A Day In The Life Of A Writer

People are always asking about my writing schedule. After all, I’m retired from medicine, so I must have lots of time to write. Of course, since my latest book, Medical Judgment, releases about now, one would expect a little time to be spent in getting out the word about it, but there should be lots of time for writing. Right? Read on.

Since we just got back from a trip to the Pacific time zone, my body hasn’t adjusted, so I slept a bit longer this morning, not awakening until after 6:30 AM. Kay and I watched the news and drank our coffee. Then each of us had an English muffin and bacon while we watched a sitcom we’d recorded.

Now to write, right? Not yet. I called our financial advisor who’s decided to take his own advice and retire! I needed to know what steps he’d taken to assure continuity with his clients. It took about twenty minutes, but I hung up satisfied (with the assurance we’d have a sit-down conference in a few weeks).

Now surely it’s time to write. Nope. I located the roofer we’d been talking with, and discussed a new roof for our house (even though the current one is only a few years old). Thanks, recent hailstorm. Welcome to Texas. I’ll meet with the roofer tomorrow, but it took another twenty minutes to set this up.

Then came completing a blog interview which will run in a couple of weeks, scanning through my email, looking at the sites I follow—all of which takes us past mid-morning. Still no writing.

Kay’s working at her son’s home (he’s moving a few blocks closer, and since he’s a single parent she’s helping out). I volunteered to get the few grocery items we needed, but before leaving I wrote a few checks so I could mail them at the post office on my way to get the groceries. Then I picked up Kay and we celebrated Monday with half a barbecue sandwich and some chips for each of us. Productive morning, but no writing.

I won’t bore you with what followed. Let’s just say it was more of the same--lots more. Finally, late in the afternoon, I sat down at the computer to write. I noticed I had a new email, so I opened it. It was from Nancy Mehl, reminding me that I needed to compose this blog post and get it posted. So here it is.

But tomorrow, I promise I’ll work on my novel. In the meantime, keep an eye out for Nancy’s interview with me on this site in a bit over a week, where a random commenter can win a copy of Medical Judgment. 

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