A Day in the Life

I used to have a typical day as a writer. I'd send my son off to school and then spend my morning working on a fiction project or on an article for the newspaper I work for. Then life interfered big time - in the past six months, my mom became seriously ill and ultimately had to be moved out of our home and into assisted living. My son, who has Asperger's Syndrome, was disturbed by the change in routine and his behavior began to regress. My husband took a temporary promotion at work and he wasn't able to be there as much for me. Writing became a distant memory as I struggled just to get through each crisis-filled day.

Then came the biggest disruption to my routine - the news that The Wild Rose Press was going to buy my chick noir novel, Thirty-Nine Again. That's when writing really became difficult. Because then I started spending all my time working with TWRP's Rae Monet on my sexy and fantastic book cover. She also designed a more professional-looking website for me. I researched romance book review sites and magazines and made a list of their advertising packages, and I printed up bookmarks for a luncheon held by a romance writers' organization to which I belong. And of course, I talked everyone's ear off about how excited I was by the news that I would be published.

Now two months have passed and because of a series of unforeseen circumstances, I've had a couple of editor changes. Currently, I don't even know who my next editor will be - much less when my book will be published. But today I realized this is a good thing. It's going to force me to refocus my mental energy on doing something I haven't been doing much of lately - writing something new. 

Writing is such a solitary occupation, it's easy to go off into tangents. All too often, we say we write when what we really do is surf the net, read emails, and blog. The good thing about being a writer is that every day is different, because every story is different. The bad thing is that it's all too easy to just put that story aside and not write it at all.  So now I'm resolved to get back to that typical day I used to have - a day spent writing. And I don't mean emails. Or even blogs!