Time spent earning extra income, (because reduced teaching load salary isn’t enough to pay the bills) takes up a huge chunk of my schedules. Using the desktop computer here at the faculty center, I am able to type these words now  about writing because I don’t have an urgent email that requires me to translate, edit, proofread, or validate a translation ASAP. But last week, a series of small urgent job orders that totalled to about three hundred dollars gave me no time to write.  Every job was “URGENT” as the subject line of client emails had always indicated. There was no way I could default at each step of the job, from acceptance of the PO to answering client feedback. Happy about the number of job orders, I set aside all writing agenda for the week. I spent zero moment in thinking about how Bianca’s Diary should proceed
(after the teenager and her mom watched a play).

A novelist friend (she has written two award-winning novels) tells me that when she writes, she needs “creative space”. This is a time to just be quiet and stare, observe and absorb evocations from the stir of people and events. To meet this need, she goes out of town, the farther and more isolated, the better. The trick she says is to just savor this creative moment, to sit down, and to write.

Right now, all alone at this spacious faculty center at the library, I can enjoy some creative time and space. So I sit down and write.

But the task of writing is really more than sitting down and writing. Writing is thinking clearly, logically, meticulously. Not a word should end up where it doesn’t need to be. Not a sentence longer for a thoroughly thought out idea.

I began this blog here at 11:00 AM. By this time, 11:31, it isn’t finished. There is no time to polish the final outcome of this in the next thirty minutes because I have to leave this desk and attend a writer’s meeting. I will come back to the blog later and edit it until it becomes useful for a target reader. Outside, the muted street sounds hardly inspire me to write. I am tempted right now to sleep on the sofa. It takes about twenty seconds before I am able to type the next sentence that will keep the focus of this blog to the thought of “creative space”. This paragraph meanders.

Bianca’s Diary can’t be put on hold any longer. It deserves its creative space. The best way to work this out I think is to impose a deadline on myself, to treat this YA novel like a job order, to work like Bianca’s Diary is a client that needs to be served with utmost professionalism.  Then, once in the “pipeline” of my freelance job calendar, I should dive to the task with urgency, meticulousness, and diligence. I should deliver on deadline and expect a return on investment, so to speak. This is work. Writing.