Chris Baty - We're slammed at work and busy at home. Throw in...

We're slammed at work and busy at home. Throw in an occasional outing with friends or significant others, and we're ready for bed at 10: 00 PM every night. Really ready for bed. There's barely enough time in a day to cover all our mandatory obligations, so optional activities like novel writing, journaling, painting or playing music--things that feel great but no one will ever take us to task for shirking--are invariably left for another day. Which is how most of us become 'one day' novelists. As in, 'One day, I'd really like to write a novel.' The problem is that that day never seems to come, and so we're stuck.