Month: January 2013

[This is part of an ongoing series about getting work done after having a child.  As always, what works for me will probably not work for anyone but me and my particular child.  But I hope you enjoy reading anyway.]

It’s been a while since I wrote one of these.  I’ve been trying to group eras together, so I wait for something to change significantly in my daughter’s development that affects my work habits, and then I take note and wait for it to change again, so I can talk about that era having just passed through it, rather than from the middle.  Six to twelve months was definitely an era, and one I quite enjoyed.

An amazing thing happened at six months–my daughter learned to crawl.  Suddenly instead of whining and struggling every time I put her down, she happily scooted around the house, and then crawled with competence, and then pulled to a stand and cruised everywhere, and then walked.  Everyone prophesied and complained at me: once they can move, they get into everything.  Once they can move, you’ll never get anything done.

So I was thrilled to discover that for my particular circumstances, the opposite was true.  Along with the ability to move came the magical ability to play happily by herself.  For multiple minutes at a time.  Sometimes, against all reason, for hours.

There are a couple of things that I think contributed to this.  One sadly unrepeatable thing is my daughter’s personality.  She’s fairly independent, not terribly destructive, and dissuaded from “getting into everything” by basic childproofing.  And childproof we did–everything we can lock or close or latch we did so, and what we couldn’t we gated off.  I read in one of those baby books that you really ought to childproof at least one room…but we childproofed everything, so I can put my baby down wherever we are and work while keeping half an eye on her.  It works well for all of us–she’s happy to explore everything she can reach, and I’m happy knowing that she’s safe while she does so.

The other thing we did to facilitate this is fill our house with toys.  There’s a toy box in every room, toys and children’s books on all the lower shelves, and larger, activity-center type toys in the corners.  I spend significant portions of my day picking up toys and books, but I also spend significant portions working, so I’ll take what I can get.

These days, my work space often looks like this:

(what you can’t see are the ants under the table . . . the perpetual ants who cannot be poisoned since they live in toddler-land)

I found during this time that the biggest barrier to getting work done was myself; it was easy to discount the five, ten, twenty, and thirty minute increments of happy playtime I had, since there was no way to know when any of them might come to an end.  The thought process that began with “there’s no point in starting now” would always end in a wasted day.  And, as always, there were times when I honestly couldn’t get work done–there were a few growth spurts and the week when the ear infection and teething and flu that hit all together–and it was easy in those times to forget that on a normal day, I was getting as much writing done as I ever did before I had a child.  I often had to give myself assigned times to write (naptime, early mornings before Drew began work) that could be guaranteed to be child-free, not because I couldn’t write with her around, but because I couldn’t get myself out of my way to take advantage of the time that I had.

I also found that to make the most of my short keyboard snatches during the day, I did more and more of my head-work while doing other things.  If I thought through a scene while I was prepping lunch, I could make the most of the fifteen following minutes by writing it down without having to pause to do the think-work.  I couldn’t afford to spend lots of keyboard time thinking, so I separated thought time and typing time as much as I could, which actually made my writing less frustrating over all.  Since I had a non-talking child during these months, there was plenty of time to think when my hands were busy.

So, against predictions, working during months six through twelve were doable at my house.   At twelve months things changed somewhat.  I’ll get back to you about that when it changes again.

2012 kicked my butt.

Last year around this time I was anxious to begin.  I was overdue with my first baby, and unsure how that was going to change my life, my work, my family.  I was ready to jump in and find out, and I kept having this thought: Janci, you are going to rock this year.

And I did.  But I wasn’t fully aware that it was going to rock me back.

And the strange part is, it had nothing to do with my baby.  The other day I ranked the list of things that were hardest for me this year, and my baby and all the millions of tasks that came with her was fifth.  FIFTH.  I’ll call that awesome thing number one for the year: I was blessed with an angelic and mellow child who is not all that hard to take care of.  (More about that will come in a Mommy Writer post, sometime next week.)

This year was also an awesome year in terms of work.  CHASING THE SKIP is a real book!  With a cover!  It was copy edited and line edited within the last year, and then I wait wait waited and it came out and people bought it and read it and gave it kind reviews.  In the month leading up to the release, I kept thinking, “I’ll be happy when this is over.”  And I was right.  I am happy.  Finally having a book in print feels like closure, even though I know it was really just another kind of beginning.

And then I wrote.  I finished revisions on three projects (on top of those line edits and copy edits above) and wrote a new novel and then half of another one.  (Yeah, didn’t finish in December.  Who is surprised?  Not me.  I’ll finish it.  It’s not on a deadline, so it doesn’t matter when, but right now I’m thinking February.)  Despite the prophecies of other nay-saying parents, my child did not end my ability to work.  (Even when she’s awake, much to my joy.)

I also sewed things, and took a few pictures (of things other than my kid).  I played many fewer video games this year, but only because a year in which both an Elder Scrolls game and a Borderlands game come out is a year we don’t play anything else.  I spent many, many hours exploring Skyrim.  It made me happy.  It still does.

But this was also the year of the absolute avalanche of medical bills.  We knew the maternity deductible was coming, but knowing it and seeing it are two different things.  So this was a year with two three-month stints where I honestly didn’t believe we were going to be able to make it work.  We didn’t have enough money, and we weren’t going to make it without real jobs.  We did make it, turns out, but that outcome was very far from inevitable.

This was also the year when I watched people I love go through terrifying personal crises, and could do literally nothing but listen and talk and watch.  This was the year my best friend’s little boy got diagnosed with cancer.  It was also the year he recovered.  There were other things I won’t talk about, but they were there, and they weren’t easy.

And, finally, it was the year I got somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty rejections–two from my own editor.  And no sales.  There is not yet a contract for a follow-up of any kind to CHASING THE SKIP.  And for most of the year that terrified me.

But something happened to me in October.  I let go.  And the last three months of the year, I finally figured out how to just do the things I can control, and let the rest go.  I finally figured out how to stop thinking about outcomes, and think instead about processes.  So this next year, I’m going to finish my most recent novel.  Then I’m going to finish three unpolished projects (including the book I wrote earlier this year, and the one I’m working on now) to get them ready for submission.  And if this is the year of thirty more rejections (or forty!  or eighty!), it won’t be because I didn’t do my part.  And in the end, that’s all I can ask of myself.

So the year rocked me.  And then I rocked it.  And this next year…I don’t even care.  I’m just going to live my life and parent my baby and write my books until I don’t feel like writing my books anymore.

And that’s all I have to say about that.