State of the Writer

 

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Well. Two months raced by without a single blog post from me.  Honestly, I'm treading water, so forgive me if you were hoping for an update before this.  I've basically abandoned social media, though I randomly pop in on Facebook to check on my kids and my ward page for church.  Fitting in my part time job around the kids' school schedules is more difficult than I thought it would be.  I don't really want to whine-- there are plenty of working moms out there-- but as Terence has pointed out when I'm beating myself up over all the things I leave undone nowadays, I'm not just a working mom with kids in school.  I'm a working mom who needs 90 minutes to drop them off in the morning and more than 2 hours to pick up in the afternoon and has kids in 3 different school districts (plus a college kid who still messages home for help).  That's a big chunk of time devoted to school every day. *sigh*  I don't regret the school choices we made for the kids, but it does require sacrifice, and lately I've had to cut anything beyond the bare essentials.

What are the bare essentials though?  That is the debate.

I don't have good answers but I'm muddling through.  My non-negotiables each day include scripture study, exercise, time devoted to Noom (the diet app), work, getting the kids to and from school, cooking dinner, braiding hair, and writing fiction.

Well, writing is SUPPOSED to be non-negotiable. It is an important part of my mental well-being-- I'm just happier when I write.  But in reality, when I have to fit some of the other stuff in that I need to do on a less-than-daily basis (like laundry and helping with homework and shopping and paying bills), writing often gets cut (that, and hair braiding).  Hair braiding isn't essential to my happiness, but it's important to stay on top of it for my girls' sake, so if I'm in a time crunch, I squeeze some braiding in and axe the writing.

Every time I do that I shrivel a little inside though.

I've been trying to make some time for it early in the morning, even if it's just fifteen minutes, and that seems to help.  Of course, that means I need to be up at 4am, which means that by 7pm every night I am ready to pass out, just when my kids seem to need my help most. Oh yeah.  It's a real pain to be the only early bird in a family of night owls.  

But I digress-- back to the writing.  This is a state of the writer post, after all.  For those of who enjoyed my Roran Curse novels, are you wondering if I am ever going to release anything else?  The answer is yes, probably.  I am currently finishing up the second draft of the third book in a new YA fantasy series.  The trouble with this series is that unlike the Roran Curse novels, which are standalone stories, this is a true series where people will shoot me if they get to the end of a book and there's nothing after.  As a reader there's nothing I hate worse than a series I get into that never gets finished.  Or a book left on a cliffhanger with no sequel to ever resolve it.  (Thanks, Robin McKinley, for leaving us hanging in Pegasus.  One of my favorite books, and I've had to resign myself to never knowing how everything gets worked out.)  So rather than release one book a year and make everyone wait, I'm writing the entire series first.  

The trouble is as a pantser (or a "discovery writer," which sounds a lot more professional instead of implying I am like a middle-school bully) I don't know exactly where I'm going or how long it will take me to get there.  I do have a general destination in mind, of course.  But I have no idea how many more books it will take me to get there.  Three books are written.  It will probably take me two more to finish the overall story arc.  I think.  Maybe three?  Heaven forbid it is four.  That's too long.  But you get the idea.  I don't know yet.  

At the moment I am trying to get my life more organized so that I have a prayer of participating in Nanowrimo this year.  Writing 50k words in November is the only way I've gotten books finished in the last ten years. But I've barely pulled it off in years past without already being on the ropes before the month starts.  We'll see.  Maybe work will have died off by then.  This position was supposed to be temporary, after all.

In the meantime, I'll keep trying to fit in at least 15 minutes of writing a day.  Hopefully without dropping any other essentials.  I can do this.  Right????