I Need About 10 Hours Added to Everyday

Days like today remind me of why I quit trying to juggle my two favorite hobbies/wanna-be-careers.

For the longest time I was working on my photography skills and little else. Then my long neglected passion for writing bit my backside and I started trying to write nightly and wiggle in time to take pictures of willing subjects, do the occassional wedding and various landscapes. Doesn't sound too difficult right?

Well add to my passions the 35-45 hour a week day job, a commute that now takes nearly 40 minutes (both to and from work), the responsibilites of being a husband and father and any other "normalities" of life and one is left with very little time to devote to one's chosen crafts.

So for much of the last 19 months I've kicked photography completely out of the picture and focused the vast majority of my free time on writing (both the study and practical application of).

About a month ago I found out that I had a shot to work with someone I'd been dying to work with next week and decided I had to take this once in a blue moon opportunity. Well not to put too fine a point on it, I'm way out of practice when it comes to working with a living, breathing person. I'm trying to scramble to find time to schedule a warmup shoot or a half dozen between now and next friday.

I'm also struggling to make sense of the cacophony in my mind and write coherent short stories, novellas and novels as well. My wife finds it amusing when I say this but I've read things by other writers that tell me I'm not alone.

Each and every idea my imagination births has its own "voice" in my mind. Once the concept is birthed in my thick skull it swirls around building moment and taking a more definate shape. As time passes and it becomes a solid enough "being" it starts "speaking" to my mind's ear. The longer I try to ignore it the louder it gets and eventually I have this intangible thing in my head that it pounding it's fists against the walls of my skull in an effort to break free. Over time several of these can start their attempted jailbreak at one time and I'm left with daily migraines and a sense of confusion.

I know maybe that sounds a touch odd to those of you who don't write but that's the best way I can explain it. I've already had a horror novel, an epic fantasy, a private investigator novel and a post-apocalyptic novella swirling around in the inner reaches of the right side of my brain but over the last few weeks I've added the concept for at least one horror short, a dystopian novel in the Orwellian tradition and a character driven dramatic short (the last of which poked its obnoxious head up last night at about 2am).

Maybe I'm not alone here but with the shortness of hours available to me, I sometimes feel like I'm never going to get it all out of my head (especially once they all start stepping on each other).

Well that's enough wasted time here, maybe I'll go into my corner of the house and get something sorted out (lord I hope nothing new shows up while I'm in there).

Good night.