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Every author wants to write all day, all the time. But life has this horrible way of getting in the way.
Three months ago I sat down with the third draft of a book about a secret service agent, a kidnapped Empress and some devious plot devices. I had time while my oldest kid was at daycare and my youngest was running around my feet bringing me plastic objects for me to admire. I got really into it. I was writing, and editing, and changing whole chapters and even the names of characters because it sounded better.
Then my oldest kid came back from daycare with a cold. Which she gave to me. And to the youngest. And then when she got better my partner had it. And then when I got better she had it again (or a new cold, maybe). For the next few weeks I did nothing but nurse the sick, be nursed myself, go to bed as early as I could, cough, sneeze, feel bloody miserable and in general sit on the couch and watch hours of movies and Netflix.
I stopped writing. I put my laptop away and the secret service agent was halted only a quarter of the way through the rewrite. I felt sorry for my characters – I always do when I take a hiatus. Like are they stuck in limbo until I write them out of the situation they’re in? One of my characters was stabbed and bleeding to death. Does she then bleed for the months that I don’t write about her?
I often feel that sometimes they get annoyed with me and bitch about me behind my back. “She trapped me in an underground sewer for three months!” “She had me stabbed and dying for six weeks!” “It took her a year to write me out of the villain’s dungeon.” and so on and so forth.
There was a week where I wasn’t sick, and the kids weren’t sick, and the partner-in-crime wasn’t sick, and I pulled out the novel and did another two chapters. Then we went on holiday. And then I got sick again.
The character is still bleeding to death. It’s been eight weeks and counting.
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