My husband, Damien, had a great suggestion for how I might try to keep up with writing after the baby is born. When he used to work at a Barnes and Noble, he would keep little slips of paper in his pocket and pull them out when he had down time, and he would write stories on them, one or two sentences at a time. It was slow going, but better than not writing at all, and eventually he’d end up with a complete draft of a story that he could then enter into the computer when he had time.

I was always extremely impressed by this. It seemed almost impossible to me to write without a computer and without enough time to really get into a groove. One of my biggest bad habits as a writer is that I always write on the computer (which means if I don’t have a computer in front of me, I don’t write) and if I don’t have at least a half hour stretching out in front of me, I tell myself I don’t have enough time to write just now.

But with a new baby, I may not have much of a choice. I may rarely have more than a few minutes at a time of solid free time, and those few precious minutes would be wasted if I turn on my computer and check my email (another bad habit—the first thing I always do when I turn my computer on is check my email) before beginning to write.

So Damien suggested I buy myself a small spiral notebook and try to keep it within easy reach all the time. He said I should try to train myself to write first drafts by hand—something I’ve always thought was a good idea, anyway, because it encourages more thorough revision since it’s easier to make dramatic changes when you’re entering the draft into the computer—and write in the small snips of time that will inevitably come my way: when the baby falls asleep, while the baby is nursing, etc.   

It’ll be difficult. It means training myself out of those two major bad habits that have been with me since I was a little kid, back when I wrote on a hand-me-down word processor and would lock myself in my room and write for hours and hours on end. But it seems like the best bet I have at keeping up the very good habit of writing often after the baby is born, and who knows, this new way of writing might inspire me to try other new things, too. I may find myself taking risks in my writing that I never would have taken before or revising even more exhaustively than I already do. This may be just what I need to push myself up to the next level as a writer.