Day 2: Can I write a novel in a week?

Today, I was faced with the bane of every author: laundry. I admit that we'd fallen well behind lately on the household chores. There were some…challenges of an early teenage nature that…made us all wish we were all deaf for a few days there. I rolled out of bed around 9am and was faced with the 348 loads of laundry to wash and fold. After two hours, I'm still folding what had already been washed but not folded, not to mention the clothes washed this morning.


So, I hadn't written by 11am. Driven by guilt, I sat down for an hour and wrote 1000 words. I'm noticing that my focus wains after 20 minutes during the daytime, so it did slow me down a few things. I'll need to work on that, I think.


But all this got me thinking about the conventional writing advice out there. I've come across a number of male authors who make comments like:


No matter what, I would come home from work and write 3 hours a night.


I read a number of female author blogs. I haven't come across any who state this. On twitter, I see a number of male authors make comments about how they *will* be writing for 3 hours tonight. On the flip side, I see a lot of female authors saying how they had to stop writing because their husbands wanted to play WoW (so couldn't use the computer), or they had a sick kid and "hubby" was busy washing his car, and so on.


I am incredibly lucky that I'm with The Engineer. Before I was published, be valued my writing time. He felt that it was an investment into our futures, just as it would have been if he supported me to go to school. This freedom to write – and him taking on additional household and childcare responsibilities - has allowed me to produce as much as I have been able to.


Which, brings me back to the laundry. There are a lot of women who feel that they have to look after all of the household chores. And there are plenty of men who agree. I've been slow writing today because I have opted to do some serious house cleaning. There are a lot of women out there who don't have the choice. They have spouses who don't support their writing because it isn't bringing in any money. Or, worse, it's bringing in money but looking after kids and chores is still her job.


So, today, I'm celebrating that I don't have to do chores and that I have a supporter partner who will pick up the slack so that I can write.

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Published on February 22, 2011 13:02
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