A Day in the Life of an Author: My Dual Life, A Guest Post by Amy Q. Barker
I’m on maternity leave! During this time, a few of my favorite authors offered to step up and write guest posts so that this blog would remain active while I adjust to my new role as a mother. I may also be a bit slower to respond. Thanks for understanding and for being so supportive of me, my family, and my blog. Want to donate a few dollars to keep this blog running or perhaps contribute to my diaper fund? You can do so on Venmo or Paypal.
A Day in the Life of an Author: My Dual Life, A Guest Post by Amy Q. Barker
I fight crime by night and write books by day. Okay, well, this isn't exactly accurate. Sorry, I was trying to lure you in. Actually, I write books by morning (4:00am-7:00am) and write policies by day (7:00am-4:00pm) and I go to bed at like 9:00pm. Sometimes on the weekend, maybe even 10:00pm. I'm wild like that. Or sad. Don't judge. Let me tell you about my dual life, the one where I fulfilled my lifelong dream at the age of fifty and realized the only way I could do that was to keep my day job.
When I was twelve years old, I decided I would one day be an author. I didn’t know how, but I knew it was my destiny. I had become obsessed with reading books and writing in my diary, so I figured it was inevitable. Little did I know how long it would take and how difficult it would be. I began by reading all the classics, becoming an English major, writing for the college newspaper, publishing several poems and articles, then applying for dozens of jobs in the writing industry and voila, boom. It all came true for me. Right? Nope. All the stars did not align. I needed money, so I got a job coding security software at an insurance company. Wah-wah.
Fast forward eighteen years and being a woman in the world of technology wasn’t such a bad thing as I bopped from one job to another, always shooting for a better salary, more responsibilities. It was hard to think about anything else and even harder to remember that I used to have a dream. Why become an author when my IT career was taking off? Then, out of the blue, I stumbled into a new job at a healthcare company—not in technology but in compliance—where I was assigned to write corporate policies.
When I started in the new role, I didn’t know what I was doing—I still thought about everything in the framework of an IT project with milestones, project plans, resources, assets, servers, the cloud, testing and production schedules. This was not what I was hired to do. I was hired to write clean, simple, easy-to-understand, all-employee policies that could easily be translated into twenty-three languages. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the best breeding ground for becoming a good writer. When you only have three pages or less to convey a complex set of requirements that must be followed precisely by thousands of employees, then you better make sure every single word counts. Every word matters. Every word must be the right word. That is the power of words.
When I perfected this approach to writing in the office, I decided to dust off that old dream at home. I began by writing daily with just as much commitment and dedication as I devoted to my day job. Then I thought about the stories and how I wanted to tell them—as all original, individual, stand-alone novels about amazing women going through life struggles. It took years and a ton of grit, but five novels later and I’m still selecting every word with great care, making sure the needs of the story, the characters, and my readers are all fulfilled. In my latest novel, Lap Baby, I weave together the lives of three women who are reeling and recovering from a share tragedy that happened twenty years ago. I hope you will find inspiration in my words and how I have learned to tailor them for my work and my destiny.
A Day in the Life of an Author: My Dual Life, A Guest Post by Amy Q. Barker
