104 Days
It has been 104 days since I was laid off. In that time I have written approximately 64,000 words, of which 75% has been fiction and 25% non-fiction. (These figures don’t include email or social media.) I’ve actually written on all but 30 of those 104 days; at 71%, that puts me a little short of my 75% target but slightly ahead of the 65% of days I’ve managed over the past year.
As for time, I’m averaging about 5 hours a day of trackable activity, which includes exercise, music practice, and pro bono work as well as writing, programming, teaching, and looking for a job. I don’t really know where the rest of the day goes—I don’t believe sleep, chores, Wordle, and an episode or two of Elementary fill nineteen hours out of every twenty-four—but I’m trying not to worry about it.
Ongoing projects include:
- building some simulations of software development teams in order to learn how SimPy works;
- writing a discrete event simulation package in Python that uses
async/await(partly to teach myself how asynchronous programming works in Python); - writing a synthetic data generator to use in teaching data science;
- finishing two middle-grade novelettes and starting a third;
- (finally) finishing a full draft of a YA novel I’ve been chipping away at for years;
- doing a few hours of contract work (mostly teaching, but also some technical writing);
- helping to supervise some university students’ projects;
- playing jazz again after more than twenty years; and
- missing my daughter, who is enjoying her first year at university but without whom my world feels just a little bit empty.
One thing I haven’t done much of is read. I used to devour a book or two a week, but these days I find it difficult to get into most fiction, and even harder to read non-fiction. I don’t know if this is because I’m distracted by personal and world events, or whether it’s a stage of life, but I miss losing myself in someone else’s prose for a few hours at a time.