Guest Post by Emma:
My experience with having kids, homeschooling
and finding the time to write.
As a homeschooling mother of five, I grab any time I can to
write. If I am not doing stuff for my kids, or my pets, or my husband (rare!) I
am either writing or reading. So, it's hard to quantify how many hours I
actually get to write but it could be as often as two-three hours a day to as
little as two hours a week!
As a busy mom I feel it's important to carve out a small piece
in my life for personal growth. To me being organized is the key. When life is
a chaos it's hard to be organized, but it's possible, and in fact, needful to
arrange our lives into manageable sizes to stay sane--at least for me. I'm not
saying it's easy--my husband travels about 60% of the time, and it can be
emotionally draining dealing with whiny kids--but if we can lay railroad tracks
for our daily lives it'd be easier to function and that's what I try to do--and
I stress on "try".
On a week to week basis I
have my tracks laid down--I know which kid is doing what, when and what meals
to be served throughout the entire week--this cuts down on unnecessary time
making extra trips to the grocery store. I do most of my shopping on the
internet--like books, supplies, clothes, and make-up, to save on time--and it's
less expensive too, with free shipping and I can shop at 2am!
Also, on my site, I have
some blogs on using free things to give the kids a great education (and I hope
to input more of such things as time goes by)
but still give us, moms, some time to gather ourselves before we fall
apart at the seams. One example is using Netflix movies to help in the
homeschooling--make movie nights a meaningful and educational experience. And a
mom can take a break as the kids watch something that would benefit them. This
is one of the tricks I use to give myself an hour here or there.
Also, I audit their
time--find out when or which time block I spend my time on doing meaningless
tasks--it's like budgeting with time as my currency.
Another advice I have, and
this may seem unrelated, is I stay away from negative people as much as
possible. There is something draining about being around negativity and this
mental torture will translate to stress, illnesses (which will make me even
busier and serves no purpose) and there is something about the lack of peace
that even sucks out whatever little time and energy I have.
But having said that,
about the homeschooling, it's good to have a schedule but if things fall apart
and some kid really didn't finish up whatever task was given, I'd learned
through almost 17 years of homeschooling that the best thing is to just move on
and not fret. There will always be another day, and in every stormy cloud there
truly is a silver lining.
So,
there you go folks. No magic wand for me to find time. Wish I have something
like this, but at the end of the day it's searching for any time I can find. If
anyone out there have suggestions, please share, so I can write more!
How much of the author is there
in the main character of any novel? And to what extent do authors write
themselves into the stories they tell?
My characters and their human counterpart.
Where do main characters come from? All those personalities,
like Daisy or Jay Gatsby from The Great Gatsby, or Anne of the Green Gables
series, or Katniss from Hunger Games?
It really depends on the story. And I am sure each author
has his or her own take on this.
When I wrote my first book, Keeper Of Reign, I extracted
some of the traits my kids portrayed and quirks I thought were cute and
endearing and included these in some of the conversations and personalities—it
is after all a book for kids. But that is about where the similarities end. As
the story developed and plots took shape the circumstances the characters in
Reign faced helped formed their own personalities. So I can’t say that there
was very much in me at all in the main characters of Keeper of Reign.
Having said that, things got a little different with my
young adult psychological thriller, Dead Dreams. I see a lot of myself in Brie
O’Mara, the main protagonist, and even
in Sarah McIntyre, the anti-hero, even
though both young ladies are very different people.
In some ways, I believe, the author always deposits a
portion of herself into the characters—particularly the main ones. Think about
it: as the plot falls into place, and as the writer faces the questions the
characters are confronted with—what would she do faced with this or
that—wouldn’t it be reasonable that the author would reflect her biases into
how anything is played out?
Of course, the fictitious person would have a basic
personality to start with, say, a moody, pouty girl, used to having the world
offered to her on a silver platter and servants hovering around her, as in
Sarah McIntyre, but when she is faced with a proposal, say to rid herself of a
nagging, persistent boyfriend, how she thinks, is in some part a reflection of
what the author thinks. That’s why I feel fiction is so powerful in influencing
the thinking of its readers. And every fiction has a message no matter how
subtly it has been woven into the story because at the end of the day, it is
the author projecting her thoughts, ideas, suggestions, and world view into how
the characters would act and react.
So, back to the question—how much of myself is in the two
main characters of Dead Dream? I’d say a lot and yet, not so much, too. Because
although some of the choices my characters make are things I could have done, but I probably won’t
due to my moral choices and governing ethics. For instance, would I ever commit
a crime? I could. (For that matter, even the President of the United States
could commit a crime and shockingly some have!) But I won’t—it’s a matter of
choice. I think as humans we are not
all that different from each other, especially for those of us of a particular
culture.
As authors we cannot run away from
the fact that we do breathe some of who we are, or what we believe in, into our
characters –for both the protagonist and the antagonist. Each facet of the
people we populate our fiction with may not necessarily be who we are now, but it can be a glimpse of what the
author could be, or even what the author once was.
Connect with Emma Right
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