Nobody warns you about the weird things you will find yourself doing, just to get writing time, while trying to do a half decent job at parenting your beloved and adorable children.
Mine are getting big now (as in over six feet tall), but the younger one isn’t driving yet.
I do get time to write each day while he’s at school, but that needs to be shared between my day job(s) and running household errands.
During the summer, all bets are off. There is no routine. I recently found myself balancing my laptop on my steering wheel, parked under a tree outside a downtown L.A. Home Depot for a couple of hours. I was trying to rewrite my last act while my sixteen year old and his friend scoured nearby thrift stores.
I’ll write in a Starbucks, I told myself on the drive there. It was one hundred degrees outside. There were no open seats in Starbucks or any other place with air conditioning.
My son attended a summer jazz intensive last week in Northern California. This was the week I was going to finish my rewrite. My husband encouraged me to book an airbnb so I’d have a nice environment to work in. “Or stay on a boat,” he suggested. I thought he was crazy. Sure enough, a catamaran popped up in my search. It cost the same or less than most of the other places I was considering, and it looked like a lot more fun.
The boat, a brand new catamaran, was very nice. I drove my boy to camp each morning, picked up a coffee on the way back and settled in for a day of rewriting and editing. Apart from needing to chase away Barn Swallows so they wouldn’t build a nest on board, my days were uninterrupted. This is how I imagined writing a novel would look. I pulled it off for five whole days!
Each night, I met my son for dinner and listened to his teachers play some great jazz. Afterwards, he wanted to stay and jam with his new friends and tutors — for another two hours, from ten o’clock until after midnight. Every night!
I drove around looking for an open Starbucks. No luck. There I was again, laptop balanced on my steering wheel. This time sitting in a dark parking lot, watching as a big, confident-looking family of raccoons circled my car.
On our last day, I wrote THE END and sent my manuscript in an email to myself to save it.
It’s been a long haul. My kids have grown up while I worked on this project. I hope the next one will be done before my baby graduates — high school that is, but it will probably be college. Either way, I’m planning on less car writing and dreaming about more time writing on a yacht.
