In July I posted “Making Time,” talking about how important it is for a writer to make time to write. My daughter was born a week later, and I didn’t write a new word for the next six months. At random points during that period, when my synapses were actually firing in a semi-functional capacity, I would occasionally think to myself what a sanctimonious ass I must have sounded like, lecturing people about whether or not they were writing.

Am I a sanctimonious ass? Maybe. Please allow me some retrospective.

Here are a few things I said back in July, how things are different, and how they’re the same.

“You don’t find time — you make time.”

Still true. It’s been hard with a baby. I’m a first-time parent, and long story short, I had no idea what I was in for. I still don’t, but we figure it out every day. Part of that figuring out, for a writer, is when and how you write. Recently I’ve found pockets, of course when the baby is sleeping. I write and do other work in that quiet. It’s a mad scramble, but it’s amazing how much you can get done if you’re focused. I also go to school about two hours before my first class, so I can do work in my office. It’s not an optimal scenario, but it’s worked so far. She’s nearly 8 months old right now, and I suspect the game will change again once she can walk.

“I wasn’t even addicted to coffee back then, though I did have an unnatural relationship with ephedrine and guarana extract.”

COFFEE = SURVIVAL. PERIOD. I’m too old for ephedrine and guarana.

“In the evening I’d be in bed by nine thirty or ten because I had to be up by 5:30 or 6.”

Still in bed by 10pm, not to wake up early to write, but because we are so exhausted that we can’t keep our eyes open past that point.

“For me being a writer simply meant that I had to do what I had to do to make sure I was able to get my work done to the best of my abilities. I thought of myself as a literary athlete, with a set routine and traditions and superstitions.”

Athlete? More like an old equipment manager who goes back and forth between contemplating retirement, and disappearing into complete obscurity. Routine, traditions, superstitions, out the window, especially when you are dealing with a newborn martinet who could care less about your ‘routine.’ (To my daughter: I love you more than anything else in the world, Sophia, but you are a bit of a dictator. I wonder where you get this from?)

“I wrote my first novel via this routine (3 years of writing, revising, and editing), repeated it with my second (about a year), and what I hope becomes my third (5 years and counting).”

In the last 8 months, I’ve written 3 blog posts (including this one), done some line editing on my novel-in-progress (which has been in-progress since 2005), and written two prologues, neither of which I’m sure is any good. Not much, but it’s something.

“My process has always been to write a burst — three to five pages usually — within my allotted hour or two, then rest for the day.”

3-5 pages and one to two hours a day? More like two to three hours a week, at best.

“It is a painstaking and occasionally grueling process.”

More so than ever.

“Because for a writer — a real writer — it is about doing the work. Creating. Fixing. Changing. Improving. It is always about the work. Even if you’re not slaving away at the keyboard, you’re doing research, reading, taking notes, sketching out scenes or contemplating weaknesses in your narrative arc. A writer is always doing something related to the work.”

These past few months it’s been thinking about the work I’m not doing, and the guilt and terror that comes with it. But I’m starting to dig out a little, starting to get some momentum, gain some traction. One of these days I might even be ‘back on a schedule’ (not holding my breath, though).

“I tell my students all the time, no one will ever put a gun to your head and say, ‘Write me a short story,’ or, ‘If you don’t write me a poem I’ll just die.’”

Still true — no one has threatened me with a firearm because I haven’t been writing.

“Whether you have a girlfriend or boyfriend, husband, wife, family, kids, or job (and most of us have some combination of these things), you must always maintain the right to be a little selfish and crazy when it comes to defending your space and creating time so that you can do your work.”

I suppose I’ve maintained the right, I just haven’t exercised it. Don’t think anyone would blame me for putting my work on the shelf for six months to learn how to be a decent father and take care of my baby. That being said, the selfishness does peck at my heart or whisper in my ear. It feels good to at least be able to occasionally appease that urge.

“If you don’t mark and defend that time for yourself, someone or something will take it from you.”

Unfortunately with a baby, you can’t reasonably defend your time to write. They just don’t seem to care.

“I tried working on a new short story a while back, but after a week of tedious struggle, it fizzled and I let it go. But I’m not worried, even though I feel guilty; because the guilt is what lets me know that I’ll be back at it soon enough.”

I still worry and feel almost irresponsible. Yes, even with a newborn that I love indescribably, I still feel pangs of guilt while dreading a vision of the future where I am no longer writing.

“And let me differentiate here that this guilt is the guilt of dissatisfaction: the guilt one feels when one has done it and then misses doing it because he/she knows it’s the right thing to do.”

At least I am feeling the ‘real’ guilt, and not the fake guilt.

“But even beyond the guilt (if you can fathom beyond the guilt), maybe we write because the act of writing is the only thing a writer can control. Not jobs and friends and family; not the state of your favorite baseball team or the economy or who is or is not the presidential nominee.”

No control over baby, that’s for sure; no control over the Yankees, who disgust me with their huge spending and enormous free-agent/mercenary salaries; I guess a little symbolic control over the presidential nominee, because if Obama hadn’t won I’d be writing this from another country right now.

“By writing you stave off the guilt just enough to know that there is a tomorrow, and tomorrow just might be all right — if you make the time.”

Blog # 3 in 8 months complete. Tomorrow I go to school early and work on my prologue and hope to God it’s good, and hope the rest of the manuscript is too. Even if it isn’t great, at least I’ll do some work, and that will make tomorrow all right. Then I’ll come home from school, just in time for Sophia’s bedtime routine — dinner, bath, story time, then down -– and my day will be perfect, and complete.

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