I have much neglected my blogs of late, both this one and An Arrow Through the Air. I’m now working on holiday schedule, and have for most of the last week as we made a major clean-up of the house prior to the arrival yesterday of our daughter and son-in-law with our two grandsons, and my mother-in-law today. We will watch the kids today through Wednesday as their parents are off to Eureka Springs, Arkansas (an hour, more or less, east of us) for some needed R&R provided by their church. We are hoping three aging adults are more than a match for a 3 1/2 year old and an 8 month old who has discovered crawling and pulling up.

So writing efforts will be curtailed. I’ve learned that I need chunks of time measured in hours to effectively write. Fifteen to thirty minutes at a time just doesn’t cut it. But I can effectively read in those shorter times. So I think my main “writing” tasks will primarily  be reading between now and Christmas. I say primarily because I do have a little writing to do. Here’s my plan.

• Write the two articles for Buildipedia.com that I’m under contract for. These are the two prototypes of a regular column on construction administration. This will be fairly easy, I think, because it’s within my area of professional expertise. They are only 500-600 words each. The first one, due Nov. 28, is about 2/3 written.
• Be more regular at posting to my blogs. ‘Nuff said.
• Read In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People. This will be for: consistency of plot, typos, adding physical descriptions of characters as I think needed, and better anchoring the action in time. I also have some more coordination of Ronny Thompson’s pitching record relative to a season.
• Read Doctor Luke’s Assistant in preparation for e-self-publishing it in early 2012. I’ve gone through about a third of it already.
• Finish reading the writing help book I’m working through at the moment, on creating memorable characters. I’m less than 1/4 of the way through it right now.

I suppose I could squeeze a few other minor things in there. Of course I’ll be attending BNC Writers tonight, and possibly on Dec 5. If time allows, I’m almost done with an article for Decoded Science, a content site I’ve been approved for. I continue to spend 15-20 minutes every weekday morning at work adding to the passage notes of A Harmony of the Gospel, something I can do in small chunks of time. And I intend to continue to monitor several writing blogs.

So I’ll stay busy, but none of these will be hard and fast things I’ve just gotta do. As time allows, I’ll do them. If it doesn’t allow, no loss.