Fleeting Hours

Does anyone else ever wish they could put the need for sleep and food aside sometimes and stretch one day out for as long as it took to finish a big job?

I am not at all averse to hard work. But every once in awhile, I AM daunted by just how long big jobs take and by the need to stop in the middle of them to do necessary things like eating and sleeping and grocery shopping and and and…

I often look at my circa-1983 ensuite, and think “I could rip that out right now.” And if I did, I’d happily put in the work to re-do it. If I could do it in one stretch, even if that meant magically postponing the need to sleep or eat for a couple of weeks to make one long day, at the end of which I’d have a shiny new bathroom, I’d dive right in. What puts me off is the thought of NOT being able to do it all at once, of having to go to bed at night in the midst of renovation mess for days or weeks at a time. And I know full well that whatever time I think it will take is probably half or 2/3 of what the reality will be.

The same is true with writing. Unlike the still-untouched bathroom renovation, I DO put in the work for that, even though it means living in a mess of unfinished chapters and half-written scenes for weeks and months (or maybe even years) to get to The End. But some days, the impossibility of writing a book in one sitting frustrates me. No matter how hard I work, it isn’t possible. On my best ever writing days, the ones where the words seem to pour directly from my subconscious into my computer, I’m lucky to reach 3000 words. And those days are rare. A very successful writing day for me is more like 1500 words.  And that’s fine. Except that some days, I’d like to sit at my computer and simply stay there until the whole book was written. Instead, the hours fly by, swift and fleeting, and dinnertime or bedtime rolls around again, and I have to leave the mess to pick up the next day.

That there will never be enough hours in the day to do all the the things I want to do is a given in this world of ours, but sometimes, I wish for a little magic…