Guest Post – Evelyn Lafont

I “met” Evelyn Lafont through Zoe Winters‘ blog.  Evelyn, aka Keyboard Hussey, made a number of funny and interesting comments there, so I went over to check out her blog.  After some comments there and some mutual twitter following, we became Facebook friends.  A couple weeks ago, she announced on Facebook that she was looking for blogs to go to for a blog tour.  Even though this blog is small time, I volunteered, and she accepted the offer.

So that’s how I lined up the first guest post on this blog (and really my first guest post ever).

As I mentioned last week, Evelyn writes paranormal romance: not really a genre I’ve had much interest in, historically.  But since I like her, I decided to pick up her book, The Vampire Relationship Guide, Volume 1: Meeting and Mating.  And you know what?  By and large, I dug it.  And no, I don’t think that makes me less manly.  🙂  She wrote it as a satire of the genre, and it’s good, snarky fun.  So even if you don’t think paranormal romance is your thing, check out a sample.  You may be surprised.

And now, without further ado, here’s Evelyn.

Finding—no—MAKING Time to Write

In order to be considered a writer, there is just one thing you must do. Write.

If you talk about writing, think about writing, read about writing and dream about writing, you aren’t actually a writer. That doesn’t mean you can’t be someday, and it certainly doesn’t mean you don’t have the talent to be one, it just means that you aren’t right now. Because being a writer is, at its core, just about you filling up a blank sheet of real or electronic paper with words.

It easy to transition from someone who thinks about writing to someone who is a writer, you just need to find a way to carve out some time each day or week to do what it is that writers do. It sounds hard, with the busy schedule you have and the family and significant other time you want to maintain, but if you really love something—I mean truly love it—then you have to sacrifice just a little in order to make it happen.

And it doesn’t have to be a great amount of time each week. Ten minutes a day on your lunch break at work, 20 minutes twice a day taken from when you first wake up and right before you go to bed, an hour while your kids take naps or first go to sleep at night. That is all it takes.

In order to develop that writerly muscle in your brain, you have got to write. It doesn’t have to be a marathon session during which you spend five hours furrowing your brow and frantically typing your masterpiece while chugging rum and chain smoking cheap, filterless cigarettes that make you think of your childhood growing up on the rough streets of Chicago. It just has to be time that you spend communicating with the paper.

Evelyn Lafont is an author and freelance writer with an addiction to Xanax and a predilection for snark. Her debut novella, The Vampire Relationship Guide, Volume 1: Meeting and Mating is a comedy about dating, sexing, and living with vampires and is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Smashwords. She has also developed a monthly e-zine to accompany the series, which can be found at VampLure.com.