Spencer Ellsworth's Blog, page 6

I am informed that there is a “debate” about whether or not we should bring back mammoths.

A “debate.”

That means someone doesn’t want mammoths.

Someone does not think it would be a good idea to be all strollin through the woods and say OH SWEET FREUDMONKEY THAT’S A REAL LIVE MAMMOTH!!!!

Buzzkills everywhere!

Stop harshin the mammoths, bros.

The blogs on parenting and writing continue and WOW is this a great look at an aspect most of us don’t think about. Beth Cato has been living the high life with her series The Clockwork Dagger but as parenting and publicity don’t have the greatest complimentary features, she’s detailed for us the ways she mediates between the inevitable guest blogs, cons, AMAs and much much tweeting and that parenting thing.

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My son is ten-years-old and autistic. He always knows where he can find me: glued in front of my computer, slogging through the word mines. We don’t use babysitters and we don’t have any family within eight hours. Nicholas is my responsibility most of the time. That wasn’t so much of an issue when being a writer just involved writing, but having a book deal with Harper Collins Voyager has complicated things.

On top of all the fiction writing and revising, there’s the new nonfiction element: selling the book, and even more, selling myself. I have to talk about myself like I like myself. A lot. I have a really, really awesome publicist at Harper Voyager. When we first started emailing, I told her, “I want The Clockwork Dagger to sell. If you see an opportunity, let me know.” She forwards me interviews and blog requests. Others come to me directly. A twenty-question interview might be four hours of work. Some guest blog posts, especially ones that are pitched a certain way to a major venue, might take days of effort and several drafts. (If you want an idea of how much time I’ve spent on this stuff, scroll down here: http://www.bethcato.com/the-clockwork-dagger/clockwork-dagger-around-the-internet/) But that’s all writing. That’s me at my computer, as usual.

Last September when my first book came out, I had a strangely clean house. It wasn’t because I was cleaning out of procrastination. No, I had reporters come by to interview me. Some even took pictures. I had to dress up in full steampunk attire. I have a kid who has no sense of tact or timing. He has no qualms about streaking from the bathroom to his bedroom. He has major food sensitivity issues and mostly eats sandwiches and crackers, and if he encounters a food texture he doesn’t like, he spews vomit like a fountain.

I tried to schedule these reporter visits during the school day, if I could, but it didn’t always work out that way. I kept the reporters corralled to the formal dining room for the most part. I made sure they didn’t visit when my son is eating (and meal times MUST be maintained on schedule for him or the end of the world is nigh). And I begged, pleaded, for Nicholas to remember to stay in his room and read quietly… and remain clothed.

Podcast recordings involve similar pleading. I know Nicholas is not going to completely grasp the whole idea “I’m recording this on camera and it will live on the internet in infamy.” So, what does work? Bribery, my friends. This kid loves his video games. “I’m doing an interview on my computer and I CANNOT be interrupted. You want extra game time, yes?”

“YES!”

“This interview will start at 8 o’clock and go until about 9. You can have video games that whole time and bonus time later, but you have to leave me alone for that hour. You only come to me if there’s an emergency. What would count as an emergency?”

“Um, um, like maybe if the house blew up?”

“Yes. That’s a good example. But is the house going to blow up?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Make sure of it.”

So far, the house hasn’t been in peril during an interview, nor has any other cataclysm occurred (i.e. a game system locking up).

I try to schedule everything around Nicholas’s therapies. too. His home therapy requires that I have enough time to clean the living room, at minimum, and his other therapies require hours of driving each week. I get a lot of reading time as I wait around during therapy and I can respond to some emails on my phone, but I can’t work on big interviews or blog posts that way.

Autocorrect: handy and yet so potentially embarrassing.

Attending conventions is another level of difficulty because of my husband’s schedule, the whims of his work place in altering that schedule, and Nicholas’s needs. If my husband can’t secure days off, it means the backup plan is seeing if my parents can do the day-long drive from central California to Phoenix to stay for a few days. They are very willing to help, if they can, but I hate to ask that of them. More often than not, the forthright answer to the invitation is, “No, that’d be awesome, but I can’t come. I have to watch my son.”

Does that make me feel sad or resentful at times? No, not usually. I know my priorities. I’m Mom first. Writer second. There will always be other opportunities to sell books, but my son needs me on a daily basis. And you know what? I need him, too.

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Beth Cato is the author of THE CLOCKWORK DAGGER steampunk fantasy series from Harper Voyager. Her short fiction is in InterGalactic Medicine Show, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Daily Science Fiction. She’s a Hanford, California native transplanted to the Arizona desert, where she lives with her husband, son, and requisite cat. Her website is BethCato.com.

 

 

 

Oh man, y’all. We have a treat this week in the Parenting & Writing blog series. If you’ve ever felt like your writing was even more demanding than your own children, this is the one.

Lia Kawaguchi is a Speculative Fiction writer with a blog (https://mundanemisfit.wordpress.com), a great kid, a patient husband, an excel spreadsheet of currently-out-for-submission pieces, and one pro sale in Daily Science Fiction last year. She splits her time between writing, volunteering at her kid’s choice elementary school, and planning the family’s two-month sabbatical in Australia this fall. This split is not equal. G’day.

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You’re not my real daughter! You can’t tell me what to do!

So, my kid hates my book.

This is neither a shock, nor the end of the world. It’s a comedic book about a troll girl, and she’s all into heavy emotional realistic novels right now. (She’s ten, going on John Green.) And it’s not like she actually said that she hates it. She definitely tried to let me down easy. “It’s really good, mom! I know people in my class that would totally love it.”

Yeah, right, poison spawn. I know that condescending tone. I taught it to you.

I suppose it’s to be expected, though. It’s just sibling rivalry. She knows my writing is my other child.

The written word has taken my attention away from her since day 1. One of the first pictures we have as a family is of me reading a book over her nursing head. She’s quite often been stationed on one of my knees while the computer had the other. And the “Mama, I need you/…I’ll be right there as soon as I finish this chapter” conversation has taken place in this house more times than I can count.

She’s always been tolerant of my literary tendencies. Not that there aren’t perks to the distracted mom. My attendance at cons and classes has allowed her to develop a lovely and deep relationship with her father. Bedtime stories were never boring, as I have the ability (okay… need) to veer off the track if she seemed to be getting disinterested in what was actually on the page (okay… if I was). My “one more sentence” mantra has allowed her to become proficient at microwaving her own dinner, reading to herself, and small appliance repair. She is quite the accomplished kiddo, and I’ve got a whole trunk full of reasons why.

She has learned to share me with her sibling.

But as someone who mostly tends to write darker stuff than I intend, (oh, no, darling, mommy can’t read to you from her book. Why? Um, well… it’s for grown ups. Yes. Just like alcohol) it was truly an amazing thing to have a full-blown middle grade idea pop into my head while she was exactly the right age to appreciate it.

And does she? No, she does not.

Silly human child. Why can’t you be more like Short Story Tentatively Titled “Death Stalks The Editor Who Won’t Buy Me”? It thinks I’m an awesome writer. It says so right at the top of page 3.

Okay, so, the flesh child has benefits. Smells better, definitely. Fewer paper cuts when I cuddle her, by far. And seems to be getting smarter and funnier by the day, which is the exact opposite of my work.

And she’s turning into a pretty fine writer herself. At conference, we got a chance to peek at some of her in school writing, and I was delighted at how inventive she is, and not only in herspelling. She’d written one piece well enough that I jokingly said that she should edit my in-progress story, only to have her say that she’d love to.

Hm.

She did not, in fact, love to. But she did read it, and despite letting me know that it wasn’t her kind of book, she had some high-quality, helpful suggestions.

She’s such a good big sister.

A couple of weeks ago, for teacher appreciation week, one of the parents at her school put together a poster for the teachers of each child in the class holding a chalkboard on which they’d written what they want to be when they grow up. After years of my kiddo wanting to be a marine biologist, I was pretty certain what I’d see when I looked.

What was there instead?

Editor.

Vile betrayer. I’m off to go buy your baby sister a flash drive. Go microwave yourself an Easy Mac.

Hey! Once again, we travel to the land of parenting & writing! I really like this one. Kate Heartfield engages with the issue of having a partner and making enough time for him/her, and balancing time, whilst writing and parenting.

Because sometimes, the writing feels as time-intensive and committed as another spouse. Except, unlike my real spouse, my writing is always bossy and surly, and never surprises me with home-made bread or a chocolate bar.

I do believe that next week I may even tackle one of these posts, because these honesty-bombs of goodness are sparking my imagination.

Kate Heartfield is a fiction writer and journalist in Canada. Her stories have appeared recently in Strange Horizons, Crossed Genres, Lackington’s and Daily Science Fiction. Her website is heartfieldfiction.com.

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Before I had a kid, I probably thought of hours in the day as being interchangeable. An hour is an hour is an hour, and we all get the same number, no matter our life circumstances.

Ha. If only it were that simple.

These days, as a fiction writer pushing 40 with a five-year-old and a demanding day job, I’ve come to think of certain hours as being particularly precious – the hours when I am able to think. The hours between 6 pm and 9 pm, for example, when I’m no longer needed (much) by my day job, but my brain is not too tired to write. Or on the weekend.

All of those hours default to parenting time, not to writing time.

If I want to use them to write, I need to get someone else to be with the kid; usually it means asking my spouse to be the solo caregiver. He’s very accustomed to doing that, but it’s a favour to me, because solo caregiving is more exhausting than co-caregiving, and it pushes other activities (such as some chores) into the hours when the kid is asleep and we should be too. So I think of spousal goodwill as a kind of currency I can spend to gain a few precious hours of writing time when I’m not bone-tired. Although I am blessed with a supportive spouse who’s also a hard-working and very present parent, that goodwill is not, and shouldn’t be, limitless.

I do get some things done while my son is awake, especially now that he’s getting a little older. For example, I’m writing this post with my left thumb (I’m right-handed) on my phone, because my right arm is currently under my five year old for our evening cuddle while he watches TV. Blog posts, social media — all of that can happen while the kid’s awake. Even note-taking. I used to write short-story notes one-handed while I nursed.

But sustained creative work, drafting or revising, usually happens when the kid is asleep. That means it happens early in the morning or late at night, and neither is my brain’s optimum time. As I get older, I find I am just physically unable to spend a day at the computer at work, a few hours parenting, and then fire up the laptop to write at 10 p.m. I’m trying to become an early-morning writer but it not does not come easily to me, to put it mildly.

So those shining hours of alone time during the good-brain hours become precious indeed. Those moments when my tired spouse looks up at me over the field of Lego on a Saturday morning and says, “Why don’t you take your laptop to the coffee shop for an hour? We’re ok here.”

This is where my time management, as a writer, intersects with managing the relationships with the people in my life. When I respond with an eager “thanks!” to that offer of an hour to write, I make a mental note to extend a similar offer later so he can play guitar or read, while the kid gets his time one-on-one with Mama.

There has to be give and take. Both my spouse and I are introverts, so we both need plenty of time alone for our mental health.

We don’t keep score, or a schedule, or anything like that. But I try to be mindful of how much alone time I’ve taken for myself in any given week, and offer roughly the same amount to him.  For example, if I have a critique session on a Monday evening, I’ll ask if he wants time to see a movie or go to a concert on the following Thursday evening. Or if he just seems particularly tired or stressed, I’ll take the boy to the museum for a Saturday afternoon. Eventually the time-debt, or spousal karma or whatever you want to call it, evens out.

The need to not get myself into too much spousal time-debt means that I really can’t afford to use those golden hours on evenings or weekends for anything other than writing or writing-related events.

I almost never take time for myself to, say, go see a grown-up movie in the theatre. The cost of those three hours, during kid-awake time, is too much. I’ll save that movie for less valuable time. I might watch it on my iPad in bed a few months later, using my exhausted hours, when I’m too tired (or sick) to write.

This is why a few conventions, critique sessions and readings are pretty much the only social events on my calendar these days — they happen during those valuable evening and weekend hours. But they’re important to my craft and career, so I don’t mind spending some spousal goodwill on them.

I’ll go to the movies – once the kid’s a teenager.

Oh man, y’all.

I am really privileged to host some of these cool posts about parenting and writing. Privileged to see everyone’s thoughts, struggles, and funny observations on the creative life when you’ve got kids.

Today I am lucky to host a good friend, Tina Connolly, who just had her first YA book (not be confused with her excellent series for adults, Ironskin, which you should read right now). Tina and I met… at a con? A thing? I don’t remember, but somehow we have fallen into the tradition of hanging out and eating milkshakes at every writing-related event. (When she’s not there, I eat two milkshakes for her sake.)

Check out these mad jams she droppin. (I don’t know what that means.)

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I feel like there’s really only one kind of parenting + writing post, and that is, How Do You Do Both??  I completely believe that there is a kind of post I could write (the royal I, by which I mean someone who is not “I”) about how I used my darling children for inspiration and I couldn’t possibly grapple with the richness and deepness of life without that moment when the baby sneezed oatmeal all over my new sweater or some such.

I dunno, check back in ten years when the kids are fourteen and eleven. Right now all I’ve got is Time Management and the Art of Baby-Wrangling.

My first young adult novel, Seriously Wicked, came out last week. It is a totally fun book about a 10th grade girl who lives with a *seriously wicked* witch, and it was a blast to write. It poured out in, like, six weeks. I wrote furiously night and day, consumed by the blaze of creation. I barely stopped to eat or sleep.

If you are now secretly thinking to yourself that the punchline to the above paragraph is going to be “At that time I didn’t have any kids,” then I salute you. (And, I would come up with a better punchline that you haven’t yet thought of, except I have two children.)

The first draft of Seriously Wicked may not have been written with kids around, but it’s been through a bunch of rewrites, and most of them were. And I’m now plunging into books 2 and 3, and it’s safe to say I won’t get to take 6 weeks and lock myself in my study this time.

(If you really want to see the effect of children in my writing, then pick up Copperhead, which I wrote when my first child was one. I only realized much later that the secret hidden subtext is that it’s about a girl looking for a place to have a nap.)

I’m currently doing all the book release stuff for Seriously Wicked (like blogging, and book tours), all of which I really enjoy (although I think it all would be better if it somehow managed to come with a nap (write three blog posts and earn a free nap! – I could really get behind that.))

Anyway, the hands-down favorite, coolest thing I’ve done for the Seriously Wicked promotion is team up with my good friend (and fellow tired parent) Spencer [that’s me!] here to record one of the songs in Seriously Wicked. See, you remember that wicked witch I mentioned? Well she summons a demon, and it accidentally gets loose and into the cute new boy-band boy who’s just moved to town. Time for our heroine Camellia to stop the wicked witch and save the boy.

Except she just might be falling for that boy-band boy, especially when he sings a song he wrote just for her…

Spencer kindly agreed to lend his mad rock star skillz to sing one of Devon’s songs, “Lion Tamer.” I am totally in love with his hilarious and awesome rendition of it, and I hope you enjoy it, too.

 

ETA: Tina here, again: I realized I never did include any tips (such as they are) on Time Management & The Art of Baby-Wrangling! I blame…the baby. And…the other baby, the one that’s actually 4 now.

Anyway, my only real productivity tip is that once you find a tiny bit of time that works for you, you have to defend it tooth and nail against all comers, and the internet. Don’t do any of your “sand” tasks until you’ve gotten to do the nice (probably little) chunk of work you wanted to do.

And my two pieces of encouraging advice are “Put on your own air mask first” (which means, it’s okay to think about your own needs first) and, give yourself a free pass for EVERYTHING until the baby is one. (And I mean *everything*: forgetting your mother’s birthday, ordering takeout of fried things at 3am, not sweeping the kitchen floor for months, breaking down in sobs in the grocery store, and sleeping in every snatch of time you get.) With the first baby, I didn’t write a single word till he was six months. Baby-wrangling will get easier, and there will be time again.

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Tina Connolly is the Nebula-nominated author of the Ironskin trilogy from Tor Books. Her next book, Seriously Wicked, comes out May 5th from Tor Teen. Her stories have appeared in Women Destroy SF, Lightspeed, Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and more. Her narrations have appeared in audiobooks and podcasts including Podcastle, Pseudopod, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more. For many years she ran the Parsec-winning flash fiction podcast Toasted Cake. Find her at tinaconnolly.com.

Whussup, y’all! We interrupt your parenting and writing blogs to make a couple of announcements:

Lion Tamer, my collaboration with Tina Connolly from her new book Seriously Wicked, is alive and kicking on SF Signal. Go read about it. This was a fun project of realizing a song from Tina’s new book, in which a sweet boy, perhaps too sweet for rock n roll, is possessed by a thoroughly rockin demon.

The Fires of Mercy is also live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, in fiction and podcast form. This cool little story was drawn from a very long and complicated mythology that I’ve been working on for ages. One-and-a-half million words, four novel drafts, and here’s this 4k short story to show for it. A wee iceberg tip, peeking above the water.

(Actually, that’s not quite fair to my 2 million words–a previous BCS story came from the same world.)

I wanted to root this story, a kind of founding myth for the world, in something very understandable–a desperate group, on the run, and someone caught between two loyalties. The aphorism “every act of war has at its heart an act of mercy” isn’t something I believe, but it I wanted to create the sort of philosophy that could drive an order of assassins and allow them to live with their deeds.

This story is the foundation for a much larger magic system, a world where jin are a kind of fuel for magic. I’m currently working on a four-story cycle that takes place a thousand years later, and then I’ll get back to the (sigh) novel.

Here is another one. Another unicorn. Nikki has FIVE kids, count em, FIVE, let’s say that again. So like until the post from Gareth, in this case we are seeing the words of an impossible creature who should not exist–a working writer with five kids.

I first met Nikki in a writer’s group in Utah. Over about two years, we read the heck out of each other’s manuscripts, and stayed in touch online. During my brief and inglorious career in publishing, I may have actually made a small difference when I showed Nikki the way to impress an agent.

Cross-posted from her blog, a collection of rather funny anecdotes, and more inspiration for writerly parents.

 

So I’m a writer and a mom. (Of five.) (Yes, five.  That’s my son in the picture).

Parenting and writing isn’t a job, it’s a lifestyle, like those three percent body fat people.

Most of the time I’m not super-momming it,“doing it all.”  I mostly fall into writing the way other people fall into overeating. Or narcoleptics who wake up before they know they’re asleep.  What, did I sit down at the computer again? Wait, did my 4yo just ask if he could use a steak knife to open the battery pack of his Ninja Turtle walkie-talkie? Holy crap, did I just say yes?!

Recently I wrote a Facebook post, prompted by Spencer Ellsworth, to write seven things about my writing that no one knew.  Here they are, mostly about my Tourette-like writing habits.

1- When my 5th grade BFF moved, I replaced her for a year with imaginary friends.

2- I talked to a counselor about post-partum depression when I was 27 and, while there, confessed my addiction to making up stories in my head, sometimes for hours. I wanted a cure. He said, “You do that? I didn’t know anyone did that! We teach people with real addictions to tell themselves stories. I didn’t know it actually worked!”

3- Needless to say, the stories in my head were not eradicated at that time.

4-When pregnant, I would dip my hands in ice-water to reduce the pain of typing.

5-I once peed into a soda cup which I emptied out my car window into the grass in order to avoid wasting time on a bathroom break. (Yes, I was pregnant then, too.)

6- Um, of course, I’ve typed seated on the toilet. Bathrooms have locks. Did I mention I have five kids?

7- I’ve also typed in doctors offices, parks, preschool pick up lines, gym changing rooms, libraries, in the back seat of my car (I don’t get it. What do YOU do in the backseat?), and pretty much all of those places WHILE breastfeeding. Multitasking is my superpower.

Oh, gee.  Aren’t I crazy?  Spencer asked me to expand the post into a blog for his writer-parent blog tour, and I was like, expand that?  What, you want one of my children to actually lose a limb? (Coming soon, number 8, wherein Nikki drives the family off a cliff because she was pretending the lost City of Atlantis had appeared in the clouds.)

Okay.  Serious time.  Yes, I get carried away with writing.

But I try to stop that behavior, not go with it.

The real way to do it like this:

To be a writer-parent, you need to take time to write.

To have a happy home, that time needs to be guilt-free (to preserve your emotional health), structured (for the safety of your kids), and finite (so that the family’s needs can be met).

On guilt-free writing: The idea that you “cheat” your kids by writing, blogging, showering, bonding with neighbors, and pooping in private is a background static inside your brain, souring your every moment of happiness.  Want to know where this leads?  A nervous freaking breakdown.  Your kids deserve time, attention, and money, sure. But so do you! Are you assertive about providing for your own needs, explaining to the entire world and yourself that certain resources have been allotted to you, or do you merely hope that maybe—in the seams of your life—you’ll be able to “squeeze in” what you in fact need? Be kind to yourself.

On structured writing time: This is pretty basic.  I assume you’ll put the chain saw away before you write.  I also assume the kids will be given something to do—a babysitter, a TV, an open area to absolutely trash (because they will!), an adult within hearing distance at all times, etc.  My personal strategy is to invite friends over for my toddlers, let them all impersonate Wreck It Ralph for two hours, and make regular rounds for diaper changes or to resolve arguments while I mostly write. My kids love it. I clean the house in one shot afterward (or I write more—see below).

On finite time: DO NOT WRITE ALL DAY.  If you think you value your art more than your family, you probably have clinical depression. Okay. That wasn’t a funny joke.  Seriously, though! Turn off the computer, get down and play, read, clean, work, eat, pray, and live with your kids and your friends and family.  You need that time and so do they!

Exception: if you’re on a roll, then you can write all day.  That’s what McDonald’s is for.

As a California girl, Nikki bought snow boots to attended college in Utah because she had no idea what a plow was. After she started teaching eighth grade science, she and her husband found themselves without kids for years so she took a writing class to “find something to do.” Proving its sense of humor, life sent her five children over the next eight years. Besides writing, she enjoys throwing parties, playing the piano, attending those dance-step-classes at the gym, and swapping mom-horror-stories. Dinner is her nemesis. She recently signed with literary agent Josh Getzler for a hip, smart-sleuthing YA.

More blogs about parenting & writing! This time the blog comes with a list of helpful tips for getting stuff down when you feel, as parents do, like there’s nothing to do but the very minimum.

S.B. Divya is an author and an engineer. She is married with children (and pets), and knows the unfortunate joys of homeownership. Her fiction has been published in “Daily Science Fiction” and “Nature.” You can find out more at www.eff-words.com.

 

Most of us wear multiple hats on a daily basis. We have a paid job (or jobs) that is our main way of earning a living. We have housekeeping duties like cooking, laundry, cleaning, and paying the bills. We might have additional responsibilities: to a romantic relationship; to pets; to children; to ailing parents. If this weren’t enough, some of us are willing to add writing to the pile.

Unless you hit some kind of jackpot (a best seller list, major book award, rich uncle, etc.), you’re probably not going to earn enough from your short story and/or book sales to live as a full-time writer. This goes double if you’re supporting a family. So how can you make it all work without losing your last shred of sanity?

I’m no expert (let me know if you find my sanity!), but I here’s what I’ve learned from my own experience.

Stake out your writing time daily for at least 30 minutes, longer if you can. Guard this time like Smaug hoarding his treasure.
Sometimes life gets in the way (like a pesky hobbit), and you will lose that time despite your best efforts. Fine. Roll with it and get back to it as soon as you can. The more days you slip, the harder it is to recover.
Outsource the child care. If you have children who are too young for school, lean on your partner to grab an hour to write on the weekends. Hire a part-time sitter for a couple evenings when you can stay an extra hour at the office – use this time to write!
That lunch hour? Is a great chance to read, or eat quickly at your desk and then write.
Outsource the crappy work. If you’re lucky enough to be in a high income household, hire help as much as you can.
If you have young kids or aging parents to look after, claim your writing time after they’ve gone to bed (at night or while napping). Don’t do the dishes until after you’ve sat down (with a timer if necessary) and done nothing but write for 30 minutes. Staring at your empty page also counts.
Take your leisure time – i.e., watching TV or playing games or reading a book – and divide it in half. Leave one half for leisure, and spend the other half writing. After a few weeks, you won’t miss it. You might even drop the non-writing altogether.
If you have older kids, do some writing while they’re at after-school activities. Alternatively, use this time for research or outlines.
If you have a long commute, use a voice dictation software to plan out a scene, record notes, or even generate a rough draft.
Keep a log somewhere, like an x-chain calendar or a spreadsheet, so you can see your progress. Watch the word count pile up (slowly…be patient) or watch the X’s accumulate (with gaps because life happens). Remind yourself that any number is an improvement over zero.
Find a buddy to keep you honest, or join a weekly writing group. Peer pressure and deadlines are great motivators.
Forgive yourself if you need to take a break. Every job should come with  time off. Writing is no different. Be a good boss, though, and don’t let your vacation turn into a leave of absence.

It comes down to this: You have to make the most of your time when you can get it. Unlike the days when you had no other responsibilities (if you were ever so lucky), you can’t wait for hours of free time to appear. They won’t. Nor can you wait until the muse strikes. Become the master of stealing time. Treat your writing like another job, not a fun hobby, and make sure your family does, too.

If this sounds hard, that’s because it is! But it can also be immensely rewarding, especially when you finally see your name in print.

If you are having trouble figuring out where to find that 30 minute daily writing time, I highly recommend trying something like Laura Vanderkam’s 168 hours log (http://lauravanderkam.com/books/168-h...). Once you see the patterns in your daily routine, then you can work on rearranging and/or spotting the gaps.

 

 

Hey, blog. For the last few months, I’ve been managing a Facebook group for writers with children. It’s been a really amazing experience to hear everyone’s stories of both the enrichment they get from having children, and the ways they find time to write with kids. It’s also been refreshing to get support and give support to those of us who wonder (I’m one) if parenting and writing can be reconciled.

So, blog, I decided to feed you a bit with some guest posts from other parents/writers. Gareth Jones is an environmentalist, a father of 5, and a writer who has published over 40 publications in different languages. He was kind enough to share the following:

Writing, With Children

A friend of mine who’d just had his first novel published said that when asked, he told people he had time to write as he didn’t have children. He was amazed that I’d written a novel when I have five children. In fact I’ve now completed three novels, as yet unpublished. So how do I have the time?

Actually, people often ask me and my wife how we have time for anything, or how we cope with five children. I guess to someone with one child or none, five seems a lot, but the fact is it doesn’t seem that many to me; that’s what we’re used to.

The fact is, whatever your circumstances, people find time for what they want to do, whether their hobby is watching TV or doing something more productive. Writing is a solitary endeavour though, so on the face of it, it’s not really something the family can join in. It’s also something that requires concentration, so it’s not easy to write while the TV is on or children are playing under your chair or needing help with homework.

This means that writing time is valuable, as it is for all writers, so I need to spend time thinking about my stories when I’m doing other things that don’t require much brain power, so that when I sit down I can get on with writing 1000 words an hour. Or, more likely, writing for a 10 minute block. Most of the writing strategies I could talk about are common to all writers, so what is there I can say specifically about writing with children?

A lot of writers have daily, weekly or annual writing goals. I have none. I don’t ever expect to get much done, so I’m pleased with whatever I’ve written. Most writers have a schedule, while I can easily go for days and sometimes weeks without writing anything. I keep involved by editing a bit, submitting stories, keeping up with my on-line writers group. And I write when I can.

It can be easy to get frustrated and resentful, and that’s not something I want to feel about my family. So I view writing as a hobby. In ten years I’ve completed 3 novels, and over 100 short stories. I’ve had over 100 story publications in 25 languages, written over 100 book reviews, written a TV screenplay and several comic scripts. I don’t measure output though. I enjoy my writing, and my children join in too. My stories are suitable to read to children, though not necessarily anything the younger ones would understand. They all like writing their own stories, and the older ones help me brainstorm ideas. My oldest son had his first story published in a podcast recently, and the 2 girls had stories selected for a school anthology.

If I ever happen to sell a novel and sign a deal to write a novel in a year, I’ll have to come up with a new plan. But for now I am enjoying writing, with children.

Sometimes, you think you’re just about done processing January 2014 when you realize the whole darn year’s gone. That’s what this last year was like.

As a child of the 80s, 2015 has always been THE FUTURE in big capital letters. Hoverboards and flying cars and all that, yes, but also an old Marty McFly with a broken hand and Flea getting him fired. By fax. (That’s scary, knowhumsayin? I might get fired by fax this year.)

This was a hell of a year. We bought our first house one week before the start of 2014. I spent the year ignoring various issues with the house, including mildew and a sump pump. I have now paid the price, for I have scrambled around under a house fixing a pump, and I have chopped out hideous rotting carpet. Much like Calvin, I suspect I built character, and I loathe myself for it.

I started a new job this year. For years, I’d been teaching English full-time at Argosy University Online, a job that was flexible, but not really challenging, and not much in terms of long-term prospects. The world is teeming with online English teachers, and unexpected unemployment could be dangerous. When the local tribal college, where I was also teaching part-time, had an opening for E-Learning Coordinator, I went for it. It’s been fun, and exhausting. I went from feeling bored to feeling a little too useful, as I run the online program, design and teach online classes, and coordinate our videoconferencing classes.

The new job seems to be good for the writing, and bad for it all at once. I wrote not one, not two, but (almost) three novels this year. Each one clocked in under 70,000 words; one barely topped 50,000. I decided to consider this an unintended personal victory.

(This is not the same as when eating fifteen cookies is an unintended personal victory.)

In high school, when I wrote a novel, it topped out at over 200,000 words. For years, my comfort level with my big robberclobbering fantasy tomes has been somewhere between 140,000 words and 200,000 words. For those who don’t count the teeny little words, that’s between 600 and 1000 pages. So writing short novels feels good! Just imagine, if I had actually sold a novel by now I might not have learned this skill. Yay?

Of course, the job has taken over a lot of the time I had for things like blogging, managing submissions, thinking… but I did manage to put out quite a few interviews and articles on Bleeding Cool this year. I’m quite proud of the one with G. Willow Wilson, if you can’t decide where to start.

Just about every year I wonder whether I can make this the big “My Year,” in which I hit some writing-career-defining milestone. I think I did more writing and submitting in 2014 than I have in a while. I got a story in F&SF, another in Every Day Fiction, and have one forthcoming in Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Still, I don’t think I’ve had “my year” yet. 2015, you are the Future. Are you also My Year? Tell me, but not by fax.