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Bondage & DisciplineNovember 17, 2005 Some writers dream and scheme to "take time off to write." I am not one of them. I've tried; it doesn't work for me. I'm lousy at structuring wide-open time. Partly open time, however -- this works well. It shapes the day and leaves me enough hours and enough energy to write in. While teaching myself to write poetry, I fell in love with sonnets and sestinas and villanelles, mainly thanks to Marilyn Hacker, a grand master of traditional poetic forms. Meter and rhyme didn't seem constricting at all, but they did make me weigh my words and use them more effectively. Waking up to days with hours blocked off for editing and barn chores has a similar effect. My current workload is not like that at all. My current workload is insane. I'm running two major editing jobs concurrently, and nearly every (long) weekend I'm looking after someone else's horses as well as my own. All work and no play makes Jill a dull girl, a surly girl, a girl who wishes she had a trust fund or a sugar mama even though she knows either one would be a creative disaster. I know people who live like this all the time. Their schedules are so overloaded they need desk calendars and Palm Pilots to keep track of their appointments. I look at them and wonder what they're trying to avoid. They look at me and wonder when I'm going to grow up. Some of them admire my "self-discipline," that I can buckle down to work without anyone looking over my shoulder or making me punch a time clock. "You can't bill for jobs you don't complete" works pretty well for me; besides, I hate blowing off deadlines, even when I know that most of the production editors I work with build some wiggle room into the schedule because sh*t happens and some copyeditors are flakes. When the mind is forever go-go-going, the muses peer in, recoil, and slink, storm, or fade away. Hey, I knocked, but there was this crazy lady in there spinning and agitating and generally paying no attention . . . I don't really think that the Idea of the Century is going to come calling when I can't answer the door, but still I'll be glad when this Fall of Working Excessively comes to an end, long about Pearl Harbor Day.
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