How Do You Do It?

"I don't know how you keep track of it all." -- from a colleague in reference to my workload

I like being a chef with multiple burners heating multiple pots, simmering full of somethin' good.

I'm a concrete and a random worker, moving easily off one project onto another then to another, then back to the original. I'm also good at hanging in for the long haul. A writing workshop leader once told me I was an INTJ on the Myers-Briggs Inventory, which is a good profile for finishing a novel. Today's writer can't just be the lone warrior in the garret if she wants to be published. And while I'm not an extrovert who gains energy from others as much as I gain energy from being alone, I have just enough "I" to labor late over my writing tasks and starting early every morning.

Here are the six sections of my to-do list:

NEW NOVEL IN PROGRESS (REALLY, THE OLD ONE, PREQUEL TO ST. MICHAEL)
NOVEL CONTESTS, ST. MICHAEL (2ND NOVEL)
SHORT STORIES
NOVEL QUERIES
GRANTS
MARKETING

Each has at least two if not four bullets of tasks.

You have to find the joy in each demand. You have to love starting a new project like revising my old novel as a prequel or taking on a brand-new novella for NaNoWriMo. You have to love binding up a manuscript with huge rubber bands for the Bakeless Prize or Dana Awards, and you have to love scouring Poets & Writers for the latest information on literary magazines. Give your all to every bit of the process.

In "Why We Write: The Pressure of Young Promise" (latest issue of Poets and Writers) Laura Maylene Walter shares her long, arduous journey as writer without reward. If you slog and struggle daily toward your writer's brass ring, you must read this meditation and then see the inspirational Editor's Note.

Just this week, my former student and current friend, Teresa Smith Porter, felt her spirits flag. She's a successful photographer (My Friend Teresa Photography) who labors to get the best shot and make her clients shine. But it was one of those days when she was tapped out and struggling to see the horizon. Then she got the call. She had won 1st Place in the Wedding Photographic Society Competition, Photojournalism category. Then she got another call: to do a spread for a magazine. Now it was one of those weeks you dream of. She'd had weeks like this before, but in between for every artist is the labor, the unglamorous, exhausting, driving toil. Bleary-eyed and dehydrated, she has posted at 3:00 AM on Facebook out of the sheer joy of loving her work. Now that's my kind of crazy.

Do you love it? Writing. Do you? If you do, then make your list and keep your head down. Your spirits will lift, I swear by it.