August Chaos and Whining

Every year of my adult life the middle of August is filled with days of chaos. My past included a few years of coaching and the preseason starts two weeks before Labor Day. Preseason practices entail multiple workout sessions each day, usually morning and evening, and when my sons played football that sometimes meant ‘three-a-days.’


These days I’m no longer involved in coaching and I only have one child playing a sport this year but there’s still enough chaos and disruption to go around. For the past seven years August has also meant the packing up and sending off of a child to college. For those of you who haven’t gone through that yet, don’t worry about crying when they leave. You cry trying to get everything together they need to live on their own. Teenagers obviously think shampoo just appears in the shower when you need it let alone something as mundane as toilet paper. They also have to learn, this means you have to do it, things take up less room when packed neatly. All this involves numerous trips to the store to get all the things they don’t think they’ll need but you know they will. It also includes buying a lot of things you hope they’ll use but they probably won’t. Things like Lysol kitchen and bathroom wipes, shower cleaners and fabric softeners.

Beyond the trips running the one athlete I have still competing are the three inservice days I must attend before actual school starts. And hanging over all the busy, not entirely unpleasant hustle, is the dread of another year of school.

School means the end of sleeping in an extra hour, staying up as late as I wish when the writing bug keeps me at the keyboard and the impossibility of a cup of coffee whenever I want it. It means my writing hours have been cut into a fraction of what they were during the summer months. It means fewer website and blog updates.  Every year I dread August more than the one before. Every year I wish I could leave teaching behind and work full time on my writing. But this year is not the year.

For at least two or three more years, I must hold onto the day job and write into the late night and in moments snatched from my family time. I must whip out pieces of scenes between loads of laundry and preparing meals. How I envy those who can not only write full time but have the kids all in school while they’re doing it. I know from how much I write during the last six weeks how much I can accomplish when I don’t have to work another job eight hours a day. The prohibitive cost of tuition and the state of the economy disallows any thought of early retirement or trying to live on my husband’s income alone until I make enough writing to replace my teaching salary. I love teaching and enjoy spending all those hours with teenagers though there are many other parts of the profession I despise. But I want to stay home and write or better yet, go to my favorite coffee shop and write.

Sorry for all the whining today but what about you? Would you give up your day job to write full time if you could? Would you be brave enough to dare it if you weren’t making money yet? Do you know many authors who actually support their family with their writing income?