Authors are a strange breed

If you've ever wondered what authors do all day, I'm about to tell you.

Sometimes we do nothing. Literally nothing. Well, okay, maybe we sit around and THINK a lot, but to the onlooker, it seems like a whole lot of nothing.

Sometimes we write zero words. Sometimes we write 10,000 words.

Sometimes we work ten minutes a day, sometimes twenty hours.

Sometimes we read books or watch TV to get inspired. Vacations are good for inspiration, too. I highly recommend those.

For those of us fortunate enough to call ourselves full-time writers, we far from have a regular schedule. We don't follow the normal workday 9-5 routine. And if we are lucky enough to have a husband who likes to cook, we don't even have to do that (yes, honey, I'm talking about you).

I'll tell you about my latest book that I'm about to publish, Stone Rules. It's about 100,000 words. (Romance novels are generally about 80,000 to 110,000)
I started writing this book in April. I got about 25,000 words written and then I hit a wall. I had major writer's block. I was also suffering from carpal tunnel so typing hurt.
I waited and waited and waited to be inspired. I took some aforementioned vacations. I watched a lot of TV (too much). I pouted a lot because I wasn't writing.
Then in August - WHAM! Inspiration struck and I finished the novel in three weeks. Whoa!

Morning, noon and night I was writing. I'd be up at 6AM and write for 6 hours and then edit it that night before bed. Rinse. Repeat. For three weeks and 75,000 words.

You may think, oh, cool, you took the summer off. Uh, no. Not cool. Do you know how hard it is to have a story in your head but you can't get it on paper? It's torture.

It's hard for us to 'get away' from work because we live in a fantasy world in our head. Our characters go on vacation with us. They don't stop talking to us just because we want to lay on the beach or go skiing.

We carry a notepad and a voice recorder EVERYWHERE. Because you just never know when a good idea will pop out of nowhere.

Then after all the writing, comes a month (or sometimes months) of editing. Some writers like this part. Me, not so much. Usually by the time I publish a book, I'm really sick of reading it.

And what do we do after that? You guessed it - we start all over again. Some authors have 2 or 3 books going at the same time. I can't do that, I can only have so many characters in my head before I actually become schizophrenic.

So there you have it.