On Wed, 14 May 1997, Ryan Mathews wrote:

I am having a great deal of trouble finding time to write while 
working full-time.  Work takes the best hours of the day from me.  
I'd love to write after coming home, but I just don't know how.  I'm 
too drained.  In a sense, the problem is that my job is too 
interesting.  As a software engineer, I write code and hunt down bugs 
all day long.  By the end of the day, I'm all thunk out.  When I sold 
shoes, I had problems with being tired, but I still managed to push 
out a chapter of something every month.  The job was maddeningly 
boring, so I had plenty of time to work through story ideas in my 
head.

I'd be curious to know how other people manage to work full-time and 
still remain an active fanfic writer.  Or perhaps fanfic writing is 
better left to the college kids.  :-(

Well, I *did* get some writing done while I was working out at JHBP (temp
assignment from Manpower, if anyone's curious) . . . yes, the assignment
ended and I'm not working at the moment, but I can STILL say what I did.

I was working on story ideas in my head too, *but* I also started carrying
around a notebook to and from work. When I went on break, or during my
lunch hour, I would pull the "scratchbook" out of my bag and note down
ideas I'd had. (Granted, not all of them were writing - I did a fair
amount of scratch-work for TPs too.)

On evenings when I sat down to write, I'd pull out the scratchbook and
look at my notes. Sometimes I'd be able to do some writing; sometimes I
didn't have anything solid enough to work on.

I guess I should mention that the vast majority of my notes from that
period aren't for fanfics, but for a novel I'm working on - having a
larger plotline to work on gave me plenty of leeway for ideas, and it's
still easier than some of my fanfics to work on.

Actually, I hopefully will have reason to let the FFML know how the novel
goes . . . ^_-

				Tim Miller
					trmiller@mail.bcpl.lib.md.us
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