Road Trip Wednesday: Finding Time To Write

When I checked YA Highway today, I found this week's RTW question quite relevant to my life. Not because of Thanksgiving; I'm Canadian, and even though you Americans tend to forget this, we celebrate Thanksgiving in October. (Which I consider much more appropriate, because I get to spread out my massive eating seasons!)

But that doesn't mean I'm any less busy.

I'm in the International Baccalaureate program, which means I am basically committing academic suicide. I'm in grade eleven and have an average of four hours of homework every night, plus a constant, overwhelming flow of papers, essays, and orals, I spend about 10 hours at school every day, and I have to have at least 50 hours of each creative, active, and service extra curricular hours.

And let me tell you: it's really, really hard. 

Finding time to write is pretty damn difficult. 

Luckily for me, when I write, I write a lot. I once pounded out 25k words in three days, and if I was on a roll, I could probably do more. I don't really get to write during the week anymore; I write on weekends, sometimes; whenever I'm on a plane or a train; and very late on weeknights when I'm too stressed to sleep.

Does it work? Sort of. Do I need to work on it? Hell yes.

I can't really go into some detailed explanation of finding time, because at the moment, I haven't really, but all I can say is that if you want to write- if you really, truly want to write- you will find time, no matter how busy you think you are.

How do you find time to write?

Review: Unspoken by Sarah Rees Brennan

Let me start by saying that Sarah Rees Brennan has been my favourite author ever since I finished reading The Demon's Covenant and promptly bawled my eyes out. 

I first heard of The Demon's Lexicon on a writing forum I frequent, and when it popped up on my Grade 9 summer reading list, I thought "why not?" I later discovered the answer to that: your emotions will never recover. 

Wouldn't trade it for the world, though.

I bought Unspoken the day it was released, after months and months of breathless anticipation. Everything Ms. Rees Brennan had ever said about it made me squeal with excitement (lady reporter team? not-so-imaginary friends? a gothic heroine who is an angsty teen boy? yes, please!), and every review and excerpt I read just contributed to my excitement. 

It totally lived up to the hype.

I should have written this review months ago, when the book was fresh in my mind, but... well, clearly I didn't. So, here goes!

Introduction

If you know anything about me, you probably know that I am terrible at blogging.

It's not that I don't have anything to write about. I go through my life with hundreds of ideas in mind. I walk down the street, and think, "how interesting! I should blog about that." "Oh, I should take a picture of that." My life is a string of sudden inspiration.

My problem is that I am really freakin' lazy.

But I've been a writer all my life, and I'm trying to go somewhere with it, and I keep hearing that if I really want to be published, creating an internet presence is a pretty good step. And I'm also obsessed with starting new things, so instead of trying to keep up an old blog, I'm just going to start a new one.

I know, I know. It's a bad habit.

But here's my start, and I'm really going to try to keep this all up. Even if I have to find posts on dead blogs and repost them here. I really, really want to do this. And I really like this blog's URL.

So. Let's do this.