When moms make time for dreams

I can scroll through years of photos, and the same ones keep showing up.

Badly-lit, boring pictures of laptops.

Sometimes it’s a laptop sitting on my knees, with taekwondo classes or dance practices happening in the background. Other times, it’s a laptop sitting on a table in the library’s kids’ section or the Quiet Room on the second floor where it’s so silent that I hate to even breathe.

It’s pictures of laptops set up in different areas of my house, laptops in the lobby of the rec centre, laptops in the hospital where I’m stuck for two hours getting an iron infusion.

I take these photos as reminders, as proof, that I’m always trying to get a little closer to finishing and publishing a book. The goal I’ve had since I was eight years old.

The writing itself is nothing new. I have been writing professionally since I graduated from journalism school in 2005. For 15 years, I joke that I have put words in or on just about everything: newspapers, magazines, websites, advertisements, blogs, videos, plays, even product packaging. Writing is my career, and I love it.

A book, though is different. Unlike most other forms of writing where you get paid pretty quickly for what you submit to an editor or a client, a book is something that only pays you if and when people buy it.

While some people are in the position to sit down and chip away on a book without bringing in any income in the meantime, we are not those people.

So what do I do?

Continue reading in my weekly parenting column, The Mom Scene …