Thankful for Writing Time

As writers, we’re often told that if we can’t find so much as 1 – 2 hours to write on a daily basis, we’re not really writers. I personally find that statement incredibly unfair – writers come in all shapes and sizes. Some writers only have certain days of the week during which they can write, and put as many hours into one day as other writers do into a week. And then there are those times in our lives when it really is impossible to write no matter how hard we may try to juggle. It doesn’t mean we’re no longer writers, when this happens. It simply means we’re not fortunate enough to have the luxury of being able to do what we love during these particularly challenging times.

Anticipating that I would be busy with a family one day, I got into the writing game as soon as the mood struck me and I worked to carve out those couple of hours a day no matter what my circumstances. I fondly remember writing in a notebook on the steps of church while on lunchbreak during my internship in New York City. While working at a daycare center, I wrote in that same notebook while the children were napping and later, when I realized my hand couldn’t take all that writing, I hid behind a shelf as I typed on my laptop. Years later, I found myself in a job in which I had so much free time on my hands, I could often write in the morning and the afternoon and took a long lunch break during which I’d read as many as 3 books at a time. This made me very well-versed in the romance genre, as you might imagine. Though I was lonely, and knew my luck wouldn’t last forever, I looked at this time as a gift, one I was immensely grateful for.

Later, when I got into the real estate industry, a large part of my reasoning for doing so was knowing that I would become my own boss. Being in a position where I could make my own hours, I hoped that I would always be able to carve out writing time. And I did. For a while. Then, life threw me another curveball. A wonderful curveball, mind you, but one that basically obliterated writing time for the better part of a year. Though I’d been looking forward to planning my wedding my entire life, I’d had no idea how time consuming it would be and between planning and working, there simply weren’t any hours left in the day at all.

When you pull yourself away from writing for a long period of time, it can be difficult to find your momentum to get going again. More than that, I wondered if I even still wanted to do it. After years spent searching for the right person, learning, through the stories I read what kind of person I was looking for and taking comfort in these same stories as I ventured along a seemingly endless journey in search of him, I felt perhaps I’d reached my fork in the road and essentially outgrown romance novels. I no longer had much use for a “book boyfriend” when I had the man of my dreams standing right in front of me. This is to say nothing of the challenges an author faces, challenges I was getting pretty tired of facing after nearly 15 years in the game.

It took a lot of soul searching and ultimately, me telling myself I’d actually “quit” to realize I was still compelled to write stories. I’d put so many of them under the mattress to be completed at a later time and as I dreamed about finishing these stories, new ones came into my head. I told myself perhaps I’d cap off my writing career at the 30 or so story ideas I currently had and then the pandemic came. Writer friends were telling me they were too bummed out to write, whereas I had an opportunity I hadn’t had in years. With a couple of months with almost nothing to do but write, and many more in which I had my commuting time put back in my day, I had a whole new lease on writing. I got back into the last story I’d been writing before planning my wedding, finished it and published it. I set out to republish my backlist titles and began outlining a new 5 book series while simultaneously working on the final story in my current series. Working on new stories while editing the current, I look forward to telling stories I’ve wanted to tell for years and yes, I may even tell a few more.

Though it may not seem like it, we have so much to be grateful for. I for one am infinitely blessed and though it may seem compared to the bigger things, writing time is something I’m definitely grateful for.