First comes denial. I’ve overwhelmed at work, the house needs cleaning, the magazine needs editing, the website needs tweaking… It’s not my fault I have no time to write! As soon as all this gets done I’ll be back in the writing seat, no problem.

Then comes bargaining. I’m a organizer, a to-do list lover, a calender maker. I schedule in time to write. Sure, I can’t do it today, but tomorrow I’ll do TWO slots instead of one. I’ll be caught up in no time, right?

Then I watch the deadlines on the calender zoom past me and depression sets in. Nothing I write is good enough. And since writing is the only thing I’m supposed to be good at, well I’m not good at anything else, either.

“The reason writer’s block is so painful is because writers really do hurt when they’re not writing (whether they’re cognizant of it or not). Writers need to write the way most other people need to breathe and when they are not writing, writers grieve. They mope. They wallow.”
– From The five stages of writer’s block

It’s very easy for me to convince myself that I have no time to write. The house needs cleaning, I’m tired, there’s so much work-work to be done, I need to schedule and plan Ergofiction articles, write book reviews for Quillsandzebras, not to mention blog posts, Twitter socialising, manic marketing for the upcoming Other Sides…. Busy, busy, busy. But either very little of it is productive work, or I let the importance of writing slip far down to the bottom of my list.

That’s why — however hard I find it to write on a daily basis — I’m thankful for the Novel Push Initiative. Even when every word is a momentous struggle, I have no excuses and must at least try. I tell myself it’s keeping me sane. It probably is.

How do you make sure you dedicate enough time to writing?