I get asked, “how do you even have time to write a book?!” a lot.
“You have two kids! You’re packing and moving in a week and a half! And you start school again in less than a month?!”
I’ll be honest, my writing routine is sporadic at best. I write when I can… and it’s usually not very much. A good writing day for me in this season of our life is maybe 400 words on average. A really good day is when I can go out to a coffee shop for the evening and leave the girls at home with my husband for an hour and a half or so. Or I shirk my house responsibilities for an afternoon and the house gets trashed so I can get at least a chapter written. It’s an extremely slow process, but one that I’m grateful for. Sometimes, I’ll get up before the girls do and I’ll have some coffee and light a candle and write that way. Or I’ll try to squeeze in a couple paragraphs of world building during nap time. But this is my dream. To write a full fledge novel, polish it, query getting represented by agents, and hopefully getting published. I’m considering Indie publishing too! It just depends on what’s best for me and my work.
With my novel Awaken the Dawn that I’m working on, it’s been in the planning stage for over a year. I wrote 10K words for National Novel Writing Month and then had to scrap most of it because I didn’t plan very far ahead and I had no clue where to take the story from there. I didn’t work on it again for MONTHS. Probably not until September of this year in preparation to try NaNoWriMo again. But what I spent time doing that year in between was research and read craft books.
One of the most helpful books for me was Save the Cat! By Jessica Brody. She takes the screen writing method or planning out 15 beats in a 3 Act structure and helps guide you through how to plan out where your book should go. It took AGES for me, but the book and NaNo’s template helped get my brain going enough with ideas that I knew I could finally move forward on writing it.
Another craft book that I just picked up a few days ago was Story Genius by Lisa Cron. This seems like SUCH A HUGE gift to the world in terms of craft books. It’s all about why we love a good story and it has nothing to do with how you plot or pants a book at all, but about the guts behind a book, the psychology behind it. I love this stuff anyway. I love the idea of making books psychology and real life based admits the adventure and fantasy pieces.
So my writing routine is bonkers right now. It may stay that way for a few years.. But I’m writing. And it’s on my timeline, with what works best for our family, and I’m doing it for free right now haha. So my family is very gracious and kind as I spend money on books and geek about another author friend I made on Instagram (looking at you Rosie & Amy) and making space for me to make this happen.
It’s so so so fun, and I’m really excited for the journey and you guys to jump in along with me. <3
