Mothering and Writing Successfully

Home ยป Writer Mama: How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids

Marina DelVecchio @ 2012-01-08

Writer Mama: How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids

$14.99
"Motherhood is in," Katz cries with a cheerful lilt to her authorial voice (3). Everyone is writing about motherhood, online and offline, because the topic is hot with debate. Parenting is in, and women's voices dominate the online blogosphere with posts published for personal and professional gain. The market for motherhood and parenting is open to those whose experiences make for great content. From parenting tips to personal narratives that focus on the debates that confront women as stay-at-home-moms or as working moms, women have an exhaustive place wherein to assert their voices, support other women, and make some money. There's never been a time in our history that has welcomed the experiences of women--as women, as writers, or as mothers--but the tides have changed, and women dominate with their writings about being women and mothers. Christina Katz is among them.

In her book, she urges women writers to capitalize on their experiences as mothers and assert themselves as experts in the field. After all, we become experts in parenting whether we want to or not. A mother who writes, and successfully, Katz is a model for us. Her book discusses issues that we can relate to, and we are more apt to listen to her because she is where we want to be: published, useful in a larger landscape of our experiences, and successful in a career that we raise "alongside [our] kids" as if our works are children that are born from us, to us, and that we raise to share with the world. From how to generate ideas for topics based on our experiences, hobbies, and conflicts to how to take advantage of evening hours by starting our careers, Katz understands the complexities of working all day with kid-related work and then sitting down in the evening, exhausted, wasted, and burned out, to jump start a career in writing.

Because women are all different and unique, they will accomplish more if they can fit writing around their own time constraints and needs. Based on whether writers are mentally productive in the morning or evening, use the time to write. By waking up an hour or two earlier, before the kids awake, or taking advantage of naps, or writing after they've been tucked in at night, the first step in the plan is for each writer to put herself on a schedule that will best suit her and her family's needs and then to stick to it.

Whatever your situation, Writer Mama is a useful book to have in your personal library. Not only does Katz provide tips on finding writing niches, best paid publications, and writing effective queries, but also she does this as it appeals to women writers who can care for their children and commit to their ambitions at the same time. It is grueling, demanding, and time-consuming, but everything worth having--everything that leads to personal growth, self-reliance, and being successful--always is. Being a contender is never easy, but the trick is to stay in the game. Katz shows us that integrating motherhood and writing is possible, and that we do not have to choose one over the other.