“‘I’m so busy,’ I said. ‘As soon as I have a bit of time, I’ll be right on it.’
I lied.”
When life got in the way of Cari Rosen’s new book plans, she found her already published memoir gaining a new lease of life…
Like so many authors I often feel that I am juggling a million and one other things around my writing. There’s the day job (I’m an editor). My family (husband and daughter). The usual domestic stuff (I do the cooking, he does the washing – works for us). Add in exercise, a social life (remember those?), food shopping, haircuts, dentists … by the end of the day, all I want to do is lie on the sofa and bury my nose in someone else’s book rather than sitting down to write my own.
I started my novel a decade ago. I was buoyed by the excitement of seeing my first book, a memoir, out in the world and was determined to grasp the nettle and get another one on the shelves as quickly as possible. I had a job and a toddler and a lot on my plate, but I promised my agent I’d have it done by the time my daughter started school.
In my defence, I didn’t actually specify whether this would be primary or secondary school. The years passed, the word count remained steadfastly where it was and it’s fair to say that somewhere between little and no progress was made. ‘I’m so busy,’ I said. ‘As soon as I have a bit of time, I’ll be right on it.’
I lied.
It’s hard to pinpoint why I spent so long getting nowhere fast. I believed in the book (I still do). I thought it was a story that should be told. I still do. I blamed my lack of free time until I went to a talk by Maggie O’Farrell and listened to her tell how she’d written her latest bestseller in the two mornings a week while her youngest was at nursery. I realised I was making excuses.
By the time my daughter turned 12 I’d had another idea and thought starting something new might cure my decade of writer’s block where all else had failed. And it did – until the pandemic struck and, like so many others, I found any creative impetus destroyed by the events unfolding around us. The fear, the uncertainty, the worry, the home schooling. None of it was exactly conducive to finding my muse or even stringing a sentence together and that was before I changed jobs and started working full-time for the first time in more than a decade.
But hope came from an unexpected source. My memoir – originally published by PRH – found a new lease of life and a new publisher. It needed updates, an epilogue – and somehow they got done (on time and everything). My fingers grew used to pounding the keyboard again and I remembered that, actually, I had managed to write the entire book in just five months, despite the fact I had only had childcare two days a week.
At that point lack of time would have been the perfect excuse, but somehow it didn’t deter me back then – so I’m not going to let it deter me now. I will channel my inner Maggie and I will write both those books before my daughter leaves school altogether.
Cari Rosen is an editor living in London with her family, although she will always be a Mancunian at heart. For more information visit www.carirosen.com
About The Secret Diary of A New Mum (Aged 43 ¼) –
Whatever your age, becoming a mum for the first time brings excitement, anxiety and numerous challenges. But how do you cope when you’re old enough to be the mother of everyone else in your NCT group – and you keep reading tabloid headlines declaring you must be ‘selfish’ and ‘career-obsessed’ (at best)? The story of one woman, one baby, a slipped disc and the joy of an elasticated waist.
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No new book forthcoming? Give an old book a new lease of life.