Do you hear that? Yes. It's the sound of the children making their way back to school after a long, lazy summer. Many parents breathe a sigh of relief while us teachers prepare to batten down the hatches and start a brand new year.
I love what I do, but I'm always sad about the end of summer. My prime writing time happens during those two and a half months where I'm not thinking about my students or their creative development. Instead, I'm focused on mine.
Managing your writing time no matter what career you are in is tough. Most of us don't have the luxury of sitting at home all day and escaping to another place with our imagination. The bills aren't going to pay themselves. So what's a working writer to do? After all, we're supposed to be networking, Tweeting, Facebooking, maintaining our websites, Pinteresting, and making ourselves available to readers--and writing! How do you do that on top of a full time job?
It ain't easy!
Everybody has their own method, of course. For me, I schedule my daily writing time for early in the morning. I put in about an hour before I have to start thinking about breakfast and getting the kiddo up. At night, I usually spend another hour editing. Weekends are my big days to push hard. I close the door which signals to the rest of my family: Don't bother her or she'll freakin' kill you. I also use those days to schedule tweets or to schedule my blog posts.
Yes, there are times when I lapse from my schedule. Honestly, as much as I love blogging and connecting with readers, I really need my writing time even more. So sometimes my blog posts may suffer, but I think the writing, getting the words down, is the most important thing.
So to those of you in the same predicament as me, good luck to you! Hang in there!
You can follow Mary Ann Loesch at www.maryannloesch.com or find her on Twitter: @maryannloesch!
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