GUEST POST: Author Christopher Meeks

Thanks for inviting me in, Dan. You asked if I might write a guest post about how to find time to write amid a busy schedule. As you said, “How do you find time to write, market, and teach your classes?”Add to that, how do I spend time with my family, correct all those English papers, and have time to garden, too?

It ain’t easy. Still, your question made me think about my journey and how I fit writing into my schedule. One answer is that I’m compelled to do so. Writing helps me make sense of this crazy trip we’re on.

I reviewed books once for a newspaper, then switched to reviewing theatre. It was all that reviewing, actually, that led me to writing plays then novels. As a reviewer, I was challenged in analyzing many new works. Most were not truly great but few were truly terrible, either. They were somewhere in the middle. A mixed review is the hardest to write—yet that’s what most reviews are.

After a while, I asked myself what made most of them not reach the highest heights? It also made me ask what made compelling stories so involving? That led me to focus on storytelling and what’s in a good story. Part of it is to offer a dramatic question that needs answering. Will Luke Skywalker save Princess Leia, defeating Darth Vader? In my new novel, Love At Absolute Zero, I implicitly ask, “Why is Gunnar near death at the start and will he survive?”

Another benefit of being a reviewer was that I wrote on a tight deadline. You must experience this, Dan. If I saw a play Saturday night, I often had to have a review in by Sunday. Later, as a writer at an arts college, CalArts, I was under deadlines nearly every day—not only conducting interviews and writing stories for an arts magazine but also for a quarterly news journal. Now that I write a weekly blog and a monthly newsletter and always a novel in progress, I put myself under deadlines.

Publishing and marketing one’s own book is certainly a time-sucker, and a hugely challenging one. There’s press releases to write as well as letters and emails to possible reviewers. There’s publicists to consider—and bookstores to contact not only for sales but also for possible readings. Do you tour your book at all? How will you pay for that? There’s so much to do, I wrote an article on how to market your book or watch it die. (Click here for that.)

It’s nice to know I don’t feel alone in the challenge. I happened to interview author Darcie Chan recently (click here for that), and I was curious about how she fit time in for writing, considering she’s an attorney writing legislation for the U.S. Senate. She’s also a mother and a wife, and she loves to garden. She says, “I will tell you that, this summer, my modest vegetable garden has been completely overtaken by weeds!”

She writes at night. Myself, I’m a morning person. I write the first thing before I start having to deal with other responsibilities.

The thing that showed me I could do this happened when I was in a particular writing group. In the group was a neonatal doctor who every fourth week was on call in neonatal ER and intensive care, and that week she’d always work 90 hours. She also said there would always be babies that died, and it took its toll emotionally on her. She said at first she didn’t think she could be a writer because dealing with those deaths was hard, and she didn’t have the time everyone else had. Yet, she learned that if she wrote just even 15 minutes a day on the weeks she worked on call, she kept up her momentum. She wrote more than many people in that group. I thought if she could do it, so could I. And I have.
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Christopher has also lowered the price of the Kindle and Nook versions of the book to .99 cents for the duration of the tour.