The Glamorous Life of an Author

By Rikki Strong

When I tell people I’m an author, I invariably get one of two responses. The first warms the heart: “Oh, you write books! How cool is that! What a great job!” The second… not so much. “Boy, it must be nice to have enough money to not have to have a real job.” (Coincidentally, those are the same two responses that I get when I tell people I’m a homemaker.)

But what is this glamorous job that allows me to stay home and do the two things I love best in the world? Well, here is a typical day for me:

7:00 a.m.: Alarm goes off. Since Hubby is working out of state, it’s up to me and only me to get Boy up, dressed, fed, and ready for school. Which, since Boy is six, that can take up to an hour and a half.

8:15 a.m.: Put the dog outside, let the chickens out, and Boy’s off to school. House is quiet.

9:00 a.m.: If I’m not out running errands, I’m home and the house is mine. This is my time. What’s it full of? Not writing. Nope. Marketing. Every author’s nemesis. This time is mostly full of Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and actual work. Not the fun kind of work, either. Books don’t sell themselves, as much as people want to believe that my life is just sitting at the writing desk watching the money come in. This is a particularly busy time for me as I have a brand new book out.

11:00 a.m.: Suddenly remember that I should probably eat breakfast, but I usually choose to write a little bit instead.

11:50 a.m.: Pick up Boy from school (he’s still just in half-day kindergarten).

12:00 p.m.: Lunch. Finally, something to eat… well, something that’s at least semi-nutritious.

The afternoon is usually full of house work. It’s very difficult, though not completely impossible, to write to the video games’ fight music or while also reminding a certain someone that he has homework obligations.

6:00 p.m.: Dinner.

7:00 p.m.: Skyping with Daddy. Since Daddy is far, far away, we Skype every evening. Fortunately, time zones work in our favor this time. Family time is not a time for working.

8:30 p.m.: Boy is in bed. We are currently reading The Complete Sherlock Holmes as a bedtime book.

9:00 p.m.: Mommy’s time. This is my time to write (or read) until the eyelids can’t stay open and the eyes won’t focus. Usually, it’s less than three hours.

So, that is the life half of the people I meet seem to aspire to; glamorous, huh? It’s not all bonbons and soaps. Neither is it late-night cocktail parties discussing the plight of the common man and how high school English students should interpret our book. It’s just kind of… life.

Sure, there are some fun months, like NaNoWriMo (http://www.nanowrimo.org/) or Camp NaNo (http://campnanowrimo.org/), where the goal is to write at least 50,000 words in 30 days. There are those weeks leading up to a book release that are full of marketing and the fun stuff—like this week, since I just released Flash (http://amzn.to/WNzPvV/). And there are other months—like when we will be moving to join Daddy—that very few days will have any kind of writing in them.

There will always be people who say, “Oh, that’s nice, but when do you plan to get a real job?” But this life is glamorous enough for me. Who needs a “real” job?

Rikki Strong has always been enamored with superheroes, and started writing the My Life as a Superhero series (currently Karis and Flash) when she was a sophomore in high school. She began writing for fun and profit in 2006 and has since written or ghostwritten more than 10 books and over 50 web articles. When not writing—which is most of the time—she is a stay-at-home wife and mom to a very active 6-year-old boy who is already about 500 words and 25 chapters into his own book.