I’m so tired right now (yeah! survived my fourth tax season!). Haven’t written a thing for months except for a couple blog posts/comments. My energy level is at an all-time low. Fortunately, my husband does nearly all of the cooking now and gets the one kid still living here to and from school.

I was a stay at home mom for 11 years. Went back to work 15-16 years ago when youngest child went to all day school. My writing productivity took a major nosedive when I went back to work and has never really recovered. Most of that is my fault, though. I have a bad habit of choosing other things over writing: sleeping, grocery shopping, laundry, even vegging in front of the tv for a little while or reading a few pages.

And Jessica, my husband is an a cappella singer in addition to his day job, so to your point, perhaps he understands the demands of creativity better than the average bear?

Food for thought!

BTW – I love Castle – great show.

What a discussion you started here, during the morning hours on a holiday, of course–when else?

I read through many of the responses hand found a recurring theme–women do the majority of the work.

We tend to DO a substantial portion of every physical job on the homefront.

We get the mental share of having to know everyone’s schedule, where this one left that (“in the last place you left it,” or “pretend you’re a girl and look” are two of my favorite responses to my testosterone-driven housemates). Then we’re supposed to be on top of our day-job game (which may entail bringing work home–the difference between a “job” and a “career” IMHO).

All this and then I decide to be a writer, too. Add a publishing contract and now I have to write, learn about the business end of writing, cover the website end, blog, etc, etc, and so forth.

My husband helps out in many ways (putting away laundry, basic jobs like dishes and some cooking, but I need to keep him a running list of things to do, many of which I end up doing anyway. And forget trying to direct 12 and 10 year old boys to do nothing more than keep after themselves!

So off to mail the dreaded income taxes. (Hubby went to open up our summer home w/his buddies and won’t be back until this evening…

A writer mom’s life, I suppose…

Joanna

I think we probably split house/yard work at about 60/40, and he certainly does his part. More than that, he doesn’t care of if I don’t do mine. LOL If I don’t vacuum for 2 weeks, he doesn’t care, and if he does, he’s willing to get the Dyson and do it. I do all of the cooking, except for special events when he helps, but he helps with all of the cleaning, laundry, and does some things I really dislike, like the garbage, taxes or cleaning the cat box (this may be a traditional gender break down, and I don’t care, as long as I don’t have to clean the cat box). It balances out, and I try not to bean count, because in general we just work together to make it work.

Another angle on this question is how male writers run their careers differently than women writers — they never seem as visible or accessible to me. I’ve always been curious about that, but I guess that’s another blog.

Sam

Hmm… this is fascinating! And surely good fodder for better character development!!

I am a screenwriter, and I write in collaboration with my husband. I’m also a half-time writing professor at USC, and am the one who handles all the stuff. So it amounts to me having 2 1/2 jobs while he has maybe 1 1/4.

We both work from home. And my husband does pitch in to some extent. Trash, changing beds, pet care, and he does probably 2/3 of the driving-kids-around duties. But I do the rest. Paying the bills, answering the meals, most of the cooking, food and household shopping, basic household chores.

And the real biggie, in my mind: the schedule. I’m the one who knows who’s supposed to be where and when, be it a school activity, a meeting at a studio, kids’ guitar lessons, our writers group, whatever. He’s happy to chip in with, say, driving or errand running, but I’m the one who has to keep track of what errands need to be run.

Part of this is personality difference. I’m a multi-tasker, and really wouldn’t like it if writing were the only thing on my plate. He’s a single-tasker. When he writes, he writes, nothing else. (And when he’s not writing, he’s doing some other single-minded task — right now we’ve just moved, and he is diligently unpacking — and I am thanking God we aren’t under a deadline, because otherwise, he’d be writing and I’d be doing all the unpacking.)

And, truth be told, our writing styles are so different (a spin-off of the multi-/single-task mindsets), it usually works for me to handle most everything. I certainly don’t think I’d use any time I got from his pitching in more to do more writing.

So to the question: “Do male writers ever have to worry about stuff like this?” I’d say, probably not. Not if they have a wife to do it for them. Even if that wife is a writer, too.

Of course, we have all made sacrifices for that passion. Most of us don’t have children; few of us have homes of our own; certainly NONE of us have clean houses But somehow all of us, males and females, have come to the same place — that our art is every bit as important as someone else’s “real life.”