Final cover reveal for this series!

I didn’t really stick to my schedule for revealing these. But that’s what this post is all about!

There’s a lot of writing advice out there, and a lot of it centers around schedules: get up two hours early in the morning to write, write every day during your lunch break, set up a specific time after dinner to write, write every single day. If you do any – or several – of these, that’s great! But then there’s the rest of us.

Some of us might have trouble concentrating, or can be unsure when we’ll have the energy or drive to write. We might feel too much pressure or anxiety when we sit down at a specific time to write. And that’s okay! I’ll tell you my schedule for writing, or at least as it stands during coronavirus quarantine: I do it when I want to. Some days I get up early (that’s 11 am for me) and edit all day. Some days I roll out of bed at 3 in the afternoon and don’t get to writing until 9 pm. Some days I fill six pages of a notebook. Some days I don’t even write or edit at all!

I’ve written five full-size novels this way – and those were written while I had my day job to go to six days a week. I certainly didn’t write every day!

Don’t get discouraged if a piece of writing advice is too hard for you, especially with all that’s happening in the world right now. Everyone works differently. Think of advice like “Write every day” as a suggestion. You can still write one day a week and complete a novel. It’s not impossible, it just takes a few words on a page each sitting, little by little. If you want write every day to be your goal, go for it! You can do it! But if that goal makes you nervous or seems unattainable, write a paragraph every three days, and be proud. You still wrote. You don’t need a set schedule to finish your book.

What are you finding works for your writing during quarantine?