by Eric Goudie

Created on: December 01, 2009

Being a stay at home writer isn't for everyone. You've got to enjoy long hours of solitude, search wholly within yourself for creative inspiration and be able to resist the urge to waste away the day doing laundry, fixing things around the house or surfing the net (even if your wife wouldn't mind if you did a couple of those things). But for those of us who can get past the difficulties being a stay at home writer is a dream come true.

Being a stay at home writer doesn't mean getting up when I want. As the only self-employed member of my family I don't get to set the alarm, my wife does, and at the ungodly hour of 5:20 every weekday morning I'm stirred from a deep sleep by Tim McGraw, Taylor Swift or The Dixie Chicks (she likes country music).

Now I realize that I could simply roll over and go back to sleep until a more respectable time, but then I wouldn't have that one hour of time every morning to spend with my wife before she leaves for work. So I get up and fumble my way through showering, dressing and breakfast, just like any other working man or woman. By 6:30 my wife is out the door, and the whole eleven hours until she comes home stretches out before me like a road disappearing into the horizon.

With so much time to fill in I find it necessary to break my day up into manageable chunks. Those first few hours in the morning are when I'm at my worst (I have never been a morning person), so I generally use them for the mundane tasks of checking e-mail and working on my business (which isn't online and constitutes entire non-writer half of my life). I'll also use the time to check some of the blogs I subscribe to (even if it's just the latest news from the BBC) and do some casual research. I also use this time to keep up with my duties on Helium.com, and write my Helium articles.

By 9am when the rest of the world is just starting their day's work I've already been at it for two and a half hours, so I switch gears completely and go for a long walk.

While some might consider going for a walk to be a waste of time I find it's an essential part of being a stay at home writer. It's taken me a long time to learn that no matter how inspired you may be there's no way you can sit in front of a computer for eleven hours a day, five days a week, never take a break and produce a masterpiece. Your brain needs time to process what you're writing, to tear it apart, thoroughly understand it and then put it back together in a manner that can be effectively expressed through

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>