A Snapshot of a Writer

I work an 8AM-5PM job like a normal person. I do my job to the best of my ability, and probably give it 125% effort every day because I deal with helping sick people get what they need from their insurance companies, hook them up with home services and help them with mountains of forms and paperwork.

All the while I am doing my day job there is a separate level of my brain where ideas are forming, percolating and sprouting. I'm aware of it happening but to the casual observer, I'm diligently doing my job. I'm diligently doing my job but that other part of me, the writer part, is also diligently doing its job simultaneously.

When I get home from work I eat dinner, and then I sit down to write. I write on my HP Stream at the kitchen table which is sort of the hub of my life. I eat my meals here. I pay the bills here. I do projects here. I prepare things to bake here. I've groomed and cleaned the cats here when they were kittens. I've sat Kelly on this table and washed and bandaged her scraped knees when she was younger. She sometimes sits across from me to check her email, read facebook posts, or writes. This is the epicenter of my home life as a writer.

I'm pretty quiet when I write. I have, in the past, played music on the main computer in the den before John bought me my Dell netbook, which I wrote on for five years, and now this computer that is about a year and a couple months old. The letters were worn off my Dell. The A is wearing off this keyboard already! I can hear the TV but don't pay much attention to it.

I have a small notebook and a pen near me, but only use it to jot down things I want to remember that I've just written- like a character's name, or why he/she did what they did, or a location- whatever- because I write out of my head and it comes fast and furious. Twenty-five pages later, fifty pages on I don't even know what I've written about, but I have a general idea. Stories leap from my imagination into print with no stops in between. I've had to train myself to jot brief notes in that notebook to mark imagination's soaring passage. I had to do that because Kelly got tired of my asking her, "What was that character's name, the one who...?" and "What was the name of the town they stopped in?" She's got an awesome memory (photographic). I can remember a lot of stuff except lines from movies, baseball players names, jokes, and what I've already written!

I write from 7PM-11PM, and occasionally up to midnight if I want to get the whole section I'm writing done before I turn in.

I do not go back and read what I've already written. I read the book when it's finished. That's where any continuity errors are caught and fixed and all the little tweaks are made to tighten it all up. I write on the fly and don't stop until it's done.

On weekends I do things that need to be done- like housework, errands, laundry, attend author events, read a little...and write in my spare time.

I'm sort of reclusive, but have started to get out into the community more. I was terribly shy growing up and still feel nervous meeting people and having to talk to them I've always written as a hobby to entertain myself, my family and friends. From ages eleven to twenty-one I sprawl on the floor or my bed and wrote longhand in notebooks. Occasionally I used my Mom's electric typewriter. Yeah, I was writing before there were computers. We got an Apple computer shortly after we got married in 1984, but still I preferred to write longhand or type. I was still using the typewriter when John got the Gateway computer. Kelly learned to use the computer before I did. I liked the typewriter well enough, but hated the backspacing to correct mistakes. That was the only thing that got me to use the computer in the mid-1990's for writing- the ease of correcting mistakes prior to printing! It took me a long time to trust my stories to still be there when I turned the computer on! Now I'm savvy enough to back up everything I write to a USB!

I've sort of always been involved with writing- arts and literary magazines in high school and college, satirical 'newspapers' in a previous job that amused my co-workers, writing various articles on antique and vintage buttons for 10 years for the Massachusetts State Button Society and serving as editor of the 42-page annual magazine during that time, writing annual holiday stories for my family, and then jumping into writing novels only recently- within the past five years, because I never thought I had it in me to write a novel until Kelly asked me to join her during NaNoWriMo in 2012. I've been writing novels ever since!

So- this is me, the woman who sits at her kitchen table after work and on weekends tapping away on the keyboard of her trusty HP Stream (that her husband stripped all the bloatware off of to increase the memory space- hugs & kisses to my IT guy!), creating novels that my circle of family and friends literally give me hugs for and then immediately ask when the next one is going to be out! (Two co-workers were gifted today with the first chapter of the sequel to Black King Takes White Queen...but I may shelf that novel until November and write it as my 2016 NaNo Novel. I have three other novels started and one that is finished but needs some work still before I'm happy with it.)

And if you stop by my house you won't find a pristine palace by any means. I live in a normal house and it's chock full of creative chaos and clutter. Kelly is also creative and a collector like me. Revere and Riley are here- Revere is always happy to greet a visitor, but Riley is more skittish. He may pass through to check out a visitor with a wary backwards glance. I call him the ghost cat since he's gray and white and flits by so fast. Now you see him, not you don't!

The magic of writing all happens at the scarred kitchen table that is marred by cat's grabbing the corners of it to get my attention. You can see letters and possibly whole words impressed into the wood from various writing projects in long hand when Kelly was in school. This table is 27-years old- has been a fixture here since we bought the house and bought the table. It was unfinished when we bought it. John stained the top, and painted the base and legs. It's a classic farm table complete with a drawer on one side that is shallow but deep. That drawer is full of vintage card games and decks of playing cards. (I collect vintage and antique decks of playing cards, another hobby!) I play solitaire to relax- regular solitaire and clock solitaire that my meme taught me to play between games of gin rummy.

This is a snapshot of me, the writer.