Writing is risky to dinner preparation!

Tonight instead of cooking a meal, I spent the time instead doing more editing…

I think the one person who notices the impact the most of all this work, is my partner. And yes, writing is a full-time job but I am starting to realize that it can also have an impact on when and even how you eat.

I am sad this seems to happen as I love cooking, and consider myself a good cook, which why a copy of Getting Started In Food Writing by Kerstin Rodgers now lies on my desk, because of the simple fact that I want to start to write down in a methodical way all the meals I make, and put it in a cook book to self-publish as my little cook book, perhaps one of the few non-fiction I’ll do.

Tonight I consciously made a decision to set up a very structured work schedule to know when to write, and how much do in that time too, and therefore know how much time I had left to do other things important in my life.

Such as the ability to indulge in the preparation of a well-prepared dinner for my partner and I…

Instead of having no time left for anything else, I found a minimum of six hours of spare time. I don’t watch much television – find it distracting mostly, and if I do watch it it’s for one good movie or catching up with news – so it means I can actually cook. But it also give me some time to get working on the other pastime I enjoy which is drawing, painting, doing crafts…

Maybe after a dozen or so books are written I’ll slow down a bit. At the moment I am still in this “catch up on lost time” mode, as I only started writen in November 2014, and as my career choice in June 2015, at which time I started doing it more seriously. This “lost time” relates somewhat to how my life was until the end 2007, when I dealt with a whole other gameplay in terms of how my life was from day to day. I am divorced, and a survivor of an abusive relationship, and the old adage of “life starts at 40” applied to me the moment I was free from that life. It took a while for me to get it out of my system that there was no such thing blaming others for what had happened, and to rid my mind too of blaming myself.But that’s probably a subject for some sort of memoir when I am old and grey…

However that said, the moment I did rid it of feeling blame or giving blame, life started looking up again. It was a month or so later I met my partner, who is one of the most supportive people you could ever ask for, and he became the driving force that keeps me going.

He was okay with it tonight, when I told him I forgot to cook. It prompted me to work out a schedule for myself – military style almost – to make sure I get my work as a writer done in time, in the quantity I want to achieve in a given day, and to the standard I am setting for it now.

I love to write. I found my passion late in life (at age 47), and yes, I could have started sooner if I had had a different outlook on life one or two decades ago. Howver, I remember something I heard said “You write about the things you’ve experienced emotionally and around you…” (heard this said by an author, whose name I can’t even remember now as this was stated perhaps two decades ago. I never forgot those words, and as I went through the motions of dealing with the life I was living, it also gave me other values which I treasure deeply now – empathy, concern for others, compassion, better understanding of trust, forgiveness. And in turn they gave me the ability to write words that mean something to me personally (you’d have to read my books to see in print what they are).

So what has this all to do with not being able to cook dinner, you ask. Everything really. If you don’t control your life, especially your work life as a writer, I found that it can give less ability to do other equally important things you might want to do with that time – like be with your family, visit friends, go on holidays (already tentatively planned one for autumn 2017 to Curaçao to visit my family there I hope), and other pastimes…

Visit this blog entry at my blogging site https://nathaliemlromer.wordpress.com and leave a comment or two about how you balance work as a writer and your pastimes. I would love to hear from a few out there…