Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino.

It’s been one year since I started a simple writing log in an Excel spreadsheet.

By simple, I mean I log the date, the project I’m working on, the number of pages or words, the time I spent working and some notes to orient me to what I wrote, where I’m at with the work, or where I left off.

The “midlife essay” turned into the “Mommy essay.” The “therapist novel” morphs into the “therapist teleplay.” Lots of stream of consciousness pages are handwritten. I notice myself avoiding writing my book, for reasons I explore in freewriting sessions that I also log. Little chunks of writing typed into the computer equal a word count I can start to keep track of. Notebook entries become transcriptions to work with.

As my personal and work life take turns, go uphill, downhill, around the bend, this little log keeps me anchored to my process. And I wish I’d been doing this years ago, mainly so I could easily open a notebook and know what every entry contained. So many notebooks.

The “Mommy essay” gets sent out for submission. The “therapist novel” brews in my head. My next book idles, awaiting its next proper ignition.

Despite everything: the log goes on.