I'm back home from my exhausting and exhilarating trip to the east coast. Unpacked clothes, finished laundry, babysat for sick grandson, went through the mail, did grocery shopping, and all the other myriad tasks that awaited me.
Amazingly, my three long flights were very productive in terms of writing the first draft of RAV HISDA'S DAUGHTER. Let's face it – where else am I guaranteed so many hours of time uninterrupted by phone calls and email? I wrote nearly two chapters, [Ch 17 and 18] during which: my heroine reaches the eighth month of pregnancy with her first child, her grandfather dies and has to be buried secretly to avoid having his body exhumed by the Persian Magi, her husband leaves her alone to attend the wedding of her black-sheep brother in another city, and she must entertain a former suitor who arrives while her family is away at aforementioned wedding.
Then [next chapter] Hisdadukh's family celebrates Purim, she gives birth to a healthy son, her family worries because her merchant brother doesn't return on time from a journey, and her mother-in-law changes her will between two sons several times before dying with each son thinking he is the sole heir. Of course there are several scenes of Talmud being created as she and her father's students discuss the Mishna.
See what you all get to look forward to in August 2012.
Tomorrow I'm catching a 7 am flight to Atlanta, for the start of a 12-day book tour in New Jersey and New York City. For those of you who live in these places or know people who do, here's my schedule:
May 15 @ 2 pm. Temple Beth Israel. Maywood, NJ
May 15 @ 7 pm. Caldwell Hadassah, Congregation Agudath Israel, Caldwell NJ
May 16 @ 7 pm. Morristown Jewish Center Beit Yisrael. Morristown NJ
May 17 @ 7 pm. Women's Division, Jewish Federation of Ocean County, Ramada Inn, Toms River NJ
May 18 @ 10 am. New Jersey Region ORT luncheon. Congregation B'nai Tikvah, North Brunswick NJ
May 18 @ 8 pm. Oheb Shalom Congregation, South Orange NJ
May 19 @ 10:30 am. UJA-Federation author brunch. New York City NY
May 19 @ 7:30 pm. Temple Beth Chai, Hauppauge [Long Island] NY
May 20-22: Scholar-in-residence weekend at Temple Israel of Long Beach. 305 Riverside Blvd, Long Beach, NY 11561
For more info, see my website 2011 schedule. I hope to see some of you there.
One of the Yahoo writing groups I frequent had a post asking for the reasons we personally can't do all the writing each day we'd like to [or think we ought to]. Naturally I interrupted my writing in order to answer the question, and then figured I may as well share my answer.
In short: things like this blog - small tasks I can do quickly & immediately and they're done, off my to-do list. But they each steal time from writing. As does:
1. food shopping and preparation, laundry, and other household duties that get left to me since I'm working from home and my husband is at an office
2. keeping up with internet promotion like my yahoo groups, blog & Facebook
3. exercise [I aim for at least 30 minutes a day]
4. reading the newspapers
5. email - answering the ones that need replies and either filing or dumping the ones that don't
Collectively the items above can eat up nearly all my waking hours if I let them. Another problem is that I need 1-2 uninterrupted hours to write, so if I don't see those hours available at the moment, I won't start in. That's why I'm so much more productive when I'm at the editing phase, as opposed to the first draft, which is where I am now.
Yet somehow I got two novels written when I was still working fulltime, maybe because I knew exactly when my writing window was open [at night] and that's when I wrote. These days, when it seems as though I have all day and night to write, bedtime comes around and I wonder how the entire time disappeared with only a few paragraphs to show for it.