Work-Life-Writing Balance

 How do you work on your story when life gets in the way?
      Let’s face it. Very few writers make it as full time authors. Most of us have day jobs, and sometimes, those jobs can get in our way as writers. This week a project at my day job blew up. I ended up working crazy hours and had very little time to write. By the time I actually found time to write, my brain was too fried to work on my story.
      If you’ve ever found yourself in a similar situation, you probably understand my frustration. I want to write!
      Here are some of my thoughts on how to balance a passion as consuming as writing with the demands of a standard 9-5.
     I think it’s absolutely essential that you set reasonable writing goals for yourself. Of course, "reasonable" can mean very different things for different people. For me, I want goals that keep my project moving forward and allow me to keep developing my writing style, but I don’t want to add more stress and pressure to my life. For example, my writing goal for July was to finish editing my novel. I had 18 chapters left to edit at the start of July. That's nearly 1 chapter every 2 days. Easy.
     My second piece of advice is to try to do something for your writing every day. No matter how small. Today, I spent 15 minutes drafting this post and listened to a tutorial on writing a book synopsis for a pitch package. It wasn’t much, but those are two little achievements.
     I hope my perspective helped you. Leave me a comment or send me an email through my contact page if you have any tips or tricks you use to manage writing around your day job.

---