Mindy Carlson

I wasn’t much of a writer in high school.  I did my English essays adequately. I daydreamed out stories in my head. And it is true that my senior year Chem grade was saved by my essay on Louis Pasteur. But I was going to be a veterinarian so I didn’t really focus to much on all these characters speaking to my inner self.

Needless to say, everything changed. Life happens. You don’t always end up where you thought you were headed.

And now here I am. Married woman. Mother of two. Living in Switzerland. Writer.  Getting a first article published.  Then a second. Soon a third. Hoping to be published again.

And I’m working on a book. Several, in fact, but I am focusing on just one right now. I’m trying to take advantage of NaNoWriMo and get my first draft finished.

NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. It happens for the entire month of November. It’s a national thing. They even have a website. You can sign up, make contacts, earn “badges,” and get moral and inspirational support.

Or you don’t have to sign up. You can just make a pledge to yourself and work to write 50,000 words in the next 30 days. (Well, 29 now.)

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that this is going to be easy. Writing is work. It is a job. It takes time and effort to think up characters – their flaws and their talents – and tell their story.

It is also wonderful. I am the creator of another world. Anything I can imagine can become real. I could spend hours writing. Of course, when I’m focused on writing I can do nothing else. And the state of filth in the house proves it.

I have found I do my best writing in the morning. I get the kids sent off to school and then I sit down at my computer with a cup of coffee (milk and sugar). I go through Facebook and Twitter; check in on the rest of the world through internet sites and then ideas start popping out to me. Conversations between characters start happening in my head. And I simply start to write them down.  Sometimes the words won’t come and so I read about how other writers write.

I wish this could happen all the time, every day. But I have other responsibilities. I have dinners to make, a house to clean, a husband to dance with, and children to read to.

But every November, I do try and make writing my full-time job instead of just a part-time job or “hobby that pays.” I try to sit down everyday and spend a significant amount of time to put words on a page. Maybe on December 1st I will be posting about how I have my first draft done. Who knows?

But now I’m going to vacuum while my characters knock at the door of my imagination until tomorrow morning.