Oh the days when it was just me and the cat. I wish I’d had the motivation then to make my author career a thing. I could have accomplished so much more.
Writing time is at a premium when you have a family. Kids have this annoying way of being able to stay up until 1am and still waking up like everything is normal at 7am. It seriously cuts into my alone time.
And even though they would easily spend a full day playing video games and watching tv if we let them, especially now that it’s summer, round about noon my conscience starts to get to me that I’m letting their brains rot for my own purposes and we have to get outside.
To top it off, my oldest can read now, so writing sexy vampire smut scenes now has to happen in secret, like I’m at my day job and the boss keeps coming up to peek over my shoulder. Have a new tab open, my friends. Get ready to toggle quickly.
Even though I long for the freedom to spend a whole bloody Saturday challenging myself to write 10K or some other delightful goal, the fact that I can’t is actually probably a good thing. It means I’m motivated to steal every minute that I can — furiously scribbling on a legal pad during my lunch break at work, breaking out my laptop during the short and glorious minutes that the children are entertaining themselves without yet having resorted to violence, getting up out of bed for half an hour before the rest of the house on the weekends, even though sleep is lovely, to at least try to get a few sentences on the page.
Is it slow going? Yes. But every time I make the choice to spend time with my novel, to devote time to pursuing this goal, I gain momentum, I remind myself that this is a thing that’s important to me and worthy of my time. And even one new sentence is one I didn’t have before.
So even though I can watch authors on Authortube and start to feel the teensiest bit jealous of those who seem to have all the free time I want, I also know that jealousy is nonsense and we’re all just working with what we’ve got. It might take me a little longer to get my books written, but they’ll get there.
One freakin’ word after the other.
ScarletQuill 