Why I’m Writing About Nora Roberts
Happy 2018! As promised, I’m kicking off my first blog post of the new year with an excerpt featuring New York Times bestselling women’s fiction author Nora Roberts.
Recently, as I was cleaning out some files, I stumbled across an old magazine article I had written many, many years ago on Nora. The piece never got published. As often happens in the publishing industry, editors leave, assignments get nixed, magazine content directions change…
I had retained the rights to the story, and had always meant to pitch it to another publication. But I was a young, working mom, and life somehow, as it does for so many women, got away from me. The article sat in my files for years. Looking at it again, it felt dated, it was written so long ago… and yet the sidebar, where Nora shared advice for working moms, still applies.
So, although I no longer have young kids, and Nora has gone on to become even more famous and accomplished than she was back then, I’m sharing just her tips here, instead of the full piece. Many articles have been written about Nora Roberts over the years. Yet, somehow, this sidebar still takes me back to my former life; doing phone interviews on headset while breastfeeding, writing frantically while my kids napped, always scrambling for time.
Thank you to Nora, for what I still fondly recall as a wonderful interview, and to Goodreads (which didn’t even exist back when I did the story) for giving me the perfect place to share it. And to all you writer moms out there—keep writing, even if your writing time is confined to your kid’s naptimes, or while waiting in line at the grocery store, or sitting in the carpool lane at school pick-ups, or on your lunch hour at work, or in the wee hours of the night, the only time you can seem to get to it. This one’s for you:
Keeping it all Together—Nora’s Tips for Working Moms
On the secret of her success:
"It takes a lot of juggling. Some of the balls are glass, some are rubber. The idea is to recognize which are glass—your kids’ first school play—and which are rubber—your neighbor’s Tupperware party. You don’t want to drop the glass balls, you’ll never get them back. If you drop the rubber ones they’ll bounce back sooner or later."
On ways to not only stay sane, but to excel:
"Back to the glass and rubber balls. It’s all priorities. Moms who work outside the home have to juggle faster and more skillfully than others. And we can spread ourselves too thin trying to keep them all in the air. So, you let a few go, because if you don’t take care of the juggler, there’s no show."
On not sweating the small stuff:
"Sometimes, when you’re in the middle of that three-ring circus—deadlines looming, kids yelling, and the dog just piddled on the rug—it helps to step back, take a look and remember, it really is your show. And that’s an amazing thing. Your deadlines, your kids, your dog. What would you do without them?"
Recently, as I was cleaning out some files, I stumbled across an old magazine article I had written many, many years ago on Nora. The piece never got published. As often happens in the publishing industry, editors leave, assignments get nixed, magazine content directions change…
I had retained the rights to the story, and had always meant to pitch it to another publication. But I was a young, working mom, and life somehow, as it does for so many women, got away from me. The article sat in my files for years. Looking at it again, it felt dated, it was written so long ago… and yet the sidebar, where Nora shared advice for working moms, still applies.
So, although I no longer have young kids, and Nora has gone on to become even more famous and accomplished than she was back then, I’m sharing just her tips here, instead of the full piece. Many articles have been written about Nora Roberts over the years. Yet, somehow, this sidebar still takes me back to my former life; doing phone interviews on headset while breastfeeding, writing frantically while my kids napped, always scrambling for time.
Thank you to Nora, for what I still fondly recall as a wonderful interview, and to Goodreads (which didn’t even exist back when I did the story) for giving me the perfect place to share it. And to all you writer moms out there—keep writing, even if your writing time is confined to your kid’s naptimes, or while waiting in line at the grocery store, or sitting in the carpool lane at school pick-ups, or on your lunch hour at work, or in the wee hours of the night, the only time you can seem to get to it. This one’s for you:
Keeping it all Together—Nora’s Tips for Working Moms
On the secret of her success:
"It takes a lot of juggling. Some of the balls are glass, some are rubber. The idea is to recognize which are glass—your kids’ first school play—and which are rubber—your neighbor’s Tupperware party. You don’t want to drop the glass balls, you’ll never get them back. If you drop the rubber ones they’ll bounce back sooner or later."
On ways to not only stay sane, but to excel:
"Back to the glass and rubber balls. It’s all priorities. Moms who work outside the home have to juggle faster and more skillfully than others. And we can spread ourselves too thin trying to keep them all in the air. So, you let a few go, because if you don’t take care of the juggler, there’s no show."
On not sweating the small stuff:
"Sometimes, when you’re in the middle of that three-ring circus—deadlines looming, kids yelling, and the dog just piddled on the rug—it helps to step back, take a look and remember, it really is your show. And that’s an amazing thing. Your deadlines, your kids, your dog. What would you do without them?"
No comments have been added yet.
