Happy writing everyone.  Today’s episode focuses on creating a new routine for your writing or other work during social distancing. I know I’m still changing and adjusting. Trying to get up early again after letting myself and my family sleep in… well, it’s an ongoing challenge.

Here at the Dowell house, when we aren’t trying to make a balance between work and home (when both are in the same place!), we’ve been keeping spirits up by doing all the COVID-era cliches. Steve’s been baking nonstop. I’ve dyed my hair a weird color (purple!) and started a journal. We’ve all been gardening. All we need is a sourdough starter to hit bingo.

Two announcements:

Writing Without Childcare is now free as an ebook! Find it on Amazon here, Kobo here, and this link leads to Apple, B&N, and eventually library apps.

Next, for the first time, I’ve got a transcript for an episode. I’m trying out different transcription services, planning to make this a regular thing. Transcription make podcasts accessible for the deaf and hard of hearing, and it improves SEO, making the show easier for folks to find. Here it goes!

Transcript below:

Please note: This is a machine generated transcript that I have proofed only once, for time’s sake. It’s not been edited for style and grammar. Therefore, as is common in speech, sentence fragments and run-ons abound. Episode transcripts are not representative of the quality of work I provide as an editor.

So today I’m talking about routines in this weird social distancing era that we are all experiencing and specifically about making yourself a new routine to get your writing done, to get your work done, to get your house work done, whatever it is that you are trying to do. Now, I want to preface this episode by saying, that if you don’t want to write during this incredibly stressful period that’s more than okay. It’s okay to press pause on your creative work. And you shouldn’t feel any shame about that. There’s a lot of articles and blog posts and podcast episodes going around lately about how we can all really focus in and be hyper productive while social distancing. And that’s fine to do. For many folks, that’s how they cope with a scary situation they can’t control, to just really throw themselves into work because that is something they can control.

But sometimes that discourse goes too far and shames people who are really just trying to hang on, and frankly just hanging on is an achievement right now. So, even though this is a productivity focused episode, especially for those of us who really can’t press pause on our writing–it’s part of our income–or those us who just don’t want to press pause and want to keep going, even if it’s at a slower pace–none of this is to say that you have to be productivity focused during this time. Survival, mental health, and self care are honestly pretty good goals right about now. So going into this, let’s launch right into the first tip for making yourself a new schedule. I don’t know about you, but my old schedule doesn’t work anymore.

I know we’re not alone. Our family, you know, we have all been sleeping in later, eating at weird times, and for those first few weeks it’s more than understandable. We were just really kind of coping with a new situation. But now I’m trying to reorganize and get myself in more of a work mode, even if that work has to be slowed considerably. So the first thing I’m going to do is, and I am doing right now, to some degree, is work on me first. New schedules, you know,