Ever wonder what it’s like to be a full-time writer? Well, I certainly can’t speak for all the authors out there, we all have different lives, different responsibilities and schedules. But I thought I’d give you a peek into an average day for me.

I wake up to the sound of birds chirping and the smell of breakfast cooking. After a rigorous workout with my personal trainer, I shower and dress in my silk leisure suit. My assistant checks my emails and takes care of the ones that don’t need my personal assistant and formulates my new promotion plan. I sit at my computer and the characters immediately come alive and I quickly whip out 15 brilliant and perfectly crafted pages. Since I finished early I call my masseuse and then have a little nap. I wake up in time to see my lovely husband walk through the door with flowers again and announce we’ll be dining at a new 5-star restaurant. Anyone sick yet? Yeah, me too, okay so here’s how it really goes…

7:00 alarm clock goes off, The Professor hits snooze
7:30 after 30 minutes of snoozing, I get up, drag my laptop onto the bed and check email
7:45 begin bugging The Professor to get out of bed
8:15 no really, GET OUT OF BED!
9:00-9:30 somewhere in here either The Professor leaves or I take him to work (we only have 1 car)
9:45 talk to my mom on the phone
10:00 eat breakfast and decide to put dinner in the crockpot
10:30 check email and respond accordingly
10:45 open current book document and scroll down to the last written page
11:00 look at plot chart, what was I thinking? There’s nothing going on in this book
11:02 send panicky email to critique partner about how this is the worst book ever and I can’t imagine how I’ll ever pull it all together
11:15 write a couple of pages, get stuck looking for the right word, spend 15 minutes on-line looking for the right one. Go back to the pages, yep, still crap
11:45 check email, critique partner assures me that I always think the book I’m working on is terrible and I’ll be able to fix everything later, send her a threatening response that if she’s wrong, I’m giving her a nasty dedication

11:50 look at plot chart for inspiration and see that the next scene looks more interesting (it’s an almost love-scene), make a note in the manuscript to finish/fix the current scene and move onto the more interesting one – write 9 pages
12:45 lunch break, eat something wildly healthy and watch the food network
2:00 check email, email from my editor’s assistant and they need a picture for the back cover, peruse current promo pics and email friends to see which one they like best
2:15 critique partner calls with a plotting crisis of her own and I’m brilliant and very helpful in solving all her problems, we then brainstorm issue with the problem scene from earlier today. Decide I need to research for some sort of large event to set the scene in.
3:45 hang up – yes we talk a long time, but hey we’re wordy and I had to say hi to her 2.5 year old which you know takes a while sometimes, but now it’s time to go get The Professor
4:30 check email and get ready for our afternoon walk
5:30 walk
6:30 finish dinner up and eat
7:30 check email again (frankly I think I check email really like every 2 minutes, but I didn’t want to look like a total loser)
7:45 start research needed to fix scene, make notes for tomorrow when I’ll do it all over again.

You know some days are like this and some are great writing days where everything goes wonderfully and I’m done writing all my pages in like 2 hours. And some days its painful and brutal and I barely get a page done before I just throw in the towel and hope the next day is better. Then there are those days when I have a doctor’s appointment that lasts forever and have to go grocery shopping and to the bank and by the time I get home I barely have any time left. But I get some work done everyday. I try to do weekly page goals rather than daily to afford for the crazy schedule my life sometimes has so that I can deal with the 3 page days when I have a 15 page day. It all evens out.

So how about you, how do you spend your days?