Time, for me (and I suppose for everyone else), always seems to be quite spare, slipping through my fingers like fish and moving along at a rate frowned upon by whoever sets the speed limits on the roads. I always worry that I’m going to wake up tomorrow and be eighty.

As much as I’m keen to experiment using coffee as a form of genetic modification to eliminate my need for sleep, apparently caffeine can only do so much, and the rest of the time I have to actually usefully schedule my time so that I don’t waste vast chunks of it watching TV or faffing about in the bathroom or, er, writing blog entries about how to productively make use of one’s time. Thankfully, my TV aerial doesn’t actually work, and I’ve never really mastered iTunes, and my laptop screen is far too small to be able to viably play games on. I do seem to rack up an obscene number of social events and hobby stuff during the week, though, and between those and work and exercise and the zillion and one random projects I masochistically put my hand up for, it’s pretty easy to opt out with the standard lament of ‘I don’t have time.’

Which was fine for a while, until this year, when I finished my degree, and realised that I have one less excuse not to write. That my day now effectively has two seven hour chunks in which I’m essentially impotent (although in the name of employee propriety perhaps I shouldn’t define my work hours as such), which is a rather nasty thing to realise, and shocked me somewhat into desiring to do something productive with my life before I do indeed turn eighty. That it was time to be all mature and start scheduling stuff (which my boy happily did with google calendar and a whiteboard, much to my horror).

I’m currently editing my first novel, and am doing so during my lunch hour during the week, meaning the novel gets five hours minimum a week. I’m forcing myself to become an early bird, something that is rather a difficult undertaking in the middle of winter, but is slowly becoming easier, so that I’m up and out of bed with a few extra hours in the morning in which to fit in my walk and breakfast and submissions and coffee and any novelly stuff that I can handle. Parts of my evenings now go towards blogging or the novel or any short fiction projects I’ve agreed to.

As a former arts student whose days were merrily made up of lots of reading and the odd class, this whole structure business is a touch unnerving (something paralleled in the slight issue of the largely absent plot that appears to be inherent in Campisian fiction), but it is quite nice that when somebody asks, ‘where on earth do you get the time?’ I realise that whilst I still have the same 24 hours in a day that I’ve always had, this planning business (and coffee) have helped them stretch a tad further.