Managing "Real" Life with "Writing" Life

Wow. How do I manage? I don’t think I do it very well. Most times I am just holding so many things at once that if I were Shiva I would still need more hands.

At this very moment, I have:

two works-in-progress that should have been finished by now
nearly 100 partially sketched ideas
196 little squares of wood that I need to burn pictures of cows, horses, and roosters onto so little kids can sponge paint them
lesson plans to create; papers to grade
a dog who desperately needs to be walked
kids that need attention
a husband to bother
a bathroom estimate to obtain
a kitchen wall and ceiling to repaint
bits of a pool cover my dog ripped to shreds and distributed all over the yard to pick up
a bigger dog crate to buy because the critter won’t stop growing!
the dog’s rabies tag needs to be found- it’s somewhere in the backyard I HOPE…

I have a hard time saying NO to more outside demands by work or school, but I am getting better at it. Caller ID and voicemail help a lot.

But I think we all have a million things that need to get done. It’s just that as writers, we have these people in our heads. And they really won’t shut up until one of two things happens:
1. We write down their entire story.
2. We shove them to the end of the To Do List so many times that they go away and that precious story POOF is just gone. That happened once, and from that point on, even if I don’t have time to write the manuscript, I write down as much as I can in note form so that I at least have SOMETHING to go on when I get back to those characters.

So, how to do make it work? I don’t have a choice. I have yet to let anyone down, despite the enormity of the things on my plate. I get asked because people know I will come through.

I take on so many things, probably because I enjoy them, and if I am to be honest, maybe I enjoy the struggle, the panic, the fact that I am needed. I guess we all do to an extent.

Or am I just crazy here? ; )