Curve Balls

It turned out that last week, not long after I posted my blog about heading to my college Alma Mater, that the trip was canceled due to a medical emergency in my friend's family. Since I don't have a car, this canceled things for me as well. Coincidentally, my sister came in from out of state on the same day and will be around longer than I expected. She's splitting time between my place and my mom's so far which throws a bit of a curve ball into our lives.

I didn't work on my writing the way I had planned to last week. I've been trying to work on my novel for about 3 hours on Sundays, 1-2 hours on Thursdays, and squeeze in at least 100 words a day on every other day except Tuesday and Saturday. Since I was cleaning for company, I didn't write last Sunday, and everything else fell out of place as well. I wrote a few hundred words on Tuesday, but without the Sunday momentum I couldn't get into it like I normally do. I've been semi catatonic on my bus rides in and out of the day job - so no writing there, and actually not much reading either. I did get to go write on Thursday, but I was back to writing articles for eHow and Associated Content. I figure I'll get my novel groove back on Sunday when I take my three hour block back.

Curve balls can be dangerous to a writer, routines can be hard to establish in the first place, and upsetting them can easily be taken as a sign that something else was meant to be. And sometimes it isn't, but it doesn't mean you stop writing. You just write something else - maybe something less demanding, like a silly haiku, or a few minutes of a nonsensical journal. On the busiest of days five minutes can do a world of good. It can remind you that you are who you say you are - a writer. It can give you enough of a taste to motivate you to set a new schedule that will work until life throws you the next inevitable curve ball.

But curve balls aren't all bad either. They can pull you out of a rut, or make you see places in your life that can use a little patching. Article writing is a lot different than creative writing, and before this past week I had barely noticed that I had gone two months without a new eHow article. I was able to expand on a side note from an Associated Content article and get something new out of it. Article Writing gets you involved with scoping the world for information, and figuring out how to shape that in a way that it will work for you and the reader. Creative Writing generally carries more aesthetics, more emotion, and it's good to balance both. This week's curve ball taught me that. Both types of writing deserve a purposeful place in my schedule. I may just keep Thursdays for article writing for a while.

In baseball, curve balls are designed to trip the batter up, keep him guessing. It's some players favorite pitch. I'm not sure it's my favorite - but it does keep me on my toes. Because I never know what life is going to throw at me next.

Gretchen Lee Bourquin's Blog is syndicated weekly on

Gather.com, WordPress, Associated Content, and her website. Her novel, No Sensible People, is available in paperback on Amazon.com or in print and download from Lulu.com. For further updates, please consider following her on Twitter.