Still more changes
I know I've been silent for the last couple of weeks, but it hasn't been for lack of subject matter. Instead, I've once again found my business in flux: I found out I'm expecting another baby in early June.
I've been thinking a lot about work and pregnancy with my son, wondering if it will be similar this time around or not. Most significantly, then, I had no brain to speak of. I was forgetting how to spell and how to read. It was a terrible state of affairs for a writer, and it didn't help that one of my editors told me she'd written the best story of her life in her second trimester. (It did help that her boss, also pregnant at the time, had the same problem I did.)
This time around - although it's still early - the main symptom appears to be "energy swings." These are sort of like mood swings, except they involve not emotions, but cycles of extreme fatigue swinging to extreme frenzy. During the former I'm napping before dinner. During the latter I'm up till 1 a.m. and only go to bed because I force myself. This state of affairs isn't so bad for the creative spark. It probably all evens out in the end.
In the meantime, I'm hoping to continue posting at least once a week, even though I asked for more work. In fact, I need to think up questions for the first of my cyber book tour moms (sorry it's taking so long, Melanie!). One line of questioning, however, is certain: How do you write successfully with two in the house?!
I've been thinking a lot about work and pregnancy with my son, wondering if it will be similar this time around or not. Most significantly, then, I had no brain to speak of. I was forgetting how to spell and how to read. It was a terrible state of affairs for a writer, and it didn't help that one of my editors told me she'd written the best story of her life in her second trimester. (It did help that her boss, also pregnant at the time, had the same problem I did.)
This time around - although it's still early - the main symptom appears to be "energy swings." These are sort of like mood swings, except they involve not emotions, but cycles of extreme fatigue swinging to extreme frenzy. During the former I'm napping before dinner. During the latter I'm up till 1 a.m. and only go to bed because I force myself. This state of affairs isn't so bad for the creative spark. It probably all evens out in the end.
In the meantime, I'm hoping to continue posting at least once a week, even though I asked for more work. In fact, I need to think up questions for the first of my cyber book tour moms (sorry it's taking so long, Melanie!). One line of questioning, however, is certain: How do you write successfully with two in the house?!
posted by Christa M. Miller at 7:50 AM
4 Comments:
Naps??? (I know, I know...)
Christa: Congratulations! Now to the hard part (hehe): writing with more than one in the house. I currently have a 17 yo, a 9 yo, and a 4 yo in my house. I fight for writing time like a cat trying to climb a glass wall. Well, maybe it's not that hopeless.... ;-) It all comes down to two things: first is something that I sort of hate which is schedules, and second is something I definitely love, my hubby. My hubby works out of the house three days a week, and I homeschool the two older ones. We HAVE to be organized, so two nights a week - the nights after the days he works from home - my hubby takes over everything. Dinner, bedtimes, baths, whatever. For my part, I lock myself in our room and work for several hours. Weekends are sort of free-form, but I can usually get 5 or 6 hours to myself. If I could get up out of bed earlier, I could have a couple of morning hours, too. Now that some things have changed and others have settled, I'm having to consider hanging out my Writer-for-Hire sign - which means several of those hours will have to go toward writing-for-pay instead of my novel, but you do what you have to do. I know of a couple of writers who hire sit-in's. Someone who comes to your house to watch the wee ones while you go into your office (or bedroom or whatever) and work for a while. Maybe not for every day, but a couple of times a week could give you a boost. Just some thoughts.
~PJ~
Hi, I've been a lurker on your site for a while...this will be a long comment, but here it is...I too, am struggling with keeping up with my writing while taking care of a young son...so I go back to the words of Carol Shields, a Pulitzer-prize winning novelist and mother of five, who writes this about "time":
"Every moment will not be filled with accomplishment; we would explode if we tied ourselves to such a regimen. Time was not our enemy if we kept it on a loose string, allowing for rest, emptiness, reassessment, art and love. This was not a mountain we were climbing; it was closer to being a novel with a series of chapters.
"My mother-of-small-children chapter seemed to go on forever, but in fact, it didn't. It was a mere twelve years, over in a flash. Suddenly I was at a place where I had a little more time to reflect. I could think, for instance, about writing a real novel, and I did. ... For the first time I needed a file cabinet and a wrist watch, something I'd done without for a decade. I remember I spent the whole of an October afternoon working on a single sentence; I was not by nature a patient person, but for this kind of work and at this time in my life, i was able to be endlessly, foolishly, patient."
there's much more...but she concludes, after reflecting on her breast cancer: "I have time for this last exercise. All the time in the world."
Congratulations on your pregnancy. I'm sure you'll get through it, and everything beyond, beautifully!
I can't really address the energy swings or the troubles with writing while pregnant. Heck even the writing with small kids around I skipped. I just wanted to say congratulations on your pregnancy.
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