A Month of Juggling Everything (and Still Finding Time to Breathe)

There’s a famous poem by Henry Twells about how time seems to move faster as we grow older. When I was in high school, my choir even sang it as a strangely compelling acapella piece. Let me tell you, it’s spot on. I still remember making my parents crazy during any break from school because I was SO bored and time was just DRAGGING!

But as the adult world starts taking up more and more of my resources, and the seemingly endless fountain of energy that bubbled and splashed in my youth begins to dry up in the heat of responsibility, time has become my scarcest commodity. My heartmate and I joke that I have this terribly lame superpower in that I can make time move faster than the blink of an eye when we’re on vacation, or having a daytime adventure on the weekend. It feels like we just blink and it’s Monday again.

Never have I felt that time was my enemy more than now that I’m writing a novel, however. I mean, seriously. I’m trying to juggle my writing career with a full-time day job and still have friends, hobbies, and time with my beautiful one all at once, and it’s…Well, it’s a struggle.

And I had a good idea that it would be going into this. Novels don’t write themselves, or at least, they shouldn’t (looking at YOU, Artificial Intelligence)! But WRITING is only part of the battle. So to give you all an idea of what it’s like trying to do way too many things at once, I thought I’d give y’all a look at what a month of work really means for this particular writer.

Step One: You gots to pay tha billz, yo! Monday-Friday I’ve got a 9-5 that eats up my time for considerably longer than 9-5. I’ve got to be up by 6 to take a shower, play ball and/or play chase with the little one and then make a lunch for work to be there by 8 am. Then I come home and make dinner, and finally spend a tiny bit of time with my heartmate.

Having a full-time job, as anyone who has a full-time job that isn’t their dream job knows, is draining. You don’t come home full of vim and vigor, ready to pull out quill and parchment and get to it. But you have to do the 9-5 grind if you want to eat, have a roof over your head, etc. But, you all know about adulting, right?

That’s what I thought.

Finally, at 6:30 in the evening, the headphones go on, and I try to find my Zen before I get writing. THIS is my dream job! This is the part where I get to lose myself in the world that I’ve lived in inside my head for over three decades, and it’s GLORIOUS! I get so excited creating the new things for my readers, and part of that excitement is hating how long I have to wait to share it with everyone.

Because the process can really take some time.

Prelude to the Storm involved some research but not as much the rest of The Storm Cycle will. The first book didn’t happen in a vacuum, but it feels like it did to Auren. Very little that happens in Baria reaches the outside world. People in Darg know that there are some demons up there and some people are fighting them, but Imar and company don’t have ambassadors or promotors telling everyone in the world how bad things are getting in the frozen north.

Similarly, the average person on the street in East Kelore or even Edderish has no idea that Damone Kavamar set up a small castle on the border of the Great Forest, nor that the Children of The Beast are really upset about it. 

But now the All-Chief is coming to Lansea and the capital of the Keylores is just filled with thousands upon thousands of Humans, Vansernic, and Orman Perisie. There are constables, royal guards, and soldiers, and each one has a different function, different protocols, and different looks. These are things that I put a lot of thought into because I want to present them to you in a way that's honest and makes you feel like Auren's a real place.

Maybe some of you don’t really think about it, but for a very long time, most fantasy books had a single moon that acts suspiciously like that of Earth. Same size, same orbit, same cycle. And our moon is a real outlier from an astronomical point of view. Way too big with an orbit that’s so wonky it’s ALWAYS showing us the same face.

So for Auren, I wanted to research what would actually happen if a world that was Earth-like in most aspects had a smaller moon with a closer orbit. And then figure out what would happen if an evil god just sort of tossed the moon out of the sky. What would the oceans do? Would there still be tides? I’m trying to create a new world, yes, but I’d like it to follow most of the basic laws of gravity and physics. Magic and the will of gods need to exist to tell the story I want to share with everyone, but when those forces act outside of the basic tenets we’re all familiar with, I want them to be breaking the rules we all agree are the norm.

Auren has no moon, 45-day-long months, lots of different races with different rules of biology, kingdoms, nations, and immortals, and all of it needs to make sense and be consistent–especially the stuff I’m making up. Which means I want to spend hours and HOURS of researching to make sure I get it right for you. I got to get down and dirty with biology, history, astronomy, and architecture just to write the first four chapters of Storm Clouds Gather.

Yeah, I’m learning lots and lots of really cool things (not the least of which is that nature is so much freakier than we know), but the important takeaway is that I know that I’m standing on solid ground when I introduce how Orman Perisie or Drakin reproduce, what a crescent staff can do better than a sasumata, why there aren’t any real navies in Auren after Tsaurem’s departure, and how the throne room of the Kelores can transform its architecture without using magic.

But it does slow down the writing process a bit.

You know what else does? Stubbornly wanting to have an audiobook of my first novel. My mapmaker, beta-reader and future collaborator, R. Scott Marshall went to school to be a director and has mad skillz in the engineering department. With his knowledge and professional equipment, I knew it would be possible to record the audiobook and have it sound great if I wanted to take on the narration duties. Having a background in theater, I knew I could do it (whether we did it well or not will be up to the listeners), and I had certain very firm ideas of how I wanted some of my characters to sound. Especially The Beast.

So now I’m taking time out of my writing to record audio with my sound guy. Last week we went through three chapters (including the second biggest one), and we’re working on retakes this week with two more recording sessions for two more chapters over the weekend.

That’s a lot of time gone in a month.

Then there’s this lovely blog you’re reading. And I’m still planning on finishing the calendar for Auren’s last two months by the third Monday in July, further tweaking Amazon and Google Ads’ algorithms to promote the book and increase sales, all while keeping my Pathfinder campaign of 4+ years going, hanging out with my friends on game night, and having a relationship with my wonderful heartmate (who really misses spending time [not counting sleeping] with me). 

As for the novel itself, I’m still outlining the muscle structure of Storm Clouds Gather. The bones are in place for the remaining 6 books, and once I’ve got a skeleton and some tendons fleshed out for Book II, the writing’s going to go fairly quickly. Or as quickly as a person writing for about 2 hours per day can go while juggling everything else.

It’s a struggle, and I already know that July’s going to disappear before I can believe it. My goal is just to get as much done as I can in this proverbial blink of an eye before August starts knocking on my door. Because I’m already having readers reach out to me and ask when the next book is coming out. And I really want to make all of you happy. Every time I hear from one of you, it makes the sacrifices feel worth it.

Keep reading, friends. I promise that even as I’m juggling, I’ll keep writing!

All artwork by Forge. Copyright Leonard J. Chastain 2026