Sail Away Home: Nesting

Writing is pretty easy to blow off, especially when you're a distracted homeschooling mom with ten million other things that need attention rightthissecond. I oftentimes feel guilty spending a couple of hours holed up writing when the dishes need doing and the dinner needs cooking and the iPad has been doing all the parenting. It's sometimes hard to sit down and write when I know my time could be spent doing something else. But would that be time better spent? I can spend an hour washing dishes and scrubbing toilets and cleaning up dog shit and I'll have real things accomplished, or I can stare at the blinking cursor, the blank page, the keyboard waiting to type the story. I can create something that is mine, mine all mine. But sometimes real life wins. More times than not, thankfully, writing wins.

Having a solid routine helps tremendously. I typically write at night, when the kiddo is in bed. This means I have all day to get the real life things done, the whole day to play mom. He goes to bed and I pour a huge glass of wine and open my laptop and it's like a sigh. Writing is relaxing, it's my end of the day, it's going to bed knowing another thousand words are on the page.

A routine isn't foolproof though. Sometimes I'm exhausted at night and all I want to do is crawl into bed. Some days the kiddo never stops talking, not even for a single second, and by evening my brain is pudding and I'd be hard pressed to recite the ABCs at gunpoint. Sometimes I start projects that cut into writing time at night. Sometimes I just want to hang out with my husband and not be reclusive writer person.

We inherited a thousand projects when we moved back into our house this summer. We'd been renting it out for five year and it turns out out our tenants were shits. Their dog peed all over the down stairs carpeting. Their cats shredded our stairs. Their kids were destructive chimps, swinging from the kitchen cabinets and slamming doors so hard that the knobs caved in from the contact with the walls. Weeds choked the tiny yard and several trees were dead. The place was a mess. I was bummed because all I wanted to do was work on my writing. I was in the final revisions of my novel, Sail Away Home. I was working on the query, the synopsis. I had a new book idea I wanted to get to work on. But instead, I had a million things to do.

And I fell into the trap. The I'm too busy to write, I have more important things to do trap. I spent most of the summer reviving my poor yard. Cutting down dead tress, planting new ones, staining the deck, building a huge wall between our house and the annoying neighbors. I'd go to bed exhausted, way too tired to write. Fall came and so did inside projects. Ripping up ruined carpet, laying down new flooring. Painting over butterflies and flowers in my son's room. Getting organized.

Now it's time to get back into writing. I want to start submitting Sail Away Home after the first of the year. I want to start writing my new book as soon as possible. But I don't need anymore reasons to procrastinate than life already has to offer. I need my to-do list down to a manageable size. I need the big projects complete so my mind isn't on them, but on my new book.

For the past week I've painted the master bedroom, the kitchen, the living room and a bathroom. I've replaced the carpet in the master bedroom. I still have more to go and I should be done in a week. It feels good knowing it will all be done and I'll be free to write in a couple of weeks. It's like I'm nesting, like one might do in the final weeks before a new baby is born. In my case, the baby is my next book. I'm getting everything done and out of the way so I can concentrate on the new baby, give it my full attention. Because this time around it isn't just about the new book. There's still Sail Away Home, and the business of trying to get it into print.

Here are a few pictures of my progress so far: