Finding Time to Write During the Holidays

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Visiting family and friends, decorating, shopping for gifts, wrapping the gifts, baking and preparing dinner invitations … you wish the day would have 48 hours.  While Christmas or Hanukkah celebrations seem to find their happiness overdrive this time of year and your schedule is packed – how can you free up time to write? Here are some tips how writing can be included without compromising on holiday joy.

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Select The Type of Writing – Or Just Blog
Most likely you will not have a whole day – or even half a day of uninterrupted writing time. So plan rather:

• smaller writing tasks
• writing outlines
• research work for your books settings
• or edit single chapters

How about writing a couple of blogs ahead for January? This way you don’t need to worry about content for your web presence and you can even prepare posts and tweets for your Social Media presence with content snippets from your blogs.  Once this is out of your way you can concentrate in January on your current book.
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Plan Your Days / Week Ahead
If there are deadlines looming just after the holidays, make a plan which ones of your regular chores can be postponed or delegated? Think who has more time than you: Your spouse? Your teenage kids? Your parents or parents in law? Maybe they will be happy to bake the cookies, wrap the gifts for you or pick up the younger children from hockey training or school.
Or ask other parents to pool the children’s pickups.  Maybe you can even get a day off from your day job to be alone at home to sit on your computer and be productive until everyone comes home.

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Your Best Hours to Write?
Are you a Morning Bird? Skip your TV time in order to go to bed early and just get up an hour earlier.  While the house is still quiet, have your favored coffee and type away… Vice versa, as a night owl, stop all your tasks an hour or two earlier in the afternoon or evening and find a serene spot to work on your next novel.  Don’t be afraid to cancel cable — here’s how to get all the programs you love to watch – after the holidays. 
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Carry Always Your iPad or a Paper NotePad with You
While waiting for your kids or at a doctors office, or waiting at the airport and even during your lunch hour, you can take notes that you later hammer into your laptop.  I once almost missed my airplane because I was so engrossed in writing an article on my notepad – but in the end, it was one of my best articles.  Should you have to drive long-distance to visit family, bring a dictation program (dictaphone) with headsets or an app for your cell phone so you can continue your book “hands-free”.  “Downtime” adds up too, use it to work on your writing!
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Why not "escape" once in a while on very early mornings (many open at 5am or 6am already) to a coffee shop, put on your earplugs or headset and write?  Keep your writing more or less on track amidst all the turkey gobbling, Christmas cookie noshing and mulled wine drinking, and you won’t feel guilty after the holidays.  Just be a bit more flexible, creative and adaptable. Let’s the holidays begin!

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Author Michael John Sullivan and His Books

 

Michael John Sullivan, the author of several books and a novelette, was homeless at the age of 23 after watching his mother - his protector in a dysfunctional family - die from cancer.  A year later his father asked him to leave.  Riding a New York City subway train at night, his only companion was a green plastic bag of belongings.  During these bleak days he began writing his most reflective and emotional childhood and adult memories now featured in two of his novels. 
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Michael Stewart has lost his faith and is overwhelmed by the demands of raising his precocious fourteen-year-old daughter Elizabeth.  When he and Elizabeth find a cellar door in the floor of a church basement, they discover a tunnel that transports them back in time to Jerusalem during the tumultuous last week of Christ’s life. There they encounter numerous characters including Leah, a grieving widow; a menacing soldier who is determined to take Elizabeth as his own; Judas on the last night of his life; and a close-up of the man, Jesus. 

Trapped in the past, Michael comes face to face with some of his most limiting beliefs and realizes he must open himself up to the possibility of a deeper faith in people, himself, and love if he is to ever find his way home. A captivating and spiritual tale, Necessary Heartbreak will leave readers moved and transported. 256 pages

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Everybody's Daughter 
What if you had a chance to ask a loved one for forgiveness – after they died? What would you say? Would you give up your own lifetime of happiness for someone else? Michael Stewart confronts these questions as he travels back in time through a mysterious tunnel in an old church when the Romans ruled with brutal violence and Jesus preached his peaceful message.  His Teenage daughter Elizabeth soon follows Michael, but is surprised to discover that her father is nowhere to be found.  Little does she know that Michael has returned safely to the present, leaving her to battle a vicious Roman soldier.  Separated 
by centuries, Michael is trapped to fight his own battles in the present day.  Elizabeth’s disappearance, and the discovery of her blood in his car ignites a rush of judgment as the FBI focuses on him as a person of interest.
Michael’s only hope for saving his daughter rests in the hands of his best friend – a local pastor with secrets of his own – and a mysterious old journal containing tales of miracles within the walls of the old church itself.
Thrilling and suspenseful, Everybody's Daughter takes readers on a miraculous journey of their own, where salvation can be found in acts of sacrifice and hope remains forever eternal through the passage of a tunnel. 330 pages 

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Novelette An Angel Comes Home

Michael John Sullivan: "Over the past decade I have been working on a time-travel trilogy, occasionally reflecting back to my childhood and young adult experiences and incorporating it into the plot. While the hardships of spending nights riding a subway train were an emotional and sometimes physical burden for me, there’s been a wonderful conclusion to this period of time." "I have been able to heal while writing Necessary Heartbreak and Everybody's Daughter.  It’s also given me a chance to reflect upon the story and the characters and what they truly mean to me. I decided to write a prequel to Everybody's Daughter, a novelette. I felt it important that the reader should know who George Farmer was in more detail and to bridge the gap between the two books." "There’s a twist, too, in showing the relationship between Pastor Dennis, Michael Stewart, and George Farmer. George was a man of strength, love, faith and hope. Perhaps someday you will run into someone like him. Or better yet, you already have." 

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The Greatest Gift

Michael John Sullivan's Latest Book

Teenager Elizabeth Stewart has been given the gift of life once more and uses it to risk everything for a close friend – even though it means leaving behind her father, Michael who poses as a Roman soldier, takes a sea journey with an Apostle, and is asked to help write part of the Gospel in his quest to safely bring his daughter home to the twenty-first century.

Thrilling, illuminating, and ultimately resounding, The Greatest Gift concludes the trilogy begun in Necessary Heartbreak and Everybody's Daughter  in awe-inspiring fashion.  All of Sullivan's books are available in print and digital.


Enjoy Sullivan's books as much as his many readers do:  “I've been truly blessed with the opportunity to review all these wonderful novels and if you haven't read any of them, you are truly in for a treasure.” and “Eagerly awaiting Sullivan's next book.” 


Michael J. Sullivan can be reached on https://twitter.com/AuthorMSullivan or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Michael-J-Sullivan/237943096234593   

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