MamaWriters are excited to have debut author Beverly Kendall here today!  Her debut romance, Sinful Surrender, released in January, and she also runs the new and highly-frequented blog and linked forum community The Season, sites designed for readers of historical romance.  Oh, and she’s also a mom.  :-)

Please help us welcome Beverly Kendall!

sinful surrender coverMy World As I Knew It

I could never have imagined that my life would change so utterly now that my son comes home at 2:30pm.


For years I had my days completely planned. My son went off to school in the morning and I picked him up from after school care at 5:30pm, right after work. It was a lovely routine. So lovely in fact, I took very little notice of how lucky I was. I worked from home, so I was able to get a lot of things done that I couldn’t if I had to hike to the office everyday (I worked 40+ miles away).


Then with the down economy, I was laid off. It made no sense to keep my son in after school care any longer, so out he went. The thing is I was busier than ever. I might no longer have a paying full-time job, but now in its place I added job hunting, writing, and web site mistress to the pool. And now this was consuming more than any full-time job ever had. I needed at least 6 additional hours in the day to get everything done. This all would have been manageable had my son started coming home 3 hours earlier than I was accustomed to.


Boy, who knew (though, seriously, I should have) what a difference those 3 hours would make to my day. What has suffered? Well housekeeping for sure. But it took a hit when I started writing, which was back in November 2006. The serious crime here is my writing started to suffer. I wasn’t get near the daily word count I would have liked and needed to get done.


I can’t write with the television on—especially if it’s a kids’ show. I can’t write if my son is tugging at any of my body parts. I can’t write if there are children (my son and nephew) chasing each other around the house. And I can’t write if my son is upstairs…and the place is terribly quiet—too quiet—because that means there’s trouble afoot.


What I’ve discovered is I have to write through, in, and around the madness, the noise, and the too quiet. I now force myself into that seat each day and tell myself, ‘You can’t get out of this chair until there are xxx number of words on the screen.’ I had to forcibly remove myself from Twitter, Facebook, and all the other—what can be—time-consuming sites and blogs. I had to focus like never before. This was the net result of my son coming home at 2:30.


What about you? What are some of the things that distract you from writing and how do you cope?