Writing during nap time
The choice that started my author career
Back in 2008, I decided to quit my job in product development and stay home to raise my young children. I’d spent the previous fifteen years designing consumer goods, but that required a lot of travel and time and I wanted to be more present with my children. Then one day a few months into my new suburban life as a stay-at-home-mom, I woke up with a book idea. My kids were still taking naps, so that afternoon I skipped folding the laundry during nap time, opened Microsoft Word, and started writing the story. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know if I would finish it, but I decided I might as well try. Three years later, my debut novel was published.
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Now, the book I started writing during nap time was not the book that I went on to debut with. That first book was about a girl who discovers she has psychic powers. Pretty standard fare for a first young adult novel, only I made the character fourteen-years-old which is no-man’s land in children’s books, plus she woke up on the first page, looked in the mirror, and described her own features, all cardinal sins in terms of how NOT to open a book. Still, I spent nap time writing that story for a couple of months, and by the end of the summer, I had a draft of a story. The premise wasn’t that original but the writing was pretty decent. A few friends read it and said they enjoyed it, so that spurred me to try again.
