#ADayInTheLife: Kristina Knight

This month we experience #ADayInTheLife of PHS columnist, Kristina Knight...

I love my job as a writer because no two days are ever the same…and yet most of them are really quite similar. They go something like this:

The alarm goes off around 7:30 and it’s time to get bebe breakfasted and out the door to school. I put on my running shoes and hit the neighborhood for interval training about 8:30 and shower and dress and am at my computer by around 10am. Sometimes Facebook distracts me much more than it should, but I try to be writing by 10:30…and then it’s lunch at noon and another session of distracting Facebook (or Instagram – man, people live much more interesting lives than I do) and writing again by 1. Then at 3 it’s the school run and bebe’s home and we have snack and homework and dinner prep and maybe I’ll get a few more words in before my head hits the pillow around 11. And, if the day has been really truly distracting social-media-wise, I’ll stay up late into the night to hit my wordcount. Wash, rinse, repeat.

See? Not all that interesting.

But then there are weeks like last week, when we had company. My mom came for a week long visit, so although the alarm still went off at 7:30 and by 11 most nights I was exhausted, in between those hours was quite different from the normal routine. Take Thursday, for example.

The alarm hit at 7:30, as per usual, and the getting ready for school rush was as per usual..but then things changed. We had decided to take my mom to Marblehead for the afternoon, which meant I wouldn’t have a ton of uninterrupted writing time. It also meant, because we’d be climbing around on the rocks and running around the lighthouse grounds, that I didn’t need additional exercise (at least, that was my excuse for skipping it). So, once the kiddo was off to school, I grabbed a shower and settled down to hit some wordcount goals. Knowing my time was limited, I didn’t let myself check in on social media first, it was straight to my WIP and words.

When Siri interrupted me a couple of hours later, I’d managed about 3,000 words (yay!) and was deep into a bit of smex between my characters…but it was time to go so I left them hanging. (That leaving them hanging thing? It’s a trick I use because if my characters are in the middle of something I’m always itching to get back to them…usually, I don’t leave them in the middle of sex but…on this particular day it worked.)

We freed bebe from school for a half-day and she went with us – lunch at a local pizza place, and then Marblehead, where the waters of Lake Erie were surprisingly calm (and unsurprisingly cold – I mean, it’s May people, not July!), and the skies incredibly blue. We wandered around for most of the afternoon, watching the birds and avoiding what bebe insisted had to be ‘blood-thirsty, vampire flies’.

By late afternoon, we’d had enough of the flies, but we were having so much fun we decided to take the long way around and enjoyed more of the scenery. We wandered a bit at a Civil War cemetery on a small island nearby (no blood thirsty vampire flies there), and finally made it back home around 4.

RadioMan knew I still had wordcount to reach, so he and Grammie did homework with bebe while I locked myself in the office (again, without visiting social media because I knew the distractions would be enormous). My mom took dinner duties that night, giving me a little more time with my WIP.

We were all zonked by about 9pm, but I did hit my wordcount goal for the day, and I rescued my characters from the coitus interruptus (they’re quite happy now), and we all made a few new memories (some of them caught on camera here as you can see). And that’s a pretty typical day in the life (at least, during the warmer months) for me.

What about you? How do you tackle family time vs. writing time vs. guests at your house?

Have you found the extraordinary in the ordinary? How does inspiration strike in your everyday life? Share your stories with us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

The first book in Kristina's new Slippery Rock series, Famous in a Small Town, is out now. For more information about her and her writing, check out her website and follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.