Summer Break(-ish)

I have always loved summer. Other people may not love the heat or the beaches, but I always have.

Summer breaks?

Let’s just say we’ve had a rough start… my very first summer break after my very first year of school started with me getting chicken pox (something you can avoid with modern vaccines). Then my little sister had them. Then my best friend.

It was an itchy summer.

Other summers have been spent traveling to see family, camping, hiking, biking, and all the other usual summer shenanigans kids enjoy before they can get summer jobs. Then there were those jobs: cleaning, babysitting, lab work…

Now I’m in the tempest-hewn summer of motherhood with older children. You’d think it would be easier, wouldn’t you? Two of the kids can drive. Everyone can cook for themself. They’re fairly good at keeping the house clean. There is less busy work to do but still a lot of parenting.

But, with everyone home, my workspace is now back in a main room of the house. There isn’t a nice door I can close to tell everyone I’m writing. There isn’t a set of alarms that send kids running off to school and mean I get a few hours where I can be off-duty from parenthood.

Let me tell you, it gets a little chaotic.

Okay… it gets very chaotic.

Everyone’s very keen to talk about boundaries these days, and it’s true, you need boundaries to have writing time. It’s easy to let writing fall lower and lower on the To-Do list, especially if you don’t have a deadline with an advance waiting for you. So how do you make sure you show up for your future self?

I’ll be honest, there’s probably a thousand books about how to reach your goals and a million more blog posts. So I’ll tell you exactly what I tell my friends when I edit their work: take what works best from this and lose the rest. This is what works for me. Try it. Adapt it. Evolve it into something that works for you.

 

1. SET GOALS… the key here is to set small, achievable goals. For the month of August I know I have ten days free where I can probably write. I know I write 2-3k per writing day. My goal for the month is 10,000 words. If I get to use every writing day to the full potential, awesome! I hit 30,000 words and celebrate! But, if I only get to write a little on each day, or have a good writing day on half of them, I can still hit my goal. There’s a whole science behind goal setting, and it’s proven that setting achievable goals helps you maximize your returns.
2. REWARD YOURSELF… yes, the end goal of writing is having a fantastic book that earns rave reviews and goes into it’s third round of printing while foreign publishers are fanatically bidding for a chance to translate your book and sell it in their countries. But that’s not happening when you’re working on the first draft of the book. So you need some way to reward yourself today. Me? I love stickers. I have a calendar where I give myself a sticker for every 1000 words I write. The sticker pack is $2 for 200 stickers, and I get a shiny hit of dopamine when I see my calendar.
3. TALK TO YOURSELF… there’s a ton of research about the power of positive thinking. We see it most often in athletes. They talk to themselves before their event. Psych themselves up. It works for authors too. Read your scene and tell yourself how awesome the book is. Out loud. Give yourself the pep talk. It doesn’t matter if you believe it, say it out loud anyway. It’s going to help.
4. STAY POSITIVE… the quickest way to kill a book is to tell yourself it sucks. Your brain believes what it hears, and if you continually speak negatively about your book and yourself, you’re not going to finish the book. A lot of people continue writing to prove people wrong, and that works, but only if you’re talking about how great a writer you are. Be kind to yourself. Love your book. Love the act of writing, and you’ll actually get the book done.
5. DON’T BE AFRAID TO FAIL… your first draft won’t be perfect. Your second probably won’t be either. With each book you write, you’ll get better. Your first books won’t be as amazing as your last ones were. That’s good! It shows you’re developing your skills and getting better! Failure is always part of the growth process. You are going to fall down a hundred times before you learn to walk, and you need to learn to walk before you can run. Learn from your mistakes, identify what’s gone wrong, and move on.
6. ONLY WRITE IF YOU LOVE THE STORY… in this era of side hustles and AI entertainment there are a million things you could be doing. Publishing is not a get-rich-quick industry. It’s barely a place where you can earn a living wage. Don’t waste your time writing a book if you don’t love it. Write for the joy of the story. Write because you’re passionate about the subject. Write because you love the idea of the book. Write because you can’t stop thinking about the next scene. Do that, and you’ll get the book you want eventually.