Summer Writing

In some ways summer writing is a little tricky. I’ve got my precious girls home with me, and they love to go to the pool and the park, they want to create new popsicle flavors and bake cookies, and they like to play lots of board games. I love soaking in every moment with them while they are here every day, so large chunks of time working on my stories gets put on hold for the summer.

Photo credit Dessie Austin

I also face the battle of do I edit or do I garden? It’s important for me to feed my family fresh organic vegetables, and the way I can afford to do that is by growing them myself and preserving the harvest to eat throughout the rest of the year. Selling at our local farmer’s market also supplements the income we lose because I’m not substitute teaching throughout the summer, and of course, gardening is great for your mental and physical health too!

Even though the kids and the garden take up a lot of my time, I’m still snagging bits and pieces of my days to work. I find it easier to create in the summer than to edit my work with a critical eye. With my Mudlavia chapters about wrapped up and ready to send off, it has been fun to create new story ideas. I’ve been so busy working hard to get my Mudlavia novel just right that I haven’t come up with any new ideas lately… In fact, I was worrying earlier this spring that I had lost all my creativity and would never have another new book idea again! Ha!

But with summer’s more relaxed schedule and plenty of thinking time in the garden, the ideas have begun to flow. I have a couple new book ideas to add to my middle grade detective series based on some interesting happenings this summer, I had a dream about two brothers in a medieval setting that reminded me of my two super cute nephews (I absolutely can’t wait to write a sword fighting adventure for them), and I’ve got a few ideas for some more historical fiction. I also started rereading a story about a Native American girl I wrote a few years back, and am really looking forward to editing it and bringing it to life this fall. For now though, I am daydreaming about these books while I work in the garden or go on a run, and am collecting research and notes in files so I can to pull them together later on.

I hope with the more relaxed pace of summer that you get to spend time daydreaming and working towards your own dreams too!