Raising a family and still writing

I’ve wanted to be a published author since 6^th grade, but it wasn’t until 2007 that I started to actively pursue it. Don’t get me wrong, I wrote a lot. I have folder after folder filled with the good, the bad, and the very ugly of my writing. It was almost like a light clicked on in 2007. I had the duh! moment of “if you want to be a published author, then you’ve got to start submitting your stuff.”

At the time I was attending college, working part time, and writing. I couldn’t imagine juggling anything else.

And then I got pregnant.

Oh, my husband and I were excited. We had been talking about starting a family and this little surprise came at just the right time. While I was expecting, I finished up my college classes and graduated. And silly me was convinced that raising a baby would not be as time consuming as writing all those history papers. Of course, I was wrong. My writing quickly got pushed to the back burner as bottles and diaper changes took the forefront. What was I to do? I can’t just assign myself a writing time everyday. I’ll just sit there for my allotted hour and stare at a blank screen. I wrote whenever the muse struck, and it seemed that was always when my son needed me. Luckily, Fade to Black was already finished. It only takes a minute to send an email, so I submitted it when my son was napping. The harder things to do during nap time were the time consuming edits for Fade as well as my own personal writing.

Around his sixth or seventh month, my son began sleeping for 12 hour stretches through the night. 7pm-7am. Actually he still does that to this day. And it was from 7pm-9pm that I started to put my all into writing. If my muse wasn’t into it, I’d spend that time updating my webpage or blog, doing interviews for Fade, or getting the final draft of Promises to Keep together. But as his first birthday rolled around it was getting to be too much. Fade had great reviews, and people wanted to know what happened next. I needed time to write Fade’s sequel, and I had none left. For a moment I considered ending my writing career. I had done what I wanted to do; I had gotten published. But I quickly ended the thought, since my new dream was to be on the NY Times bestseller list. I couldn’t get rid of my son, not like I’d want to. He is one of the few things in my life that I will never regret. Let’s see, that left my job. It just had to go.

Now my son is sixteen months old, walking everywhere and getting into everything. I take care of him, play with him, and be the best mommy I can be. That is, until nap time. The second his little eyes close I am at the computer, doing what I can to forward my writing career. It’s rough being a wife, mom, and writer but somehow I pull it off. And one day, years from now, when I look back at this time in my life I will be so proud of myself for not giving up on my dream.

I am a writer. I was born a writer. I will die a writer. Nothing in this world or the next will ever change that.

Heather KuehlCheck out Promises to Keep, available now from Eternal Press!www.eternalpress.ca/Kuehl.html

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