You see, I hold two jobs. One full time, 13-14 hour a day, 5 day a week job plus a part-timer on the weekends. In addition to that, we have our son who is showing signs of delayed learning and gets frustrated easily by being unable to communicate. My husband is a full time work from home web writer. Our schedules weren’t always this hectic, but 2008 was apparently the year of upheaval. LOL.

The hardest part is finding a balance. I don’t mean absolute peace and tranquility. (In my house? Not likely!) I mean you have to know your limitations. This means you don’t have the luxury of waiting on the muse to come out and play. You see, if your muse is flighty, trade her in. You need a workaholic, one that will be working in the background of your mind while you go about your daily life. If you don’t, you’ll be unable to write in chaos and that, my friends, is the hardest part about my life.

So how do you do it? How do you find time to write when there isn’t any?

I wrote down my schedule, from wakeup to bed. Every time I had a break during my workday, I wrote it down. When I was at home and writing, I wrote down the amount of time it took for checking email and replying, the amount of words I was able to write at any given hour, and the number of times I had to get up and go take care of something related to the house. This was during a looming deadline, btw.

And I noticed a few things.

1. I wake up at 4:30am every morning. Some days my day doesn’t begin until 6:00am so during that time I could easily catch up on email. (Especially since there’s NO WAY I can write that early. I’ve tried, I waste more time trying to focus on the screen than writing)

2. I have an hour for lunch. Not every day, but most days I have unimpeded writing time. Hmmm.

3. When I get home the world is in chaos. I’m home, the house is in an uproar (even the basset hound gets into it and you know how hard it is to get them excited about ANYTHING), and the clamor continues on well into dinner. So before dinner I can get no writing done. As a matter of fact, any time I’ve attempted it, unless the boy’s asleep (which is rare), my word count over a few hours barely breaks 1K. That’s not efficient. Yes, every little bit helps, but if I’m staring at the screen for 2 hours and nothing gets written, it’s not helping. It’s frustrating.

4. My day ends at 10pm. I might have those extra special nights where the spark of creativity will guide me into the wee hours of the morning, but those are rare and I have to overcompensate the next day due to lack of sleep.

5. My weekends are easier to grab snatches of writing time but they’re not predictable, easy to manage, or always available.

So now that I’ve carved out snatches of time I can write in, let’s see what it does for me.

Morning…email only. I did a couple of things to make this easier.

1. I culled through my many many yahoo groups and switched to digest on those that I adore and avidly read and dropped those I ignored in my inbox.

2. I put those priority emails, those from people I’m in constant contact with on an email basis in their own folder. So when they email me, it flags and I can handle those, at least.

Lunch…I stopped coming home for lunch. It prevents my son from going crazy for the entire hour I’m home and keeps Dad on a steady schedule. His writing time isn’t interrupted due to my abrupt arrival and departure and that means he’s happier too. Instead, I now write at lunch. I bought an ASUS eee laptop that I take with me and power up just for those moments. So 1 hour.
Get home…I don’t even think about writing. It’s family time. We hang out, we talk about our days, the kiddo climbs all over and around me. We color, we read, we play games or we’ll watch a movie. Then Dad and Mom chat about stuff while the dinner’s getting prepared. I vent, he vents, and then we feel better. Some days the kiddo is wound so tight nothing will calm him down.

After 8pm is my writing time. I have two hours of productive time at this point. By this hour of the night my mind has been racing like crazy, working to fill in all the details I’d wanted to put in the story. I sit down and my fingers fly. Two hours=1.5-2K words for me. It’s the rough draft, so I’m not worried about editing. I take notes as I go in order to remind myself about mundane things, the clothes the heroine is wearing, how long the hero’s hair is, where the spaceship is parked LOL. It’s important to note…I don’t write at my desk anymore. I write wherever I can. My ASUS comes out and I write outside, or in the living room, or once, when the kiddo had a bad dream, I was writing in his bedroom when he kept waking up just to make sure I was there.

On a bad day I get 500 words done. On my best, 3K or more. If I only wrote during the work week I’d have 2500-15000 words. This is before my unpredictable weekend starts.

With my new schedule I’ve been able to do two things…

1. Give my family a predictable time in which I’m slow to respond

2. Take a day off on Saturday (from writing at least) and just enjoy some family time

Married Mother of Three Seeking Scientist for Dinner, Movies, and Possible Cloning

By: Emma Ray Garrett

All right, I’m kidding about the dinner and movies – but not the cloning. Mostly because I don’t have time for wining and dining anyone right now, not even myself. For most working mothers, this is a common problem. There’s just not enough time in the day for everything that needs our attention. However, a majority of working mothers actually leave the house for employment.

I don’t.

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, I’m on call as mother, as wife, nurse, receptionist, counselor, housekeeper, and so many other occupations. Hell, if I received a wage based on my skill set, I wouldn’t need to worry about another thing in life – something I’m sure most mothers would surely agree with me on. I’ll be honest, there are days where I wish I punched a time clock, so to speak, at any number of the aforementioned jobs rather than be a work from home mother.

However, for me, and for a lot of stay at home or work from home moms I know, choosing employment outside the home isn’t a logical option. When the cost of daycare can, in many places, exceed the income a mother makes working in ‘the market’, it’s simply more responsible – and economical – to stay home. With the rising cost of food and gasoline, I wouldn’t be surprised to see telecommuting become the wave of the future, complete with more moms and dads working from home and raising children at the same time.

Telecommuting, though unusual, isn’t abnormal. If my work revolved around IM troubleshooting for an insurance company or providing customer service through an internet interface, I wouldn’t worry too much about breaking up the inevitable ‘she took my toy/he hit me’ argument between my kids. After all, the person I would be helping wouldn’t see or hear me tell the kids to knock it off or go take a time out. They wouldn’t know I was taking care of their problems while in my pajamas with “Go, Diego, Go!” blaring on the
television.

Being a writer though, takes working from home to a whole new level. Readers don’t know I’m sitting in my pj’s and arbitrating whatever dispute arises – and truthfully, they probably don’t care, which is for the best in my opinion. If I got fan letters asking what I was wearing, I think I’d change professions. That said my children don’t need to read over my shoulder the more mature content of my stories. Considering they are ten, eight, and five years old, I imagine you can understand why I do almost no writing when the kidlets are at home. The five year old can’t read complex words yet, but the eight and ten year olds certainly can and they are way too nosy for my own good.

Don’t forget, I’m also married. Ten years and still trucking, though I’m honest enough to say sometimes I’d like to hit him with that truck. Regardless, my husband and I also need time together and, much as our children, he also needs attention from me. He needs me to listen to his day, be a sounding board for his grunts and groans, and show him affection and interest. Since my husband works a hectic schedule of irregular shifts, I find myself with very little time for personal grooming – if I hope to do it alone. That’s not to mention sleep and, oh yeah, writing. I’ve sacrificed a lot of sleep over the last three years since I began freelance writing as a vocation and not a hobby.

By now, you’re probably wondering why in the hell I do it? Maybe how I do it (in just less than two and a half years I’ve written fifteen novellas with an average word count of approx. 27,000 words)? You might be asking why I’d continue to go on five or less hours sleep a day, maintaining hearth and home, entertaining spouse and children, all the while never having time off or a vacation? What’s it all worth?

To answer the why question, well that’s easy. It wouldn’t matter whether I were published or not, I’d still be creating stories. Some of them would stay in my head, daydreaming sojourns to take when the boredom wears me down. Others would go into yet another journal, tablet, binder and join the hundreds I already have in boxes. I never aspired to be a writer. I’ve been writing, making up stories to tell, creating worlds and characters, for as long as I can remember. I wanted to be a vet or a cop when I grew up, not a writer
because I already was a writer in my young mind. Not being a writer would have been like not being a woman – it’s how I was made. I do it because I don’t know how not to do it and because even if I learned how not to write, I’d never use the skill.

I’ll skip the how I do it and answer the why I keep going question. And I won’t lie. There are times when I struggle. Struggle to meet deadlines as much as I struggle to keep the house clean, the laundry done, and
dinner made. I fight with characters, with my husband and children, with myself because I have extremely high expectations and goals and I really work myself over when I ‘fail’ to accomplish a task.

In that, there is no one else nearly as good and making me feel like shit than myself. Being honest, I’m not some huge mega star in the e-book world. Of my fifteen novellas, I have five that would be considered best sellers. I have seven that aren’t quite bestsellers but have made my publisher’s money back for the publishing as well as a tidy profit. And I have three, which are, in my opinion, flops. My publisher disagrees with me on one of those three, since the book broke even and turned a small profit, but I think its sales sucked. I’ve made close to ten thousand dollars in the three years since I signed my first e-book contract. Not much, though it’s a hell of a lot more than many freelance writers make in their lifetime, but more than I could have made working my accounting job and paying out over seven hundred dollars a week in childcare expenses. Seriously though, I don’t keep going for the money.

I keep going despite the personal sacrifice because I get a high no drug can deliver every time I sit down at the computer and bring one of my fantasies to life. I keep going because I have some of the most fantastic, wonderful, delightfully wild fans that show me unbelievable support all the time. I keep going because quitting simply isn’t an option for me and thankfully an eighty-percent sell through to profit ratio is damn good and my publisher keeps wanting more books.

What’s it all worth to me will undoubtedly show you all my selfish side. Writing is priceless to me because it is the one thing in my life that is mine and mine alone. It’s what reminds me that I am mother, wife, and
Emma Ray. Without writing, in whatever form, I wouldn’t be able to be the spouse and mom I am because I’d be withdrawn, irritable, frustrated, and depressed. Everyone gets down, but if I couldn’t write, I’d be way worse than in the dumps.

When I write I’m not just Mrs. Garrett or Mommy. Being creative helps me maintain a small part of me that I was as a child, an adolescent, and a single woman. The me before hearth and home, diapers and bills. And I think that every woman should absolutely, positively, retain some bit of the woman they were before family. In that way, we don’t drop into the pitfalls that can come from living through our children and their achievements or from identifying ourselves so completely with our spouse that we don’t know how to go on without them, should that ever happen. In short, writing is worth as much to me as my children and my husband and my family, which is to say it’s worth everything.

Finally, the how do I do it. Simply put, I do it as I can. I steal time here and there. I stay up into the wee hours just before dawn, knowing full well I will have to be alert and functioning in too few minutes. I growl at my husband and tell him to take the kids out for a couple of hours. When I’m in deadline hell, the laundry slides a bit and the kids eat easy to prepare meals. Occasionally, I tell them all to leave me alone so I can work. And sometimes, I don’t write, though I’m dying to inside. Because working from home means that I can’t always work. People get sick, bad things happen, hell, life happens. And it’s okay if the clothes in the dryer don’t get folded tonight. It’s all right if I leave the dishes until morning. Neither my husband, nor I, will die if we can’t have ‘mommy and daddy’ time for the third night this week. On the flip side, it’s okay to go outside and play with the kids and not hit my word count goal for the day. It’s okay to watch television or read a book or play a game and not finish the chapter I started. I’ve found a balance that works for me and that’s my best advice to other writers in a similar situation. Find your balance, don’t sacrifice all of yourself, and the writing will flow.

This coming year, my youngest will join the school-going crowd and I will find myself alone for more than a couple of hours a day for the first time in my adult life. This year is the year when I finally put writing first and I see how far I can go. If I hit it big that will be fantastic. If I don’t hit it big that will be fantastic too. Because I’m doing something I love, surrounded by the people I love, and no matter the outcome, there’s not a single thing I’d change.

Except that damn ban on cloning. I could sure use another set of hands around here…

I’m looking forward to chatting with you all and as always, comments and discussion are welcome. Thanks goes out to the fabulous Lynn Viehl* for launching the Virtual Workshop tour.

See you tomorrow night!

Dawn