J.G. Chayko

Summer is a lively season, full of afternoon excursions, visiting friends and family, sunset walks along the beach, and long evenings lingering on patios with refreshing drinks revelling in the beauty of the world. Summertime is the time when friends and family emerge from hibernation and your social calendar is unexpectedly overflowing with new obligations. It’s a wonderful time of year to celebrate life and spend time with loved ones. The downside to all this socializing is that it appears to snatch those coveted hours reserved for writing – but it doesn’t have to. This is the time when you need to become more organized in carving out those precious moments to keep working. Life and sunshine have returned to the earth but this doesn’t mean your work has to suffer – it just requires a bit more attention to finding the time to write. A little bit of vanity is a writer’s prerogative. I’ve written before that we have to be selfish in order to finish our work, but it’s just as important to find a balance in life. As much as we would love to be cloistered away in our own little worlds, there is a real world out there that helps feed our ravenous imagination, and without it, we would eventually find ourselves starving for those vital details that infuse life into our writing.

Enjoy the summer, step outside and allow the world to contribute to your thoughts, discover characters in the people around you and find those pockets of time for writing and creating – as you fall into the rhythm of summer, you will discover a balance between the outside world and the creative world of your own imagination and your writing will not suffer.