I thought this was a great question for me to try to tackle because as the mom of two now college-aged students, I have been juggling family life, writing, and a full-time job through every stage of their adolescence. It is definitely not something that I can share any sort of road map for! In fact, my own journey with it probably looks pretty messy and scattered. But, the natural order of things is chaos, right? (More on this later!)
This is my first published novel, so this gives you an idea of how long I have been at it. It’s an important place to start because I think you have to know what you are writing for in order to get a handle on how to weave it into your juggling act. Are you writing because you just need to? Ideas and thoughts nag at you until you get them out in written form? Then random and stolen writing moments are probably your best friend. Or are you writing because you have a specific goal in mind? For example, you want to finish that short story, poem, article, or novel, and get it published. If so, that will probably take effort towards carving out more regular organized time than you usually get as a working parent.
I once had my boss confess to me that for much of her kids’ youth, she rarely saw her dining room table. This was because it always seemed to be covered in folded laundry. I almost gasped, because at that very moment that is exactly what my dining room table looked like. She went on to tell me that she just decided at one point that chaos was the natural order of things and that some days, it just wasn’t worth the energy to try to make order out of life. I can’t tell you how much that helped me going forward as a parent. Whatever your feelings are on the natural order of things, neatness, or folded laundry not being put away right away, I think it’s so helpful to remember that it’s okay to just roll with not trying to pick up all the messy pieces of parenthood sometimes. Yes, that day you might step on a Lego with bare feet, drive carpool in a car that you hope no other parent sees the inside of until it’s cleaned, or perhaps not eat dinner at your dining room table. And yes, routines and order are important. But so is that time you found to write down that killer thought or idea instead of falling exhaustedly into bed.
I would also say that I learned to use my kids’ activity times as my own activity time as much as possible. I tried to adopt this practice after hearing a successful author once say that she wrote her first novel in her minivan at her children’s soccer practices. Both of my kids were big soccer players, and rather than dropping them off and chatting with other parents or making phone calls, etc. I tried to use as much of that time for writing (or sometimes a walk or jog if I was short on an exercise window). It helped me a lot to learn to use that time as my own for whatever I needed.
Most importantly I think is just to keep at it. Things will always pop up that take you away from or interrupt some planned writing time. I spent many days feeling frustrated by the lack of time I had to focus on something that felt so important to me. But after a while, even those small moments of perseverance added up to finishing a larger project.
The Ghostwriter of New Orleans Laura Michaud
Genre: YA, YA Paranormal
Publisher: Pelican/Arcadia Publishing
Date of Publication: 3/28/22
ISBN: 978-1455626243
ASIN: 1455626244
Number of pages: 192
Word Count: approx 55k
Cover Artist: Julie Buckner
Tagline: What if fate got it wrong this time?
Book Description:
When a boy dies and becomes a ghost in his high school, he creates life-changing consequences for the entire student body when he communicates with his girlfriend by underlining passages in her favorite book in the library.
But he finds that he also has a decision to make–accept his fate or take a dark path back and start a new life?
Excerpt:
How many times have you forgotten to do something small? Shut
a window before it rains? Take your phone with you? Do up a button on your
shirt? Grab your homework on your way out the door? On the day that seals my
fate, I forget to look over my shoulder.
Right before it happens everything is the same. I get the
same rush of freedom that I always get in my stomach when I leave the school
parking lot, hit the gas, and make a right turn onto St. Charles Avenue. The
same line of live oak trees cast their tunnel of shadows over the street. I see
their branches moving, so I turn the air conditioning off, roll my windows
down, ignore the text messages blowing up my phone, and turn the Jimi Hendrix
music (that I only listen to when I am by myself) way up. The sweat starts to
pool up around the white collar of my school uniform, but the feeling of the
wind across my face is totally worth it. What I do not know is that this is the
last time I will ever do it.
I guess if you asked
me what I do know for sure in those last moments I would say that I am a pretty
fast runner, I am decent at guitar, and that Margot Cramer is the love of my
life.
Laura Michaud grew up with her face in a book, so it was natural that she would spend some time in the publishing industry before becoming a children’s librarian and writer. A native of New York and New England, she has called the amazing city of New Orleans home since 2004. The Ghostwriter of New Orleans is her first novel.
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