Real Author Day!

Happy Real Author Day everyone!

What? You’ve never heard of Real Author Day aka RAD? It’s my favorite holiday that happens several days a year! I can’t believe you’ve never heard of it?

*Checks notes*

Oh right, I made it up. Well that fact aside, RAD days (yes I know that I’m just repeating “day” but the acronym wouldn’t work otherwise so screw you) are my favorite writing days. These are the days I try real hard to be a real author instead of someone pretending to be a writer/author. It’s super easy to celebrate but despite the ease of the occasion, I rarely am able to do it aside from a few times a year.

How do you celebrate a RAD day you ask? Well you need a couple things. Typically I write in my house. Sometimes at my dining room table after my 5 and 1 year olds are done smearing their food all over it and I spend quality “me” time cleaning it up. Or I sit in my “office” which is an old desk and old office chair in a corner of the basement. The table is covered in cobwebs (not from disuse, but rather it may be a spider spawning ground? Not sure why it’s constantly covered…) and the chair is laden with cat hair as this chair is where my cat escapes to when not being tormented by my children upstairs.

Anywho, escaping from these writing conditions and out into the real world is the first step in a RAD day. Getting out of the house, alone, with my laptop and having the time to write is a rare thing. But it happens on RAD days. So step one complete: Leave the house with the mission of writing stuff and thangs.

The next step is kinda easy as well, find a local coffee shop to do you writing. Living in the Burlington, VT area, I am lucky to have lots of artsy, cozy coffee shops with many of my same ilk tapping away at their keyboards. It’s nice to blend in to the background sometimes (all the time). While I have hopped around from place to place and I have several places I like to write in, my favorite is New Moon in downtown Burlington. I’d say a good chunk of my third book was written in this establishment. Why do I like it? It’s really big, they have a large back room with lots of individual tables, wifi, it’s not usually that busy outside of normal meal times and they have a plethora of power outlets. Like almost one outlet per table and there a lot of tables. They also have great food and hot chocolate (I don’t drink coffee…Yes I know, scandalous. But it’s nasty. So is tea by the way. Just saying.)

Once you have escaped your home and found a nice spot to write in, then you have satisfied the most important objectives of a RAD day. See? Easy. What you do after this point is up to you. Write, blog, query, edit…Whatever as long as you do something! These opportunities (for me) are few and far between so I try not to waste them. I plug into my hip hop music, crack open the laptop and tap, tap taparoo away!

Do you have a similar ritual? Do you have RAD days or is every day a RAD day for you (you luck duck!)? Let me know!