Monday morning. The alarm seemed to go off very early today; I would have been glad to sleep for another hour. However, here I am.

It's the week before Christmas and things are winding down and winding up. I am now done with teaching until January 4, but I've got a pile of editing and a looming deadline. I've finished baking and package-wrapping, but I've got to track down materials for holiday meals. The travel forecast for Friday looks iffy, so our schedule may be upended. And so on.

Anyway, for the moment my day is normal. I'll get through my exercise class, and work at my desk, and finish dusting and vacuuming, and run laundry, and figure out something for dinner. Latkes, maybe.

The poem drafts are stirring around, begging for attention. I should probably think about submitting to journals. I want to mess around with a hand-made chapbook project. 

Yesterday, at the end of class, the participants were discussing the age-old writer's issue: how do you protect your writing time? how do you make yourself abide by your own schedule? Butts in seats, in other words. Why can that be so hard?

It's an interesting question to me because it's not my problem. I'm more of a firehose that has to be turned off so that other things can get done. I am shamelessly selfish about reading and writing time. I always have been, even when the boys were small and I was homesteading and had a thousand daily duties clawing at my throat. Of course my writing and reading patterns have made this somewhat easier. In Harmony I read while stirring a sauce or waiting for kids in the car. I wrote in tiny small spurts, not in long sessions, so I could run in and out of a room to check on a draft while boys were arguing over Legos or riding their bikes in the driveway. Now that I have no children at home, finding writing time is almost too easy. I can always sandwich it in if I want to. And I usually do.

But most other people seem to struggle, and I get why. Because being shamelessly selfish is kind of a terrible trait.