Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
– Henry David Thoreau, American author, poet, philosopher, naturalist, and leading transcendentalist
Not surprisingly, I have a stockpile of vacation and discretionary days, plus two floating holidays. Unfortunately, you can only carry over a certain amount of vacation and discretionary hours into the next fiscal year, which for my company is July 1st. When I checked my hours a few months ago, I realized I had to take time off. But when? There’s never a good time to take off because something is always due or meetings are scheduled either on the fly or weeks in advance. I understood that any time I would take off that wasn’t labeled “family vacation” was going to be writing time for me. I was not prepared to take a week off now, however, as such a chunk of time required activity that had to be productive, as far as I was concerned. I am not ready to sit down and write the second novel. But I am ready to sit down and read, conduct research, sketch characters, and plot storylines – all valuable, of course, and a precursor to actually writing.
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