Please prove you are not a robot...

Robot?

If you post a comment on a blog you are often asked to prove you are not a robot by copying some letters. I have to confess I sometimes have to do this several times over as my eyesight just doesn't seem to comprehend the strange mix of letters so maybe I am a robot. I certainly feel a bit like one at the moment. I made the mistake of working out how many words I will have marked by the 14th May and since the middle of March - over half a million. Every single one of these words belongs to a student who (in the main) have tried their hardest to write the best assignment possible. I will often have seen several drafts of these pieces so have seen them develop and be honed. Because of that I owe these students my time and my attention when I mark but that can often be at the cost of my own writing. Concentrating on their work seems to obliterate any words I may have floating around. This can be so frustrating because at the end of the day I am a writer as well as an academic and I love to write. It makes me feel whole. I know I am not the only academic writer who faces this issue, in fact, talk to any writer and they will tell you how life has just got in the way. It seems to me that you have to be disciplined to stay on top of it whether this is your first, second or fiftieth novel.

Is there a perfect answer though? I don't think there is really. All you can do is create coping strategies and the way I have been doing that is to allocate a certain amount of hours to marking a day and then take two hours where I don't look at emails and I don't mark or think about it. I just focus on what I am meant to be rewriting - the PhD novel. My precious notebook goes everywhere with me, including next to the marking mountain, just in case an idea comes so that I can grab it and not let it slip out of my fingers. I made ( a possibly rash) promise this week to have the rewrites to the editor by the 1st June but I felt I needed a deadline, it would be too easy to drift along. I will keep you posted on that one. I just have to keep straight 'down the line.'

What are your coping strategies that ensure you can write when life keeps getting in the way?


Bonnie Raitt 'Right Down the Line' - the first single from her new album Slipstream, which I am hoping to buy soon :-)