I’m an author. Writing is my day job, so yes, I’m home most of the time. I do have two kids to take care of, but they’re both in school and mostly independent. When people hear this, the most common reaction I get is “What do you do all day? Don’t you get bored staying home?”
My answer to this is a resounding NO! I do not get bored because I’m busy from sun up to sun down. So, I thought I’d break my day down for you. A little peak into my life as a writer.
I get up at 5 am. Yes, by choice. And while the coffee is brewing, I hop on Twitter and tweet my daily writing snippet for #MuseMon, #2BitTues, or whatever writing prompt hashtag I’m doing that day. I like to do this first because it pulls me back into the stories I’ve written and helps remind me why I love them.
Once the coffee is done, I get started on my manuscript. I try to write a thousand words before the rest of my family wakes up in the morning. At roughly 250 words per page, that’s four pages done before the day “officially” begins.
Then I’m off to make lunches and breakfasts and cart the kids to school. I spend an hour at the gym, and then I’m back home, showered, and working on my book again. My minimum word count for the day is 2,000. Sometimes, if I get into a flow state, I’ll crank out up to 5,000 (that doesn’t happen very often, unfortunately). Also unfortunately, my afternoon writing is much slower. While I can usually do close to 1,000 words in 90 minutes in the morning, the afternoons are full of distractions.
In between the writing, I’m networking on Twitter, entering pitch contests, requesting reviews, editing other books, and countless other things. And when I’m not doing any of those things, I’m thinking about my story. Constantly. Sometimes it hard to focus on real life when I’m in the middle of writing a story, because my brain is stuck in whatever world I’m creating. And it’ll stay there until the story is done.
Probably the only reason I’ve been able to write this blog post is because I just finished a first draft a few days ago, so there’s a little bit of extra space in my brain right now, since the characters already got their happily ever after.
By 3:00 it’s time to go get the kids from school, start homework, make dinner, go to dance lessons and tutoring sessions, theater performances, and choir concerts. And if I don’t shut down by 7:30 and just chill, I can forget about sleeping because my mind will still be wrapped up in my story. Then–if I can actually fall asleep–I’ll dream about it. And I never sleep well when I’m writing in my sleep.
So, yeah. That’s a typical day for me as a writer. If I ever do get bored, then I’ll know it’s time to move on and do something else. But for now, I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do.
