A Day In the Life of Me. What it's like to be an erotic romance writer in the real world.

I was shopping at Safeway yesterday, like I always do, and the lady behind the register, who I’ve been chatting with for years, was looking at me oddly. Finally she blushed and said, “You write books.”  Clearly, some of the other Safeway staff had tipped her off.

I agreed that I did, but I already knew what was coming.  She blushed harder.  “Those books,” she added, glancing over her shoulder.  “Sexy ones.”

“You mean erotic romances?” I asked in my normal voice.

She almost melted into a puddle at the foot of her cash register, while the teenager at the end of the desk laughed himself into a hernia and had to rush off to the bathroom.

I finished the packing myself.

I could feel the poor lady glancing at me as she finished processing the order.  She was trying to equate me, bundled up in boots, hat, scarf and with red cheeks and little make-up, as we’ve just suffered through our first two-day blizzard of the season and a twenty-inch dump of snow, with the glamorous women who are supposed to write erotic romance novels that she has probably seen on soap operas and television and movies.

I’m no Catherine Trammell (the erotic romantic suspense writer heroine from Basic Instinct) although when I attend conferences, I go all-out to impress.  Back home, there’s no way I can keep up that sort of effort on a full time basis — certainly not in the middle of a blizzard, anyway.  Most days, I’m somewhere in between.  Someone recently described me as “artistic looking.”

But just in case you thought an erotic romance writer spends her days leisurely seducing men for fun and edification the way Catherine Trammell seemed to, I thought I’d outline for you one of my typical days.

6.00  Hit the snooze button

6.09  Hit the snooze button again

6.18  Debate smashing the alarm clock against the wall, and force myself out of bed while Merry (one of our cats) sits on the bed yowling at me piteously because she wants to be fed.  Mark, of course, has already been up for 45 minutes and is peppy and cheery.  Grrr….

6.35  Drag my sorry ass downstairs to feed Merry and Pippin before they guilt me to death with their wide-eyed stares, then feed myself, and get the essential cup of coffee into my system.  Then finally feel human enough to converse with Mark, who has, of course, already eaten (a cooked meal), dressed, prepared all his meals for the day, got himself coffee, and is sitting at the table, prepping for his day job and looking bright eyed and bushy-tailed.  Grrr….

7.00 A thirty-second commute down to my office (the most wonderful part of my job!), monster coffee cup in hand, to go through the first batch of what will end up being around 700 emails today.

7.30 Over to the current manuscript.  I get about two hours a day on my manuscript these days, seven days a week.  Today’s a weekday, so I stop after two hours of manuscript writing.  If I get interrupted by phone calls, kid emergency calls, etc, the stopping time gets extending accordingly.

9.30  A quick glance at emails and processing what’s need, comb through Twitterland, then over to my new marketing business, Bootstrap Book Marketing, and in between that, squeezing in the writing of at least three blog posts and various other PR & promotion activities, including monitoring and responding to the balance of the 700 emails.

5.00 I don’t always get to quit at 5pm.  I wish it were that easy!  But I do try to stick to office hours as much as possible to save my sanity (and Mark’s!)  In the evening I turn back into a normal wife and mother as much as possible…oh, and wife of a professional wrestler on occassions, too.

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