How do you find time to write?

When my 5 kids were little, a Kirby vacuum salesman came to the door and said he would vacuum one room in my house to prove to me how clean he could make it with his awesome vacuum. I invited him in, thought for a moment, and led him to the master bedroom because I cleaned the living room and kitchen when guests came over, and the kids’ bedrooms when they made a mess, but my own bedroom didn’t get clean often.

An hour later, the Kirby salesman was still vacuuming. At one point, he thought to ask me how long it had been since I had vacuumed that room. I considered the question for a long time before realizing that I had NEVER vacuumed that room. When we moved into the house two years earlier, we replaced the carpet and since it was new, I just kept thinking it was still pretty clean and ignored it.

To give credit to the Kirby guy, who probably should have run screaming from me at that point, he nodded and said, well, if you’re only going to vacuum once every other year, you should definitely use a Kirby vacuum because it’s sturdy enough to do the job. He ended up having a short cell phone conversation with his boss when he was finished. I was pretty sure the boss chewed him out because, well, someone who doesn’t vacuum a room for two years might not have the kind of priorities that would make her choose to pay $2000 for a vacuum cleaner.

If you’re going to be a writer, you’re going to have different priorities than other people. And at some point, they are going to be horrified by that. But the real question is, will they still buy your books? I think they will.