Guest Blogger, Kim Smith

Join me in welcoming author Kim Smith to Thoughts in Progress today on her on her Virtual Book Tour.

Kim is the author of the cozy mystery, “Buried Angel.” She will be giving away an electronic copy of her book today to one lucky person commenting on her post.

Here’s a brief description of her book: “Shannon Wallace is finding trouble in the most bizarre places these days, but not as bizarre as the ones her sidekick Dwayne Brown is finding. When his friend. Bubba, is found stuffed in a cooler in his flower shop, the hunt is on to find his killer. Could it be Bubba’s sister who is now his heir, or maybe one of the flower shop guys who works with Bubba? You can be sure the dreadful duo of Shannon and Dwayne won’t rest until they have South Lake’s police department, and the Hispanic hottie investigator, Sal Ramirez, find his man. Or was that woman?”

Kim with busy schedules and day-to-day activities, how do you find time to write?

Most of my writing friends ask at one time or another how I manage to turn out a whole novel and or several short stories and a novel over the course of a year. Time management I tell them. This is a crucial part of our job as a writer.

They usually tell me that finding time to write is what stops them from finishing a whole piece. There just isn’t enough time to do any writing. My short answer is: you haven’t looked hard enough at the clock.

No matter what you want to write, and there are a plethora of types of markets, you must sit down regularly and turn out work or you will fail. The formula, if you are one of those types is: butt in chair=finished product.

Note I didn’t say finished product on the same day. There is probably no way you will write an entire novel in one day, although I am sure someone has.

The main idea here is to cross off something on your list of daily chores. Either give it to another family member, or quit doing it. Now I bet I have your attention. If you say, but I have to feed my family, then I say yes, you do. But on one day can they have pizza a la delivery? The time you would have spent cooking you could spend writing.

If you do that once a week for 52 weeks and you write 1000 words each sitting, you will have two thirds of a book finished in a year. Now if you add to that number by just one day, say they eat hotdogs for dinner one night a week, then you could double the amount of writing you could do. You could justifiably have nearly two books written in a year.

Okay, I hear those of you out there saying but how on earth will I turn out a thousand words? That is a lot of stuff.

Well, let’s examine that. If you format your pages correctly, you know, two hundred fifty words per page, then one thousand words is how many pages? That’s it. Four. Can you write four pages a day? Still not convinced?

Okay here are a few other ways to cut out time waste and get into that chair.
       A.  Writing during your lunch hour or breaks when at work. Yes, it is perfectly okay to carry a notebook and pen in your briefcase, purse, or back pack. I mean what did writers do before computers?
       B.  Write when someone else is doing the driving. I do this every year when we take trips. It might only be a few hours to my family’s house or friend’s house, but I let my hubby drive and I write there and back.
       C.  Get up earlier. I get up at five thirty in the morning, work out for thirty minutes to an hour and write for fifteen minutes.  You know you want to. Didn’t that shower help loosen up the ideas when you took it this morning? Better to write two pages in the morning and two at night than none at all.

There you have it. It can be done. The only other thing I would suggest is to develop a nasty attitude. You really should become a stickler for your time. Make everyone understand that if you don’t get your time to write they will be very sorry. An unhappy writer is a terrible thing to behold.

Remember: talking about writing will never get a word on the page.

Kim, then time management can work. Thanks so much for stopping by today and sharing this information with us. It’s quite helpful.

A little background on Kim. She is the hostess for the popular radio show, Introducing WRITERS! Radio show on Blog Talk Radio. She is also the author of the zany, Shannon Wallace mystery series available now from Red Rose Publishing. You can visit Kim at her Website at www.mkimsmith.com

Remember to comment on Kim’s post today through 8 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 25, for a chance to win an electronic copy of her book.

Do you have a plan for scheduling your writing time? What could you give up once a week to make time to write?