I want to write every day, I just don't have enough time.

I want to write every day. I really do. If I could get up every morning, get my diet dr. pepper and sit down and write for hours, I would. But I can't. I have a full-time job and there just isn't enough time in the day for everything I want to do.

By the time I get off work, I've been sitting in front of a computer all day already. Then I have dogs and dinner and laundry and a house and a husband and all the normal things everybody has to deal with. I'm not saying I'm busier than everybody else because I'm not. But sometimes by the time I actually have time to write, I'm tired. My brain is tired. And now I'm supposed to sit back down at the computer and somehow be creative.

The weird thing is I still want to.

I'll be working and thinking about my book. I'll be cleaning and suddenly think of something I need to change. I'll think of something one of my characters needs to say when I'm nowhere near my computer and then I'm trying to remember it until I can write it down.

I've been working on the same book for almost a year.

That seems crazy to me.

But I don't think people realize how much actually goes into writing a book. I know I didn't until I started doing it. You don't just sit down and write a book and then you're done. God, I wish.

I've edited this thing so many times I couldn't even tell you how many anymore. I've rewritten chapters. I've deleted things. I've put things back. I've changed something and then decided I liked it better before. I've read the same chapter over and over and somehow I'll still find a sentence I've read fifty times and suddenly decide I hate it.

And then there was The House That Silence Built.

That was completely different because that wasn't somebody else's life. It was mine.

You would think that would make it easier to write because I already knew what happened. I didn't have to figure out the story or make up characters or decide what happened next.

I knew what happened next.

Sometimes I just didn't want to go back there.

There were things I hadn't thought about in years that I had to think about again. There were things I remembered while writing that I didn't even realize I remembered. I cried writing parts of that book. I got angry about things I thought I wasn't angry about anymore. And sometimes I would write something down and just sit there looking at it because seeing it written out made me look at it differently.

That's something I wasn't prepared for.

You can know something happened to you. You can talk about it. You can even think you've completely moved past it. But then try sitting down and writing the whole thing. Try remembering the room and what somebody said and what you were thinking when it happened. Try putting yourself back there long enough to explain it to somebody who wasn't there.

It's different.

And maybe that's why writing fiction feels easier to me.

Which is kind of funny considering the things I do to people in my stories.

I would much rather make somebody else's life miserable.

I can make up a woman and put her in a horrible house. I can kill somebody. I can have something standing outside somebody's window in the middle of the night. I can create an entire family and screw them up however I want to.

And none of it actually happened.

Well, most of it.

Because I have noticed that little pieces of me still end up in there. A feeling I've had. Something somebody said years ago. A house I've seen. Some weird little memory that probably means nothing to anybody else. Somehow those things sneak into people who don't even exist.

I guess that's part of writing too.

I'm still figuring all of this out.

I know I love it. I know I want to do it. And I know there are way more stories in my head than I will probably ever have enough time to write.

That's probably the most frustrating part.

It's not that I don't know what to write.

I don't have enough time to write all of it.

Maybe someday writing will be my full-time job. That's the dream. I would love nothing more than to wake up, get my soda and spend my day writing stories.

Right now, though, that's not my life.

So I write after work when I can. I write on weekends. Sometimes I get hours and sometimes I get twenty minutes. Sometimes a few days go by and I don't write anything at all, and I hate that.

But I always come back.

At the rate I come up with stories, I'm probably going to need to live to about 150 to write all of them.

So I better find the time somewhere.