Skip to main content

Guest Post: The Challenges of Becoming a Full-time Writer


It’s 5 am, and my house is silent.  With coffee brewing, the fireplace warms the chilly room where I sit snuggled under a blanket getting my hands to work through their cold stiffness to begin typing.  A small loving dog joins me on either side as another story begins, an idea is polished, a word is changed, or a character comes to life.  Before anyone else is awake, before anyone calls “Mom”, before the world begins to glow with the first rays of morning light, this is my writing time.   Of course, then the usual get the kids going, pack lunches, feed the dogs, and make sure anything that needs to have my signature is signed and put in the correct backpack takes over, and the day begins.  Writing continues after the barrage of morning Mom/wife duties has been completed.  It is a definite change from when I actually started this journey.

As I read to my kids during Christmas break seven years ago, the ideas of Smarty Pig began to simply flood my thought.  I went to the computer and began to type.  You would have laughed!  “Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer” was blasting on the television with my daughter singing along.  There I sat with my eyes closed, typing as fast as I could.  The story and the message I wanted to get across with these characters was taking shape.  It was exhilarating, but it would be a long time before I was able to complete the story.

Back then, I taught elementary school full-time while my husband rehearsed nights and performed weekends with the Austin Symphony.   Time to write was stolen moments after I put the kids to bed, tackled the dishes, laundry or finished my schoolwork.  During the school day, lunch became a chance to walk the track recording ideas.  I’m sure that many parents driving by thought I had gone crazy.  Again, it was only moments to get stories down somehow.

It is now 7 years later, my husband has retired giving us the opportunity to move back to his native Pittsburgh, and I thought it was a great new beginning for me.  Unfortunately, my 17 years of teaching experience was not enough for Pennsylvania to grant me a teaching certificate, so I found myself without the security of a “day job”.  This compelled me to complete Smarty Pig and work to get it published.  The rejection letters were quick to come, but I have found a home in Halo Publishing International.  I am blessed right now to be able to spend time everyday writing, but I simply don’t know how long I will be able to afford that luxury, especially financially.  Is full-time writing challenging? Yes, but I’m grateful every day that I have a chance to get Smarty Pig and the messages that she brings to kids, parents and teachers everywhere.

About the author: Molly Nero loves to sing, dance and read. She spent over 18 years teaching elementary school.  Reading to her own children, she was inspired to write. The second book in the Smarty Pig book series Smarty Pig and the Test Taking Terror releases in Spring 2012.

You can find out more about Molly Nero’s World of Ink Author/Book Tour schedule at http://storiesforchildrenpublishing.com/MollyNero.aspx. There will be giveaways, reviews, interviews, guest posts and more. Make sure to stop by and interact with Nero and the hosts at the different stops by leaving comments and/or questions. 



Halo Publishing, Int. and the World of Ink Network will be touring author Molly Nero’s book Smarty Pig, which released December 2011.

Smarty Pig is the only one in the pig family who hasn’t given up on school and doing her homework. Although she is teased, her report card shows her hard work, while the others fail. The other pigs reach out to her and she becomes their tutor, by creating games in their home. They all realize learning can be fun and that it’s not just for school, it’s for life.

Get a sneak peek of the book at  http://youtu.be/E2L_NS2QqgM

Comments

  1. CONGRATULATIONS! I wish you much success.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you for having on as a guest. I'm thrilled to be joining the world of children's authors. Look for more Smarty Pig stories soon.
    www.smartypigbooks.com

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thank you for visiting my blog and for leaving a comment.

Popular posts from this blog

Interview Friday with Author Maggie Lyons

Maggie Lyons was born in Wales and brought up in England before gravitating west to Virginia’s coast. She zigzagged her way through a motley variety of careers from orchestral management to law-firm media relations to academic editing. Writing and editing nonfiction for adults brought plenty of satisfaction but nothing like the magic she discovered in writing fiction and nonfiction for children. Several of her articles, poetry, and a chapter book have been published in the children’s magazines Stories for Children Magazine and knowonder! VS: I want to thank you for being my guest here on The Writing Mama today, Maggie. To get things started can you share what you do to help balance your writing life with your family life? Maggie: Very fortunately for me, I’m retired and my son left the nest some time ago. That doesn’t mean I have no other commitments, of course. In fact, I’m very busy as a freelance editor, but I do have the privilege of being able to control m...

American Chronicle | Get to know Rodger Dodger Dog and His Author, Jan Britland

In 1986, Jan was driving her children in a new town to start school. On their way, they would pass a beagle type dog chained to a huge Magnolia tree. Some days they would see the chain hanging down from the tree. "I think we just assumed the dog was in the house until one day we realized he was up in the tree. From that day on, Rodger Dodger Dog as we called him became a favorite. It was a 45-minute drive, which can become boring so as we passed him, I would start telling a story about Rodger Dodger's adventures up the tree and beyond. Because I am so dyslexic, the stories had to rhyme so I could remember them from day to day. They also started the same to get me going," shared Britland. However, it wasn´t until 2008 when Britland received a phone call from her daughter Kelly, who had young children of her own that the Rodger Dodger Dog started to even think about becoming a children´s book or series for that matter. "My daughter was complaining her son ...

Interview Friday: Author Sands Hetherington

Sands Hetherington credits his son John for being his principal motivator. Sands raised his son as a single parent from the time John was six. He read to him every night during those formative years. He and young John developed the Crosley crocodile character in the series during months of bedtime story give-and-take. Sands majored in history at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) and has an M.F.A. in creative writing and an M.A. in English from UNC-Greensboro. He lives in Greensboro. VS: I want to thank you for being my guest here on The Writing Mama today. To get things started, Sands, what do you do to help balance your writing life with your family life? Sands: Hi Mama and thanks for having me over. Actually, my family life was part of my writing life. I was a single (male) parent of a six-year-old son. We always did bedtime stories. One night John invented a red crocodile named Crosley for an after-lights-out companion. This evolved directly into...