I’ve been thinking lately about routines. I read a recent article—which, I apologize, I was unable to track down and link to—covering the writing routines of various well-known authors. While certainly different writers write in their own different ways, it was striking the number of writers who routinely write first thing in the morning every day.

Now, of course, these were mostly (if not entirely) authors who make a living off of their writing—a dying breed, unfortunately—so it was surely much easier for these writers, whose sole job is to write and write well, to find the time to write first thing in the morning for several hours (and many of them would then return to writing again later in the day). Most of us have jobs to get ready for and papers to grade, children to feed and chores to do. For most of us, it’s hard to justify writing first and foremost every single day.

But it got me thinking about my own routines and productivity. The period of time when I was unequivocally the most productive was when I was in grad school. I wrote two full length books, and several stories besides, during my tenure as an MFA student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (Only one of those books got published, but still . . .).

While I was in grad school, Damien used to have to go in to work at like 6 or 6:30 Monday through Friday. I used to get up with him to spend some time together before he had to go in. Then, when he would leave for work, I would exercise, then write. The earliest I ever had to be anywhere was 10:00, and most days, I didn’t have to be on campus until later than that. So I handily managed an hour of exercise and a couple hours of writing before it was time to start getting ready to go in myself.

The result was that I wrote a lot more than I’ve ever written in my entire life. Some days, I would write more later in the day; other days, I wouldn’t. But either way, writing at the beginning of the day like that was an excellent way to start my days. I felt content with myself for having already gotten a fair amount of work done, and I could relax and just enjoy the rest of my days. And when I did write again, it was often because writing in the morning like that got me thinking about whatever project I was working on early in the day. Those thoughts would stay with me, simmering on the back burner, throughout the day.

After grad school, things got more difficult. I’ve tried a variety of different routines. For a while, I was setting my alarm for an hour before I needed to get up so I could write for at least an hour first thing. That worked well, while I did it—half the time, Damien would still be asleep, and the other half, he knew to leave me alone to write. It was a peaceful, relaxing way to start the day, sitting on the couch with my laptap and a cup of coffee.

But at other times, I tried different routines. I’ve tried writing at the end of the day instead of the beginning. I’ve tried not regulating when I write at all, instead regulating the amount of work I do. I’ve tried forcing myself to write for X amount of time per day, or an average of X amount of time per month. I’ve tried setting goals based on specific outcomes, such as complete X scene by the end of the day or finish X chapter by the end of the week. Nothing has ever worked as well as my grad school routine—getting up at around 5, exercising at around 6, and beginning writing at around 7.

Of course, a fat lot of good it does me to know that, now that I’m a mother. With a toddler added in to the equation, establishing and sticking to a writing routine has become almost impossible (note the “almost”). Lately, I’ve been writing after she goes to bed at night and using her nap time to grade papers and do other teaching tasks. This works well in that, at the end of the day, I have time, plenty of time, wonderfully unadulterated time, since Amie is asleep and Damien grades papers at the end of the day himself. But I’m tired at the end of the day. My mind doesn’t function the way it does earlier, and I find that, though I can write late at night, I can’t write as well or as much as I can first thing in the morning.

So I’ve decided I need to rethink and rework my writing schedule, establish a new routine, one that allows me to write when the writing’s good. I can’t write first thing in the morning like I used to—Amie wakes up when I do, unfortunately, no matter how hard I try to be quiet and not disturb her—but I’m sure there’s a way to find time to write during the day, while my mind is fresh and unclouded. The trick is that I need to just establish a routine—something that will work for me and Amie and Damien combined—and then stick to it, every day, without fail. I know routines don’t work for everybody, but they sure seem to work for an awful lot of highly productive writers, and I know from my own experience that they definitely work for me.

This Thursday marked the deadline for Jenni Moody’s and my first milestone on our novels. In case you haven’t been following along, Jenni and I are using a joint goal system to write our respective novels. The first goal was to have 10,000 words written by November 15^th. It seemed like a reasonable goal, and in fact it was, but still, I didn’t end up meeting it.

I got in touch with Jenni a few days before the 15^th and suggested we extend the deadline to the end of the month. Jenni, I think, would have been able to meet the goal—she was almost there by the time I asked for the deadline to be pushed back—but there was no way I was going to make it.

I was actually doing pretty well—building a steady momentum and feeling confident about my ability to meet the deadline—but then my mom came to visit for a week, and two days after we dropped her back at the airport I drove to Pittsburgh for the weekend to visit family and do a radio interview (I’ll talk about that some other time); then Amalie scratched the cornea of my right eye and I could hardly open my eye for a day; then Damien had minor surgery (he’s fine, don’t worry) and was recovering, leaving me almost solely responsible for Amalie for a week. Plus I had a bunch of papers to grade. Plus I had to do my tutoring hours.

Plus, Season Two of The Walking Dead became available on Netflix.

But the truth is, there are always reasons not to write. If you’re planning to wait until you have time to write that novel, I hate to break it to you, but that novel will never get written. And the real truth, even truer than that, is that I just didn’t manage my time well. I knew my mom was coming for a visit; I knew about the Pittsburgh trip. I knew when I would be collecting papers, when Damien’s surgery was scheduled for, when I would be scheduled for tutoring shifts. The only thing I didn’t know was coming was the scratched cornea, and that event—painful though it was—only caused me to lose a day.

So I should have planned ahead. I should have written extra words before my mom came. Then, I should have written extra, again, in that two day period between her departure and ours, for Pittsburgh. I should have restricted myself from watching The Walking Dead, or at least only allowed myself to watch it after I had written a specified word count for the day.

I could easily have met the deadline, but I didn’t. There’s no way to go back and change that now, so instead, I’m going to look ahead, to the new deadline, and make sure that I meet it. I’m going to remind myself that the culpability for this missed deadline lies with me, that the excuses I’m using are just that—excuses—that it isn’t fair to Jenni for me to keep pushing the deadlines back, that it isn’t fair to myself to keep not writing and not writing when the projects I want to write just keep piling up. That these stories aren’t going to be told unless I tell them.

Here’s how my thought process went just now (tell me if you can relate):

Alright, Amie’s taking a nap. I have an hour, give or take. What should I do?

Well, let’s see, I need to grade four more papers today or else I’ll fall behind. I also need to do some reading to stay on top of what I’ve assigned my students to read. I also should try to write about 500 words in my novel today. Plus I need to get ahead on my blog, since my mom is coming to town tomorrow. Oh yeah, and I need to read some submissions for Bound Off.

Then I sat there and stared at my computer for a minute. Then I went through the list of things again. Then I (metaphorically) balled myself into the fetal position.

Minutes later, I was going through the list of things I need to do for about the twentieth time and thinking about what time it is, and how many hours there are left before bedtime, and whether my insurance will cover an extended stay in a mental hospital should I have a nervous breakdown. Meanwhile, Amie’s nap was close to half over already.

This is one of the biggest things that prevents me from writing—I think about everything I  have to do, think about how much time I have to do it, become overwhelmed, and then waste what little time I have panicking. Maybe I’m right when I panic like this: maybe I couldn’t possibly get it all done today. But freezing up and wallowing in my own anxiety isn’t going to help me get any closer. Instead of knocking at least some things off the list, I get nothing done, which will just make tomorrow’s list all the longer.

So here I am. Getting started on the list. I tried to prioritize, but that just led to more panic. So instead, I just picked the thing I felt the most in the mood to do—get ahead on my blog. It was something I felt I could handle right now because (as you can tell) I suddenly knew exactly what I should write about. Amie’s up from her nap already, but you know what? My next step will be to ask Damien to watch her for a bit while I knock another thing or two off the list.

Because I can do this. I can get it all done. And if I can’t, big deal, I’ll get at least some of it done. Telling myself that I can’t, that there just isn’t enough time, has never, in my experience, been an effective way of creating more time. To my knowledge, there is no way to create time. Time is finite, there is how much there is. But worrying about how much you will be able to accomplish in the amount of it that you have is a waste of it. I’m going to try not to waste any more time with stress.

So, one task from my list: completed. What will I do next? It doesn’t matter. As long as I do something, it’s time well spent.

A fellow writer/mom just made a Facebook post that got me thinking about my state as a writing mama. The Facebook post talked about completing and submitting a draft of her dissertation, and it also talked about the job applications she is sending out and the two (two!) novels she has completed and begun submitting, too.

She is the mother of a toddler, a one-year-old. Where does she find the time????

Another writer friend of mine is also putting me to writing mama shame. Jayme Russell’s son, Dylan, is, I think, eleven. He was eight when I first met him, and he was so tiny and adorable and sweet and fun (he’s still most of those things, except that he’s not really so tiny anymore). In spite of having her hands full as the mother of a spirited school-aged boy, Jayme still found the time to earn her MA in poetry and is now working toward her MFA at the University of Notre Dame. Jayme has published nonfiction and poetry alike, and recently she made a vow to write a poem a day for the entire month of October (you can read about her progress in her blog).

She’s writing every. Single. Day. AND earning her MFA. AND being a mom.

Meanwhile, my relationship with writing has been very on-again/off-again since Amie was born, since I found out I was pregnant, even. It’s hard for me to find, not the time, maybe, but the energy to sit down and write when I spend most of my day chasing Amalie around, trying to prevent her from sticking everything she ever finds in her mouth and choking on it, and stressing out about whether I’m stimulating her mind enough and whether she’s hitting her developmental milestones on time. By the time I get Amie down for a nap or to bed at night, I don’t even feel like reading, let alone writing. To be fair to me, during a good deal of her sleeping time I grade papers or plan lessons, but I do have some genuinely free time . . . and I spend it watching Mad Men or playing Super Mario Land 3D.

I honestly think if I hadn’t already published a book before I had Amie, I would probably just give up on the whole idea of being a writer. I’m in my thirties, I would probably tell myself. I have a kid. It’s time to grow up and stop dreaming about something that’s never going to happen. But I did publish a book before I had a baby, and that, combined with whatever small success I’ve had so far, is enough to make me feel not like a would-be writer, but a writer, unqualified. It gives me the confidence to believe I should be doing this, should keep at it, that I am not wasting time dreaming the impossible.

So rather than looking at my writer/mama friends and telling myself, “I guess I’m just not a real writer, like they are. If I was, I would have found a way to be as productive as them,” I look at those ladies and feel inspired. I say, “So it is possible to juggle motherhood and the writing life. So I can do this.” And then, I do.

As If I Didn’t Already Have Enough to Do . . .

I talked last week about the new shared goal my friend and fellow writer Jenni Moody and I are doing to write our new novels. Our first milestone is 10,000 words by November 15^th. I have a little over 1,000 so far. Yes, I realize that’s not very much, but hey, I’m 1/10^th of the way there, and I’m feeling really excited about this project. I’m enjoying climbing into the voice of a new narrator, knowing that she and I are going to spend a lot of time together, that we’re going to really get to know each other in the next few months.

And maybe I’m getting overambitious, maybe the fumes from starting my engine to get going on this new novel have gone to my head, but I’ve decided—tentatively, and perhaps I’ll change my mind—to do one last revision of my thesis to submit it to Fence’s new Modern Prose contest. They’ve had a poetry contest for a while now, but this year they decided to create a prose contest as well. Their first prose prize will go to a novel. When I got the email announcing the prize, I felt like it was a sign. Okay, I don’t really believe in signs, but. You know what I mean. I felt like I should do this. I should try just one more time.

The thing is, I had recently been thinking about my thesis, anyway, thinking about how it’s been through who knows how many drafts and there are about 100 pages of cut scenes stagnating in a file on my computer. Most of those cut scenes were probably cut for good reason, but it occurred to me the other day that maybe the “right” form, the “true” form of this novel should lie not at one extreme or another, but at some halfway point between my early drafts and the current version. Maybe, in other words, I should look through those cut scenes and see if some of them should be put back in.

But my new novel is more important to me than trudging through an umpteenth revision of my thesis. I think there is more to be gained, right now, from working on something new, so if it comes down to it and I can’t possibly do both, I’ll focus on meeting the November 15 goal for the new novel.

Besides my two jobs working as a teacher and online tutor, and besides my other “job” as a mom, the reason why I might not be able to meet both these deadlines is that I’ve also taken a new volunteer position as an Associate Editor for Bound Off, the literary podcast in which my work has both appeared and is forthcoming. This new position, by the way, has nothing to do with my new story, Hair, which will be broadcast on Bound Off in a couple of weeks. My story had already been accepted when I started talking to the editors about joining their team.

Like the Fence prize, I learned about the opening through an email newsletter. I thought about it for a week or two, really weighing whether I thought I could handle the workload. Obviously, I decided I could. The job only requires me to read ten stories every two weeks, then offer my thoughts on the stories with a yay or nay vote. I think it will be fun and worthwhile—I’m just itching to get back into the editing game, to tell the truth.

But, of course, now that I’ve committed to this job, reading submissions and working on my new novel both take precedence over my thesis. So, right now, these are the things I have to do:

1.      Perform all the required duties for my two paying jobs

2.      Be a good mama—the best I know how to be

3.      Read and offer thoughts on submissions for Bound Off

4.      Write at least 9,000 more words in my new novel by November 15^th

Notice I put the new novel in the “have to” list. I consider this a true commitment. No excuses. I’m going to do this.

And, if time permits (and I hope it will!), I’m also going to work on these things:

1.      Revise my thesis to submit it to the Fence Modern Prose Prize

2.      Work on some stories

The following are things I don’t need to waste my time with, when time is in short supply:

1.      Watch old episodes of Mad Men on Netflix while Amalie naps instead of taking the chance to do something more productive

2.      Stuff my face with candy when I’m feeling overwhelmed (did I subconsciously buy too much candy for Amalie’s birthday piñata so that I could eat it myself after the party? Probably. Damn you, sweet-toothed subconscious!)

3.      Turn on my computer to work and, instead, spend the next hour reading and commenting on all of my friends’ Facebook status updates

So for the past few weeks, I feel like I’ve been struggling to stay afloat in the new semester. I’m working two part-time jobs—teaching two classes and tutoring online through Pearson---and it’s A LOT, when you add it to being a stay-at-home mom. Damien is also teaching two classes, also working another part-time job (as Managing Editor for New Ohio Review) for about twenty hours a week. Trying to get the hang of the new, busy busy busy schedule has been a handful. And to put it bluntly, I haven’t been writing. Not at all. Not a sentence. Not a word.

We’re into week five of the semester now, though, and we’re finally starting to feel in the swing of things. It doesn’t really mean we’re any less busy, of course. If anything, things are starting to get busier as we’re beginning to collect papers from our students. But we’ve at least started to figure out how to deal with my online tutoring hours in the midst of Damien’s New Ohio Review workload and both of our lesson planning and grading obligations. One of us is always there with Amalie, and for the most part, Amalie doesn’t seem to notice how busy her parents have become, or that she’s spending larger portions of time with one or the other of us (and less time, unfortunately, with both of us at the same time).

And so, I’m feeling ready, again, to start adding a writing schedule back into the mix. And to do it, I’ve enlisted the help of my friend and fellow UAF MFAer Jenni Moody. Jenni and I have both been planning on getting to work on a novel. For me, this will be my third go at novel writing (maybe three times will be a charm?). But even though I’ve written and revised two novels before, I still feel completely insecure at the outset about my ability to do this (who knows, maybe it’s because I’ve been down this road before—a road that has yet to end in publication for me—that I’m so anxious about starting down it yet again). Even though I feel really excited about this idea I have, even though I have a lot of ideas for what might happen in the story, still, STILL I’ve been having trouble mustering up the courage to just sit down and get started.

And that’s where Jenni comes in. Jenni and I have committed to doing a joint goal system for our respective novel projects. We’re both hoping to have a full draft of our novels done by next summer. To get there, we’re going to set goals together and encourage each other—checking in along the way. It should help to make the long, lonely road of novel writing a little less lonely, and it should help to keep us motivated. I know for me, I’ll feel embarrassed if I have to admit to Jenni that I didn’t meet a goal, so the fact that we’re doing this together will push me that extra little bit to really DO it.

We’re starting off fairly slow. Our first 10,000 words are supposed to be completed by November 15^th. At that point we’ll check in, hopefully applaud each other’s success at meeting the goal, and set a new goal for the next chunk. I suspect after having the first 10,000 words behind us, we’ll be ready to pick up speed a bit and set a bit more strenuous goal for the next milestone, but even if we don’t, this slow and steady pace should still see us with a finished draft, each, by next summer.

I’m excited to have someone to share the novel writing experience with, and I know it’ll be fun checking in with Jenni along the way. I’m ready! I’m determined! Let's do this thing! Go!

I’ve been feeling incredibly overwhelmed the past few days. I’m working considerably more this semester and am still in the process of adjusting to the new schedule. I came about this close to just saying “Screw it” to my blog this week, but here we are, Sunday afternoon. Amalie’s taking a nap, and I have two stacks of papers to grade, but I just couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t stay away.

I guess the truth is, blogging is linked in my mind with my writing self, that is, the side of myself that pretty much lives to write. That side of myself has been getting pushed more and more to the back burner lately, with my mommy self, my wifey self, my teachy self, and my watching episodes of Mad Men on Netflix and playing Super Mario Land 3D selves screaming for attention.

I’ve been blogging for several years now, almost as long as I’ve been taking writing really seriously. I started blogging in grad school, shortly after I started developing a strong work ethic as a writer and shortly before I started getting published. I know it isn’t BECAUSE of the blog that I became a real writer and not a would-be writer, like I used to be, but the two things feel very inextricable in my mind. They are woven together and can’t be separated. If I stop blogging, it’s like a statement to myself—I’m no longer willing to do the work to be a writer.

And the truth is, blogging about writing has helped me learn and grow as a writer. Part of the reason why I write to begin with is because writing is my way of thinking about and understanding the world. I can’t always come to terms with things, can’t always decide how I feel about them, until I write about them. Fiction allows me to climb inside the minds of people who I don’t understand and try to see the world from their perspectives. I come out on the other end a more empathetic, more forgiving person.

The same is true, for writing issues, of my blog. I blog about writing topics and obstacles I come up against in my writing life largely as a way of understanding them, deciding where I stand on them, and learning how to deal with and overcome them. I know bloggers get a lot of flak from non-bloggers as being self-indulgent, unoriginal, and wasting time talking about writing rather than actually writing (although writing a blog is still writing, right? Don’t we teach our students that they should take free-writes seriously because any time spent writing is valuable, is still practice?), but I’m not afraid to admit that blogging is really important to me.

So I’m blogging today as a sort of statement to my writing self, I guess. I still care about you. I do! I’ve got to get some papers graded, and my baby will be up soon, but I’ll check back in with you soon, I promise. You’re still an important part of who I am.

I feel like I post a lot complaining about the woes of academia, especially teaching adjunct. This, I promise, will not be one of those times.

For the past three years or so—pretty much ever since I graduated with my MFA and realized that the best job I could hope to get with the degree was part-time, adjunct work that offers no benefits or stability—I’ve been seriously considering switching careers and becoming a librarian. In fact, as recently as this past April, I was talking to some of the professors at the Columbus campus of the Kent State MLIS program and making plans to start in the program with a GA this coming fall.

But. I backed out. Because Columbus is an hour and a half drive from Athens, where I live. Because the GA position would require me to be on campus four days a week. Because it paid even less than teaching adjunct does, and I can’t afford to put Ami into daycare (nor do I really want to, to be honest) as it is.

At least, those are the reasons I told myself at the time. The real reason I changed my mind and instead signed up to teach classes in the fall at the community college where I work is that, somewhere deep down inside me, I’d rather teach.

There are a lot of things that are frustrating about carving out a career for yourself as a college instructor. Teaching adjunct pays abominably and you never know, from semester to semester, how many classes you’ll be offered (or whether the classes you did get will get cancelled due to under-enrollment just before the semester begins). Landing a full-time professor job feels impossible at times. I used to think I just needed to publish a book, but the truth is, even with a book published, I’m still not even getting contacted for interviews, let alone being offered any positions. And even if I did land a full-time job, there are frustrating things about that too. Professors are expected to publish regularly—you know, the “publish or die” mentality we always hear about—and to be honest, trying to get published and dealing with rejection is hard enough without my career hanging in the balance. Plus, I always hear professors objecting to the amount of time they have during the school year to actually write, between classes and committee work and editorial duties for their school’s journal and reading student theses and, and, and . . .

But the truth is, for a writer, teaching is about the best gig I can imagine. Even now, as I teach adjunct, I feel really lucky when I consider the alternative possibilities. Teaching creative writing, for one thing, holds you accountable to be writing yourself—otherwise, you feel like a fraud (Amy Hempl pointed this out when she was here for this year’s Lit Fest. She is so right!). It also makes you feel really inspired. Teaching comp and other English courses also has its benefits. Believe it or not, you learn a lot from your students and from trying to teach them the things you know but sometimes forget to apply to your own work.

Aside from the benefits of teaching itself, being a teacher does afford you a lot of time to write and, in my case, time to be home with your child and be there with her as she grows up. I taught online for the first nine months of Ami’s life. I can’t think of another career that would have allowed me to work entirely from home while I was raising my baby. Starting this summer, I began commuting back to campus one day a week, which I’ll continue doing through the fall. A job that only requires me to physically come in to work one day a week, well that’s pretty awesome, don’t you think?

Teaching three or so classes at a time leaves me with plenty of time to write. Yeah, I get that if I had a full-time job, I’d have a lot of additional demands beyond simply teaching, but even in that case, you get the summers and most of the winters off. Who can reasonably complain about having three months off every single year (and if you have tenure, an entire year off for sabbatical every seven years)? Full-timers have plenty of time to write. You could easily write a full draft of an entire book every summer, if you wanted to. If I was a librarian, I would have to work year-round, and I would have way less time to write, as a result.

So in spite of all my bitching and my “grass is greener” nonsense, I’m really lucky to be in the field I’m in. Teaching is the perfect profession for a writer, at least for me. I hope, of course, to someday land a full-time job, to buy a home with a yard and a swing set for Amalie, to plant ourselves somewhere and just live there, period, but in the meantime, teaching adjunct isn’t so bad. I’m glad I’m a teacher—I’m going to go ahead and say it. And here it is, in writing, so the next time I start getting all wishy washy about what I want to do with my life, someone can point me to this blog post right here and remind me how lucky I truly am.

Happy, happy Mother’s Day, everyone! This is my first Mother’s Day as a mama, and it also happens to be my little Ami B C’s eight month birthday—happy birthday, baby bean! This week, I bring you the close of my discussion of the AWP panel, “Barefoot, Pregnant, and at the Writer’s Desk: Managing Motherhood and the Writing Life.”

Hope Edelman is a nonfiction writer with five books to her name. Like Kate Hopper, Edelman said that before motherhood, her writing days were unstructured. Not so, now that she’s a mother. To work her writing time into her hectic mommy-life, Edelman keeps an office outside of the house and schedules writing time around the family schedule. In addition, Edelman has become a binge writer: she’ll often check into a motel something like 100 miles out of town—far enough to justify not popping home for dinner, but close enough that if a true emergency arises she can easily get back home—and spends the entire weekend just writing.

Edelman said that she sees her life as a sort of pendulum, which swings back and forth between her life as a mother and her life as a writer. She doesn’t seem to have much trouble maintaining the right balance between the two, and she says her kids really don’t have a problem with her disappearing sometimes to write—though her husband, she pointed out, doesn’t always like it.

Edelman gave a hilarious list of things she can’t do because she’s a mother and a writer, but she followed it up with a list of things she can do only because she’s a mother and a writer: her writing is enriched with details and a range of emotions that she’s only privy to as a result of the experiences she’s had as a mother; she’s much better now at budgeting time (though part of that is a result of reduced expectations); she can help her kids with their English homework way better than most parents can; she can offer her kids the exciting, interesting experience of going on a book tour.

Edelman said that of course motherhood has cut into her writing time—of course she could have written more books by now had she chosen not to have children—but she doesn’t mind. She’s focusing on the children she does have, not the books she doesn’t. I LOVE this attitude—this is exactly how I feel. I know I’m less productive now that I have Amalie, but that’s okay with me. I’d much rather have Amalie than the extra stories I could be writing.

Jill McCorkle is a fiction writer who has published eight books to date, five of which appeared on the New York Times notable list. Immediately after becoming a mother, McCorkle noticed the effects of motherhood on her writing. She’d been struggling with a novel that was just not working. After having the baby, she was able to go back into the draft from a new angle, focusing her attention on the character of the mother in her story, and suddenly the whole novel came together.

Like the other authors, McCorkle said all of her established rules for writing went out the window after she’d had a baby. She had to really convince herself that writing is a legitimate way to spend her time, that it does count as work and it’s okay to set up boundaries to make sure she has time to do it. Still, she noted, “Some of my best work has been written in the carpool lane or outside the grocery store . . . No one ever seemed to mind if I said, ‘I’m going to the grocery store to get dinner.’” So she would drive to the store, spend five minutes quickly shopping, then spend another half hour sitting in the car writing in a notebook.

She would also just take little notes throughout the day—everybody can find a minute or two to jot down an interesting idea, an image that really strikes them, a sentence or two that will evolve into something greater down the road. She would store these notes away until she was able to scrape together a chunk of time to write. Writing, for McCorkle, is not like a faucet that she can turn on and off, but rather, “a slow, steady drip.”

Like Edelman, McCorkle felt that being a writer enhanced her as a mother, and her children have developed a true appreciation for literature. No doubt the same will be true of Amalie. At a reading this weekend, someone was marveling at how well Amalie does at these events, and I pointed out that she went to her first reading when she was only two or three weeks old. She attended her first conference at five months old. She’s growing up in a house with overflowing bookshelves. She’s growing up surrounded by writers—not just her parents, but the vast majority of her parents’ friends and colleagues, too. She’s getting a very different view of literature than most children do, and I just don’t see how this all could not affect her (I believe in a good way).

It’s been two months since AWP, but I finally want to talk a bit about one of the two panels I managed to attend while there. This panel felt like it was tailored to me. The panelists talked about the exact issue I’ve been struggling with these past few months. The panel’s title? “Barefoot, Pregnant, and at the Writer’s Desk: Managing Motherhood and the Writing Life.” When I saw that this panel was being offered, and furthermore, when I saw that it was in the morning and so before Damien would be on duty at the New Ohio Review table, I almost, sort of wanted to believe in a higher power (well, not really, but you get the idea). It felt like destiny.

I told Damien, “If I only make it to one panel during the entire conference, it should be this one.” And I was right. I won’t go all hyperbolic and say this panel changed my life, but it did help me, and I came away with some concrete ideas on how to be a mom without giving up my writing self. I’m going to break this up into two posts because there’s so much to share from this one panel.

Katy Reed is a journalist who, since becoming a mother, has carved herself a niche writing articles about motherhood. Reed talked about how, when she first became a mother, she thought she was “doing it wrong.” Parenting guidebooks, she said, would lead you to believe if you aren’t stimulating your baby’s brain every second of every day, your baby will turn into a brain-dead zombie. She described, also, the “rosy, blissful, peaceful glow” parenting books and articles seem to think all mothers are supposed to emanate when they’re spending time with their babies. This didn’t match Reed’s experience at all. Sometimes you’re tired. Sometimes you’re busy. Sometimes you don’t even know how to stimulate your baby’s brain, since (in my experience), half the suggestions they offer in the guidebooks don’t even get your baby’s attention.

So Reed took her own feelings of shame over “doing it wrong” and began to write about them. She offered, as a result, mothers like me, who are struggling with the same sorts of feelings and uncertainties, an alternate way of looking at motherhood. I imagine, too, that in the process she came to terms with her own style of parenting and accepted it as legitimate.

Though Reed didn’t offer any concrete suggestions on how to juggle motherhood and writing, hearing her talk about her own feelings of inadequacy made me feel much better about my own. This is exactly what I’ve been going through. For the first couple months of Amalie’s life, I’d pass into hysterics fairly often, frantically telling Damien over and over, “We aren’t stimulating her enough. We’re messing her up! We’re terrible parents!” It was incredibly reassuring hearing someone else talk about having felt the same way, and knowing that her kids turned out just fine.

Kate Hopper is a nonfiction writer and a contributing editor for Literary Mama. Hopper shared her experience juggling writing a book while raising her young daughters. At one point, when she told one of her daughters, “I love you more than anything,” one daughter asked, “Do you love us more than your book?” Ouch! Hopper calmly explained to her girls that if she had to choose, she would choose her daughters, then added, “But I’m really glad I don’t have to choose.”

Hopper found that the time is there to write—when your kids are at preschool, for example—but you do have to make writing a priority. She recommended that writing parents should figure out what they can realistically do as far as writing goes—what goals and schedules can you reasonably expect yourself to keep?—and then really commit to it. Writing as a parent is different from writing without children in that way. You have to be very disciplined. Before she had kids, Hopper could procrastinate and waste time waiting for inspiration. Now, when there’s a window of time, she has to use it.

While finding the time to write can be difficult as a mother, Hopper, like Reed, seemed to feel that writing helped her to deal with the struggles of motherhood. “The truth is,” she said, “I can’t imagine motherhood without writing.” I can’t, either. As fulfilling and rewarding and all those other cheesy things as motherhood is, writing is a much needed break from it all; it’s a means of thinking through and understanding yourself and your child(ren); and it’s a way of hanging on to your old self, of being more than just a mother.

Next week, I’ll tell you about nonfiction writer Hope Edelman and fiction writer Jill McCorkle’s takes on the subject.

In the house across the street from mine lives a small family—a mother, a father, and maybe two or three kids. They have a swingset in their yard, and now that the weather is warm and beautiful, you often see one or two girls swinging away. It reminds me of how much I loved to swing when I was a kid—well, I still love swinging, to be honest. When I was little, I’d spend hours, HOURS, on the swingset in our backyard. I used to bring my little portable CD player out with me and listen to music and swing until either A) a bee would come by and scare me back inside, or B) my mom would call me in for dinner.

Now, I am thirty-one years old. My hair is turning white, one long, wispy strand at a time. I am a mother, a wife, a college instructor. Strange though it seems, I am a grown-up. I’m not sure when that happened, but somewhere along the line, when I was looking the other way, I guess, I passed through childhood, through young adulthood, and ended up here.

As you may have noticed from last week’s post, I’ve been feeling a bit depressed lately about my prospects as a writer/college instructor. These things didn’t bother me that much before I had a baby, but now, at times, I’m completely consumed by my desire to publish more, land a decent job, and generally find a bit of stability for myself and my family. I feel frustrated that my daughter won’t get to grow up with a nice backyard and a swingset, like I did. I feel frustrated that every summer, we don’t even make enough money to cover our basic living expenses (true story: the summer I signed my book contract, we DESPERATELY needed the money I got for my advance. I honestly don’t know what we would have done if that bit of luck hadn’t happened at just the right time. We would have emptied out our savings account well before the end of the summer).

I think to some extent, having published my first book a little over a year ago adds to these feelings. When I first found out I was getting the book published, I thought it was going to create a sort of domino effect for my career. I imagined I could use the fact that I was getting one book published as leverage to get an agent and publish another. Then, with two published books and an agent, I would go out and land myself a full time job, which would afford me a stable enough income that I could write more and more books without the distraction of worrying about money all the time or having to work during the summer.

Of course, that isn’t what happened. It’s hard to say whether having a book published already made any difference when I was querying agents last time around. It may have—at least one agent told me my credentials were “impressive”—but I probably got about the same average of manuscript requests as I did when I was querying agents without a published book under my belt, and,  just like before, all of those still ended in eventual rejection.

And the more time that passes since my book’s publication date, the more I think prospective agents, editors, and employers alike are going to ask, “Alright, but what have you done lately?” I have this overwhelming fear that if I don’t publish another book in the next couple of years, having published a book won’t really matter at all anymore—in terms of being a stepping stone for my career, anyway. If you don’t keep steadily climbing higher on the ladder, the rungs get too slippery and you fall clear off.

But who knows? Maybe I’ll be able to pull myself back onto the ladder. I haven’t fallen off yet, I don’t think. Right now, I’m just sort of dangling, looking down and up and back down again, trying to find some way to regain my purchase. I’ve been writing again, and that’s a good first step. I’ve started submitting again, too: ten submissions a month, just like I used to do. I’m very, very seriously considering applying for PhD programs, and I’m even thinking about trying to get a seat in a graduate level workshop at Ohio University (since Damien’s an employee, I can take classes for half-tuition). Whatever happens, I’m going to try not to let these feelings of failure get the better of me. There is still hope, isn’t there? There is always still hope.

I talked last week about how I’ve been easing my way back into the writing game these past few weeks. I’m doing things kind of differently, at least for now as I get used to integrating writing back into my life. I used to be a very goal-oriented writer, believing that goals are what keep us going in life. I still think this is somewhat true, and I know that I never would have written and polished two book-length manuscripts while I was in my MFA program (and published one of them shortly after graduating) if it weren’t for the goals I was setting for myself each month.

But for now I’m leaving the world of goals behind. I have to. My life is too unpredictable, too uncontrollable right now with a five-month-old baby. Some days, it’s hard just to keep up with my teaching duties; writing, unfortunately, has to be pushed to the back burner for a little while. Amalie and the overall sanity of my family unit come first, teaching, second (because it’s my job, after all). Writing, then, is a luxury that I long for but can only indulge in sometimes, on the rare occasion when Amalie doesn’t insist on napping on my lap. (Every now and again, I go ahead and write while she’s sleeping on me . . . as, in fact, I’m doing right at this moment writing this blog. But trust me, it’s very difficult to type with only one hand free, the other supporting the body of your heavier-every-day child. My mind works much, much faster than the fingers on only one hand can.)

In some ways, though, I think this experience has replenished some of the magic in writing that had been lost from years of training myself to write almost every day. For a while, writing was like eating, or like personal hygiene: just one of the things you do almost automatically. And that was nice. But. When something is as automatic to you as brushing your teeth, it can sometimes lose some of its power, some of its ability to bring pleasure.

Don’t believe me? Try eating your favorite candy bar every day—hell, have two a day, maybe three. You’ll find very quickly that you stop enjoying it. It just becomes this thing you do. You might crave it, feel lousy if you don’t have one, but it doesn’t taste as good as it used to when it was a now-and-again, special kind of treat. (A side note: the same is probably true for you of soda, in reverse. Most people drink a lot of soda, so much that I think they cease to really taste it. I have some Sprite or Sierra Mist about once a year, and that once a year it tastes so, so good. If I make the mistake of trying it again a week later, it tastes less good. If I have another one, say, a week after that, I don’t like it at all. I can only have it about once a year if I want to experience that amazing, refreshing, delicious taste.)

Anyway, now that writing is this thing I badly want to do but can only do sometimes, I’m reminded how very, very much I love it. How good it feels when a story comes together. How exciting it is to read something I’ve slaved over and know that it is exactly as I want it to be.

In many ways, this is like taking several steps back in my progression as a writer. This is where I was, I don’t know, maybe ten years ago: writing only some of the time and being distracted with other things. But those “other things,” right now, are more important than my little scribbles. My baby is more important to me than anything I’ve ever written—there would be something seriously wrong with me if I didn’t feel that way. And I can’t help feeling like pausing a bit to rekindle my passion for writing is exactly what I should be doing now, anyway.

So. Instead of time goals, and, in fact, instead of keeping track of my writing time at all, for now, I’m just keeping track of the days. Which days I wrote, if even for only a few minutes, and which days I didn’t. I’m hoping that this will take away the guilt I feel when I add up the time I spent writing each month. The guilt is not helping. The guilt is not helping at all. I need writing to be associated with good feelings. The joy of getting lost in my own imagination. The thrill of learning about the world around me. I want to write because I want to write, not because I’ll get down on myself if I don’t.

I decided recently that it’s been quite long enough, and it’s time for me to get back into the writing game. Of course, the decision to begin writing again is one thing, and the actual beginning of writing again is another thing altogether. It was necessary, then, for me to formulate some sort of plan to ease myself back into the world I used to live in so completely.

I made the goal that during my winter break from classes (which lasts a paltry three weeks), I would write every single day for at least fifteen minutes. “Fifteen minutes? That’s nothing,” you say. “Not even enough time to really get the fire going.” True enough, but I settled on this goal for a reason: it would be easy for me to keep it. Anyone can scrape together a measly fifteen minutes a day, and because I would be on break from teaching, it would be even easier for me to make it work. 

My hope is that writing at least a little every single day will help get the wheels turning once again, after which it shouldn’t take me too long to get back up to speed. My break only officially began this past Monday, so it’s difficult to assess too thoroughly how well it’s working. I can tell you that on day two (Tuesday), I forgot to sit down to write. Forgot! I was so frustrated with myself on Wednesday when I realized my mistake, but on Thursday I wrote for a little over half an hour and made up for it.

I also contented myself with the knowledge that forgetting to write one day is not the same as choosing not to write. The fact is, I’m no longer so mired in the writing world that going a full day without writing could never escape my notice. Writing used to be, for me, like taking a shower: you do it pretty religiously every day, and if for some reason one day you can’t, you survive it . . . but you’re very aware that you missed a day. I’ll get back there, I know I will, but it’s going to take a little time.

In addition to the day I completely forgot to write, on Friday I didn’t get a chance (sort of). Even though the ideal time for me to write is fairly early on in my day, right now, with a three-month-old baby and a husband who doesn’t get a winter break from his main job (working as the Managing Editor of New Ohio Review), I’ve been taking my fifteen minutes at the end of the day, just after Amalie goes to bed. I probably could find time earlier in the day, but the end of the day thing was working well enough. Until Friday. The day Amalie, for whatever reason, simply would not go down without a fuss. She kept falling asleep, but the second I’d lay her down she’d wake up and start crying. Finally, at around 1:30 AM, she drifted off, but I was too tired to even think about writing (plus, it technically wasn’t Friday any longer).

Other than those two slips, I’ve enjoyed my few minutes of writing time each day, and am already finding myself thinking about this piece or that idea when I’m not physically writing. I may have to flush all the brown water out of my system before I can write anything very good, but still, writing at all again feels pretty great. It’s like I’ve been wandering lost for what feels like a very long time, but now I’ve stumbled upon an overgrown path that looks vaguely familiar. I have to beat the weeds and tree branches out of my way, but I feel fairly positive that if I keep heading forward, this path will let me out somewhere I want to be.

I thought it might be nice, since my Ami B. will be three months old this Tuesday, to take a look back at how things have changed for me, as a writer, since becoming a mother. Much to my surprise, for the first couple of weeks, I actually did have plenty of time to write, or at least, I would have if I had chosen to use it for that. I did not. Ami slept most of the time, and she hardly ever cried. But rather than using her sleeping time to write, I tried to rest as much as I could, too. I was, after all, on the mend, in more than the usual way, since I got very sick immediately after the delivery and was bedridden in the hospital for a few days.

Then, just when I started getting my energy back, Ami started staying awake more and more, and spending, as it turned out, the majority of her waking time crying. She started wailing when we tried to lay her down in her crib. To increase my milk supply, she started eating more and more frequently—sometimes as often as every hour, which meant I sometimes spent most of the day and night with her attached to one breast or the other. That free time of the first two weeks, which I had wasted sleeping or staring blankly at some crappy Netflix reality TV show or other, was gone, and I resigned myself to the fact that I just wouldn’t be able to write, probably, for several months.

But I’m happy to say that finally at about two months old, my Amalita started fussing less and less. Her prolonged nighttime fussiness—called unhappy hour or the witching hour, depending on which book you read—pretty much went away altogether, and when she does fuss, now, we sort of know what to do most of the time. On top of that, her sleeping habits have gotten more predictable. She still refuses to sleep in her crib (from talking to other parents, I’m beginning to think that no baby in the history of babies has ever willingly slept in his or her crib), but she’ll go down for a good five hours at the beginning of the night and then wake regularly ever three hours after that for a little nighttime snack. I’m actually getting a reasonable amount of sleep again . . . and having dreams! Oh, sweet dreams. Even when they’re nightmares it feels so good to wake up and know that I was sleeping deeply enough to have them.

And though she’s awake and alert most of the day now, which means she needs almost constant attention, the time to write is there if I take it. Damien and I have both started to get the hang of this whole parenting thing, enough, anyway, that we’re not convinced we’re doing everything wrong and damaging her in some irreparable way. As a result, he can take her when I need to get something done, and vice versa. Still, I haven’t really been writing. It would be a lie to say I haven’t written at all since she was born, but still, I haven’t written more than maybe a total of a couple pages, not counting blog posts and a book review. The time is there, in other words, but just like that first two weeks after Amalie’s birth, I’m not using it to write.

But I do have plans to slowly get back into the writing game during the winter break. I’ll tell you all about it next week.

This past week I read this really crappy book, Secrets of the Baby Whisperer by Tracy Hogg and Melinda Blau. While the majority of the book had vague advice, which it repeated over and over again just to fill in enough pages to make it a full book, I felt, and which was often dubious at best, there was one tidbit that I took from the book that I can’t help but apply to myself.

The book classifies new parents on a sort of spectrum, from very organized and plan-oriented to fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants spontaneous types. The authors recommend the reader gauge where he or she falls on the spectrum in order to be more prepared for what aspects of taking care of a baby will be the most difficult for that person. I definitely recognized myself as being on the far end of the organized planner side of things. I’m a list maker; I wake up in the morning and calculate how much time I should spend on each activity that day and what time I should begin each new task; I keep a running tally of various things in my head at all times (calories eaten that day, time spent exercising, time spent on housework, time spent relaxing, and of course, time spent writing).

The authors suggest that people closer to the planner side of things tend to have a lot of trouble getting into the swing of life with a baby. Babies are spontaneous little creatures. They eat when they want to eat, sleep when they want to sleep, and cry when they want to do anything other than whatever they’re currently doing. Someone like me, who lives by my own self-imposed schedule, understandably has trouble adjusting to the new lifestyle.

For the past several years, I’ve been very focused on building myself up in specific ways. When I was in my MFA program, I spent tons of time and energy establishing good habits as a writer and building up publication credits. After I graduated, I was focused on getting a book published, and after I reached that goal, I was concerned with building up my CV in the hopes of eventually landing a full time job somewhere. I’m goal oriented, and I’m all about plans and dedication and working hard to get where I want to be.

Having a baby, I can see already, is going to force me to sloooooooow down. The first couple of weeks were fine, but now I’m scraping together less and less time to get anything done. Because I’m breastfeeding and Amalie isn’t ready, yet, to be introduced to expressed milk in a bottle, I can’t be away from Amalie for more than an hour or two—I’m the only one who can feed her. On top of that, I’ve had some problems with plugged milk ducts, which can lead to mastitis if I don’t spend a fair amount of my day pumping out whatever milk Amalie didn’t drink and massaging the plugged ducts. I spend probably at least twelve to fifteen hours a day in breastfeeding related tasks. I sleep for maybe six hours, here and there when I can, and the other three to six I have to divvy up between spending time with Amalie while she’s actually awake and bright eyed, and passing her off to someone else, so I can get something non-baby related done.

It’s hard.

And it’s made harder by the fact that I took on way more commitments than I should have for this first few months, back before I knew what I was getting myself in to. I agreed to teach an online class this quarter, which already I’m having a hard time keeping up with. I’m doing it, don’t worry, and I’ll find a way to continue to do it through to the end of the quarter. But it’s difficult. I also volunteered to write a book review for an online journal, which I had intended to finish prior to Amalie’s birth, but being distracted and jumble-headed during the end of the pregnancy, I didn’t get it done. Now I’m still distracted and jumble-headed, but add to that the fact that I have very little time to actually do anything anymore. Plus, my abdominal muscles separated during the pregnancy. This, I’m told, is very common, but it has to be rectified by daily exercises fairly soon after childbirth. Otherwise, the muscles will remain separated, and I’ll have an unsightly pooch between them for the rest of my life. (This may seem like a silly thing to be concerned about right now, but imagine looking back in ten years and knowing there’s something I could have done to get my body back, but I just chose not to do it. I managed to get through the pregnancy with no stretch marks, after all; I’ll regret it if I don’t take care of my tummy while I can.)

And I haven’t even mentioned any writing related projects, though there are a few that I’ve been hoping I would have the energy to work on during these first few months, before Amalie is mobile. But rather than panicking, I’m trying to just take it as a sign that it’s time, really, for me to slow down. It’s time for me to stop trying so hard, to stop obsessing over my career, my writing, to stop worrying about whether or not I’m spending my time efficiently. The transition is going to be difficult, don’t get me wrong, but I think this is going to be good for me. And either way, I have only to look into my baby’s beautiful blue eyes to see that it’s so worth it.

Now that I’ve had the baby, I’m for the first time getting to actually see what life is like as a mom. For the past few months, I’ve been struggling to keep up with my writing and worrying about how my writing habits might diminish once the baby arrived. The funny thing is, despite the fact that I have to be up every two hours to feed her—which means part of the time when baby is asleep, I’m asleep, too—and despite my other commitments, I still have more spare time than I would have otherwise expected, time I can easily use to write.

And on top of that, I’ve had this amazing experience to write about—I now know what it’s like to deliver a baby! Delivering a baby is one of those things that nobody can ever quite describe clearly. People will tell you that labor is insanely painful or that once you reach a point where you’re able to push you feel much better, or they’ll describe somewhat vaguely the complications that arose during their labor, but, maybe because memory is weak and flawed, nobody that I ever talked to was able to give me a clear idea of what labor and delivery would actually be like.

As a result, like most women, I went into it pretty terrified. When my water broke, I sort of knew that my water had broken and that I needed to head over to the hospital, but I was so afraid of what would happen when I got there that I convinced myself that maybe it wasn’t time, after all, so I called the hospital to describe to them what had happened. Of course, they told me I needed to come in right away, and eight hours later my baby was prostrate on my chest for our first ever skin-to-skin bonding.

The whole experience was world shaking, like nothing I ever could have imagined. I don’t hold many idealistic views about natural childbirth, but I ended up deciding not to use pain medication. I had made up my mind in advance that I wouldn’t go into it having already decided to use drugs, but that I would let myself decide based on how I was feeling at the time. That said, I pretty much assumed that I would, eventually, ask for an epidural, I was just hoping I would hold out long enough so as not to increase the risk of needing pitocin, which increases the chances of having a C-section. But, painful and exhausting though the experience was, it was never so bad that I felt I needed something to take the pain away (and good thing, too, because it’s quite possible that not having pain medication saved my life. I developed a rare but very dangerous syndrome immediately after delivery, which was caught and taken care of right away, thank goodness, only because I was hurting in ways and places that I shouldn’t have been hurting. Had I been somewhat numb to the pain, I might not have said anything, so my midwife wouldn’t have known to check me for the problem).

So I really had the whole, unrepressed childbirth experience. That eight hours of my life (and actually, the four days that followed, during which I was confined to a hospital bed, hooked up to all kinds of monitors and IVs, while trying to manage breastfeeding and getting to know my baby for the first time) gave me tons of material to write about in my letters to my baby. The words still aren’t flowing from me with no effort, the way they used to, but still, I have something I want to say, which is in itself something of a miracle, compared to the way I've been feeling lately. I can go back later and revise what I’ve written to try to make the language more lyrical and the imagery pop, but for now, I’m glad that the experience was so mind-blowing and that I’m left with a burning urge to get it all down now, before it all begins to drift away from me, as it inevitably will.

Maybe it’s because it’s been just over two years since I graduated with my MFA, or because my husband, Damien, just graduated with his MA, or some combination of the two, or neither. Whatever the reason, I’ve been daydreaming about—romanticizing, again—my time as a graduate student. Aside from the fact that those were some fun, carefree times for me, during my last two years in my program at UAF, I was at my peak of productivity as a writer. Since graduating, I’ve published a book, yes, and I’ve published several short pieces in journals as well, but as far as time spent in front of the computer actually writing, I’ve never been able to match what I was logging as a grad student.

Sometimes as a grad student I would complain about how being an MFA student didn’t afford me the time to write I’d thought it would. Looking back on it now, of course, I know that’s demonstrably untrue. I had to do a lot of reading and paper writing, studying for the comps exam, teaching, and tutoring at the university’s Writing Center, but let’s be honest, I still had several hours a day leftover in which to write. And I used it. I did. I wrote a lot during that time. The majority of my book is comprised of stories I wrote in grad school.

There are a number of reasons why I haven’t written as much since then. Teaching three classes at a time—and in one awful, stressful quarter, four—has kept me far busier than teaching one and taking two or three ever did. Working under deadline to polish and edit a book took time away from new writing. Dealing with the crushing realization that having a published book means very little in the grand scheme of things brought on feelings of depression, which were difficult for me to write through, and, naturally, preparing to have a baby has kept me pretty distracted.

The past week, though, I’ve been writing more and more, and I’ve been feeling more like my old, MFA student (as opposed to MFA graduate) self. Anytime I experience a shift in my drive or abilities as a writer, I look at the variables in my life and ask myself what might have caused the shift. This week there was one glaring change in my life: Damien, who’s been working part time as the Managing Editor of New Ohio Review since July first, began teaching a summer course in addition to his editorial duties. Where he had been spending four hours at the office Monday through Friday, he’s now gone for six to seven hours a day.

I, on the other hand, haven’t been working at all. I wasn’t able to line up any summer classes, and I wasn’t able to find another summer job as no one particularly wanted to hire a big, fat pregnant lady who’s just going to quit when her due date gets close. At first, when Damien started the Managing Editor job, I told myself I would spend at least half the time he was gone writing. But it didn’t work out that way. I have prenatal yoga to do, and I’ve also been spending an hour or two a day on household chores (I am, after all, a housewife now—how odd). Add to that showering and other basic life activities (like making and eating breakfast and lunch), and by the time Damien would arrive home from his four hours at the office, I usually either hadn’t written at all, or had only written for half an hour or so.

But now that he’s gone for six or seven hours, I have been writing for a good hour or two every day, and I’ve been reading a lot, too—what a wonderful feeling! Because we now live an extra mile from campus and because it’s been very, very hot and humid this summer, I’ve been getting up early with Damien to give him a ride to work. When I get home, I do my prenatal yoga, shower, eat, then write and read for a few hours until I decide it’s time to get on top of the chores.

And you know what I realized? This is a lot like the routine I had going when I was in grad school. In Alaska, Damien worked from 6:30-2:30 and would get up at 5:30 to get ready. I’d get up with him, so I could have coffee and spend a little time with him before he went in. Then, when he left, I’d exercise for an hour or so and write until it was time for me to get ready to go to campus (usually not until ten or eleven at the earliest). Replace the household chores I do now with the schoolwork and teaching I did then, and the schedule is very similar. In both cases, what affords me the time to write is the fact that I get up early—even though some days I’d rather not—to ensure that I’ll have time to get everything done and still have time to write before the end of the day, when Damien and I are both home together. Because I love my husband and would rather hang out with him, honestly, than do anything, including writing, I know if I haven’t written by that point in the day, I won’t. I simply won’t.

The idea of getting up early to write is nothing new. Many writers swear by it. I’m sure for some people it’s necessary and for others it isn’t, but for me, it is. I should have known that by now. I definitely do my best writing earlier in the morning, before anything much has happened to distract me from my made up worlds, and as much as I love sleep, I love the satisfaction of getting in a good hour or two of writing time more. Routine, for me, helps a lot too. The two things combined are, finally, allowing me to recapture some of that productivity (and positivity) that I felt back when I was in grad school. Hurray! May it last and last!

Sometimes, I think, we writers get spoiled by those times when the words seem to flow like water from a tap—just turn it on when you’re ready to write, and turn it off when you’re done for the day. We get spoiled by those extended periods when we have ample time, when our friends and loved ones seem uncommonly understanding, when life’s little stressors seem to have decided to give us a break for a while, when everything, in other words, seems to align just right so that we can write and write often and write well.

We appreciate those times for what they are, but still, we begin to grow used to them after a while. We become accustomed to sitting in front of the computer and turning on the words. We begin to think that maybe we’ve done our time, fought our battle and won it, and now the world will forever step aside and just let us be writers, at last.

But inevitably, the good times will dry up, and on will come the not so good. Something stressful will happen at work or at home or in our families, or worse, for no apparent reason, the tap will just stop flowing. Did we forget to pay the word bill this month? We turn it on, and it just sputters, then dies.

We have any number of ways of referring to these other times: writer’s block, being too busy, being uninspired. Whatever we call it and whatever brings it on, one thing remains fairly consistent each time: after a while, we begin to wonder if we’ve lost whatever it was we once had. We begin to wonder if we aren’t, after all, the writers we once believed ourselves to be.

But it’s that doubt, more than anything, that causes the real problem, I think. I don’t know that there’s anything wrong or evenly remotely unusual about your ability/time/energy/etc. to write sort of ebbing and flowing, sometimes unpredictably. I’ve heard so many successful writers say that sometimes they just need a break from writing, or sometimes they’re just too busy, and that’s okay. Life has to be lived. That’s where we get our material from to begin with.

But when we begin to obsess over whether or not we’ve lost “it,” that’s when the real damage can be done. If I’m questioning my own abilities as a writer, I begin to feel even more distracted, even more blocked, even less inspired. If a day goes by and I don’t write, I begin to think that I’m a failure, that I can’t reasonably call myself a writer. The next day, when I sit down to catch up, I feel frozen. Who do I think I’m fooling? I wonder. I can’t do this. I’m not a writer. And, like the self-fulfilling prophecy those words are, I suddenly can’t do it—I’m too busy thinking about the act of writing itself to actually write anything.

I’m beginning to think that the best thing a writer can do when he or she is going through a dry spell is to just relax and not get too caught up in what it all means or how to break free of it. Sometimes the attempt to shake the block just makes the block worse, oh so much worse. When I write well, when my writing is actually coming together in a satisfactory way, it’s always during a time when I feel confident about my own abilities. When I question my own abilities, my writing gets lousier and lousier, which perpetuates the questioning, and so on.

I’ve been caught in the chaos of a move the past few weeks and have hardly written at all in that time. But for once, when I felt myself begin to get sucked into that downward spiral, I pulled myself back again and reminded myself that I had perfectly good reasons to not be writing—I was busy and distracted (and six months pregnant, which meant I was also tired and swollen and distracted by baby plans, too)—and I refused to let myself even think that my lack of writing said anything about my abilities or future as a writer. So now that we’ve finally finished unpacking and putting away most of our stuff, I’ve been able once again to ease back into writing with little trouble. If I’d gotten too down on myself about not writing, I probably wouldn’t have bounced back so quickly.

I get so spoiled sometimes by the good times, I fail to see the bad times for what they are: a pause, a break, a necessary breather. Sometimes things just happen. Sometimes other things are just more important. But we need to try to remember that there is a difference between the would-be writer who has a million story ideas but never seems to get around to writing (or revising) at all and the genuine writer, who writes when he or she can, and doesn’t when he or she can’t. Just doesn’t. And that’s okay.

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.