably mean that I’d be out of work, a work I love), but there was the focus of that time when it wasn’t being spent doing my avocations.
I’ve been having fun the past few days making new promotional art for that book release. Deadlines are useful that way, and help organize all that free time into time as productive (oh we’ve come to loathe and love that word, haven’t we?). Not all of them will be met, of course. Things outside of our control always intervene, or else we must make choices about which to meet and which to not. I haven’t had my weekly seafood meal like I thought I would this year, in part because my apartment’s kitchen is carpeted and that’s a mess but also because I’ve just straight chosen not to. The Haiku Project (damn, I should have called it that from the start) keeps getting pushed back because sometimes I sit down with a pen or my phone and wind up doing something else. But I’m caught up there now. Another Time is on its way. My new NaNo project has an outline, but it’ll be mostly freeform.
That’s my challenge to myself: writing something without a clear roadmap. Life doesn’t have one, so why should this story? There’s a deadline, of course, but apart from that? Well… it’ll depend on my choices.
All of this does.