Yesterday morning, at the start of my business day, I saw on my desk a sheet of paper titled “2017 Priorities, as of 10 Jan 2017”. When I wrote that I mean writing priorities. That’s what was on the sheet, the things I planned to write and publish in 2017. It’s now close to two months later. I knew that wasn’t still accurate, as the things to be done early in the year are behind schedule, and thus the things I intended to do later in the year may not get done. So, I decided to re-write it.

Now, these are written on the back of the small sheets I tear off my Dilbert desk calendar each day. I’m not talking about something real formal here. On the 10 January sheet, I had seven numbered items originally, written in approximately the order I wanted to complete them, but without dates or deadlines. The I realized I forgot the thing that was to be number 1, so I squeezed it in between 1 and 2 and numbered it 0. The I realized two other items I’d left off, one for early in the year, one for later. So I wrote them at the end and used appropriate arrows to show where they would come in.

I re-wrote it and put everything in order. #1 is my first priority, #2 is my second priority, all the way down to #10. I don’t really expect to get to all 10 items in 2017, but I’ll work my way down the list and see how far I can get.

Then, I realized I’m working on something right now that wasn’t on the other list. It’s a discussion of a scholarly paper someone wrote and is soon to present at a conference, a religious paper at a religious conference. So I wrote that at the end, without a number. I don’t really know what I’m going to do with that; perhaps nothing. But it’s taking my writing time, so I should have included it.

Then, while I was looking at that paper at academia.edu, I decided to do a search on Thomas Carlyle. I immediately found a scholarly paper that is germane to my item #8, Thomas Carlyle’s “Chartism” Through The Ages. I took time to download and read the paper, and write an e-mail to the author. #8 is kind of far down the road to be doing anything on it right now, but since I was at that site, and since it came up, I did the brief bit of research.

Now, I’ve learned over the year that, whenever I ratchet up my writing time, or even just plan to ratchet up my writing time, something in life blows up and the plan can be trashed. Without going into details, that what happened by noon today.

So, what is my writing plan? Right now I have no idea. Maybe things will clarify in a week or two.