You Can't Buy Time

As my Kindle release week continues to explode into the interwebs, I thought I’d take a quick look at my sales again, just so we can know where I stand.

3 (this includes me)

Um, that’s about it. Thanks to everyone who’ve taken the plunge, and to everyone who intends to. I hope to make this available in more places this weekend, although I’m thinking I’ve got a ton of things I think I’ve promised to get done by then. Someone will be disappointed in me. Let’s see, what do I have to do this weekend?

1)      Laundry - that’s my promise to my wife, she’s taking care of the yard and the garage. She hates laundry and I like not doing yard work, or reorganizing the garage. Laundry it a weird thing because there are down times, between loads, that you can do stuff. But I’m guessing there is going to be a lot of stuff to wash. We tend to wash just enough to get through a week and be done with it. Over time the pile slowly grows. We’ve got a room dedicated to long forgotten clothes. It’s time for me to go in there and get to work – estimated time to launder clothes? 12 hours.

2)      Football – My son has some Football jamboree this weekend. I’m not even sure I know where. But I’ve got to have him somewhere at 9 o’clock Saturday morning. That’s actually bad, because I will be doing laundry, and it’s his last weekend before school begins, and he was supposed to help do other things around the house. Bad planning. Estimated time for football activities? 3 hours.

3)      Writing – I still have goals to achieve. I’m working on a short story that I’m dying to finish up. I guessing it will be between 15 – 18k words before I’m done. I’m around 10k right now. That’s an odd length because it’s too much work to do over a weekend, and it will have enough typos and plotting issues that I can’t just do a quick pass and call it done. I have to work it like a novel, doing numerous passes and spending tons of time self-editing.  But, if I’m going to meet my writing goals for the summer/early fall, I need to have this more or less done by the end of the month. Estimated time to write (this weekend) 6 hours.

4)      Art – I do love me some graphic art. I’m trying to wrap up a book cover for someone, and trying to at least hammer down a concept for someone else. That sort of work is pretty enjoyable for me, but it doesn’t go as quick as I’d like. Estimated time spent doing cover related things? 6 hours.

5)      Entertainment – I missed last week’s Eureka and need to watch it, I also have a Netflix disk that my wife has patiently been holding off on watching until we can do so together. I also really want to go see a movie at the theater. Estimated entertainment time? 5 hours.

6)      Reading – I don’t count this as entertainment. As someone who pretends to be a writer, reading is important. I’ve begun A Dance with Dragons and am less than a hundred pages in so far. My current pace will put me at finishing somewhere around Thanksgiving 2014.  I devoured the first three books, and the fourth started with a lot of enthusiasm from me, but I didn’t enjoy it as much and now this one feels a bit like work. I need to read a minimum of 50 pages a day to know what’s going on. It’s sort of a minimum daily allowance for me, any less and it doesn’t take up enough mental real estate to get read. I’ll quit it altogether if I don’t do that. I’d rather put in at least a hundred pages daily, because I have a two week window to read books too. More than that and I start to forget things that happen early. So, estimated time spent reading? 3 hours.

7)      Sleep – 12 hours, I tend to get up very early on Saturday’s and sleep in on Sundays, I have no idea why. It’s just how I work.

So how many hours (non-sleeping) will that be total? 35. That’s a lot. Granted, I can write while clothes are in the dryer, but it’s choppy and unproductive that way. But the point stands that I might be able to double up some things. I can read while my son does his football thing (his time playing I’ll watch him, but there’s a lot of down time in football). 

I’ll try to revisit this on Monday and see how I fared.

Oh, and I noticed that I have some new followers. Um, I’m known as a bit of a loser when it comes to following back, sorry. If anyone cares to make mention in my comments that I’m not following them and they’d like me to, I’d be happy to accommodate. I’m crappy at visiting, but it isn’t on purpose. I always start with noble intentions and run out of gas really quick. I’m trying to be better.