Welcome to Stitch Read Cook's weekly feature!!
A Day in the Life of.....
Audra North fell in love with romance at age thirteen and spent the next twenty years reading as many romance novels as she could. Even now, after having read over one thousand of them, Audra still can’t resist the lure of a happily ever after, and her collection continues to grow.
She is the author of the Stanton Family series from Entangled Publishing and Out of the Box, a recently-released cyberpunk erotica.
For more about Audra and info on her upcoming releases, sign up for her newsletter audranorth.com or find her (way too frequently) on Twitter @AudraNorth.
I live in a smallish, suburban town near Boston now, but I was born and raised near Austin, Texas. For the most part, I love it up here, but the Southerner in me misses a few things sometimes, like mild winters and good Mexican food and crazy, house-shaking storms. Still, I’ve managed to build a life up here despite the six hours of daylight during the winter, so…there’s that. As to what that life entails, here’s what a typical day for me looks like!
5:30 a.m. – By this time, I’m at least halfway through a latte. Sometimes that means I’ve already been up for an hour, and sometimes that means I’ve been awake for a mere five minutes. Either way, I should probably just move the coffee machine from the kitchen to my nightstand so I can spend those precious extra minutes under the warm comforter.
6:00 a.m. – I am busy writing, but also keeping one ear perked in the event that my kids start waking up. I have three, and they go from zero to sixty in about 0.02 seconds. But the quiet morning is usually the best time for me to start new projects, when the brain juices are flowing (this is possible only with coffee) and the house is silent.
6:30 a.m. – Dang. The kids are up.
7:00 a.m. – I might go for a run, or I might do things like laundry or changing lightbulbs—basically, activities that don’t take much concentration, since the house is usually getting crazy by this time.
8:00 a.m. – Everyone is fed, at least one person has cried (often, it’s me), and my husband, the kids, and I are about to head out the door to school and work and errands.
8:36 a.m. – I AM BY MYSELF IN THE CAR. This is not a drill. I repeat, I AM BY MYSELF IN THE CAR. It’s like a Christmas miracle!
9:00 a.m. – I am in a meeting that requires me to focus on what something else is saying. I succeed about half the time. Go me.
11:00 a.m. – I’ve spent the past couple of hours taking care of work-related things, organizing side projects, and generally putting things in order. I like order. I can’t write without order. Since I run my own business, usually I can squeeze in time to write during the work day after I’ve put everything in order. You’re probably sensing a theme, here (Order, anyone?) But I have to pick up the kids in a couple of hours, so I get a move on writing and often manage to grab an hour to write a new scene, or plot out a work, or something that is actually accomplishable in a short timeframe. Sometimes, I’ll focus on writing-related projects that I have going. I’m coordinating and contributing to an anthology of romance works to benefit RAINN, and managing works from nine authors is fairly involved, so sometimes I need that hour to focus on that project.
1 p.m. – The little bits are home and so am I. Sometimes, I write while they nap. Sometimes, I manage to feed them a meal that isn’t Kix and cheese sticks. This usually lasts until about six o’clock, which means that I rarely get writing done. I do answer e-mails and have short phone calls, just to keep that all-important order for when I’m ready to sit down and write in the evening.
6:30 p.m. – Husband comes home. I know, I skipped a bunch of hours in there. They are not interesting hours, I promise you. They are the kind of hours during which I find myself thinking that if I have to play Hi Ho! Cherry-O one more time, I might actually die of boredom. And when my husband comes through the door, you’d think it was a celebrity or something. Everyone rushes to hug him. Usually, my hugs contain a cross between love and sobbing relief that someone else can take over pretending surprise at finding our two-year-old “hiding” by covering her face with a stuffed puppy.
7:00 p.m. – I am in full writing mode. I try to get at least an hour of writing in, and sometimes I manage two, but the evenings are when I flesh out whatever I started in the morning, or I go through and revise, or basically do all manner of grunt work that helps me to get closer to the finish line of a manuscript.
9:00 p.m. (more or less) – I check Twitter, reply to e-mails, and start winding down for the day. This is my time to read for an hour or so before bed. I love all of N.D. Wilson’s middle grade fiction, nonfiction works that teach me cool trivia that I can wow people with at parties (if I ever start going to parties again someday), and—of course—great romances. I especially love great contemporary, historical, and futuristic/SciFi romances.
10:00 p.m. – Falling into bed right about now.
Of course, every day is a little different, and some are definitely better than others when it comes to writing. But if I had to summarize the main things in my life, I’d say: kids, writing, work, and…oh, yeah—cookies. Lots of cookies.
In the “Civilized” future, there is no war, no violence, no cruelty…
No love.
Juris is a Feeler, his emotions too strong to be controlled by the chip in his brain. If he can’t keep his flashes of feeling—joy, anger, lust—boxed up, he’ll be Terminated.
Lidian is a spy from uninhibited Benori. Her mission: to rescue the Feelers and destroy Civilization. Her first target: Juris, the only pilot who can get them all safely away before the Civilians catch on.
When Lidian frees Juris from the controller and shows him just what he’s been missing, their erotic encounters blow his mind. But with these new emotions comes something Juris has never had before: choice. Can he side with this smart, sensuous woman against everything he’s ever known, for a chance to break out of the box?
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Love the sound of this book!
ReplyDeleteOh and I wish I were more organized at home - I'm pretty good at work, but home is a different story. LOL