The last few weeks have been amazingly busy, torridly scattered.
With the academic year winding down for all three of our children I have had to put my writing on hold and do a lot of hands-on parenting.
I often wonder what writers/authors working on deadlines with publishing contracts, which appear forever to be tightening, do when the needs of their children, that seem perpetual, demand the writer’s attention.
I would hate to feel torn.
The excruciating nature of the need to choose between my children and meeting my deadline would sap all my creative energy and my devotion to authentic parenting.
All impetus and imagination to write and any joy from mothering would be absorbed into a sense of a failure for either having written a less than fit novel, or worse yet defaulting on a contract.
The exact worst would be to fore go my parenting responsibilities as in sacrificing my needed presence in an effort to write.
How to concentrate with all that going on?
And yet this is what I faced two weeks ago. In that I am self-publishing I laid aside my writing and gave to my children.
This is what I can live with, needed to do for peace of mind, and a clean conscience.
Any focus I mustered would yield but a shadow of the truth from which I write regarding any story I endeavor to craft.
And yet having not been in that position, having placed my writing on the back burner for the last two weeks and attended to my children’s needs, both academic and emotional, I found myself drained and fearful.
Dry of energy, both physical and mental, I also lost confidence in my way of writing, the path I have chosen in which to bring my books to life and make them available to the public.
My novel, The House, in its last stages of typesetting is destined to printers by the first of next month. I appreciate the patience of those who have requested an early readers’ copy so that they might write a review and place it on their blog, Amazon.com, Librarything, and other places where readers frequent.
And yet there is this part of me that chastises the slow moving fashion in which I move.
To be honest, my process for writing books detours very little, if any, from the way in which I approach and accomplish all things.
Moment-to-moment, piece-by-piece, checking and correcting, inspecting and making changes, alterations that ultimately transform me as a writer and assist me in evolving as a person.
Again, this is what I do, what leaves me with peace of mind and a clean conscience with myself.