Adapting to the Full-Time RV Life

I'm in a bit of a pickle because moving into the RV and dealing with the house took time and energy away from my writing.

Here's some of the beautiful landscaping at the Treasure RV resort.

I need to put out a short story or novella every few weeks or my income drops to zero.

The problem with living in the RV is that I'm essentially living in the same room as my mother and cats.  This means we have to synch up our sleep schedules.  I'm a night owl.  She's a morning person.  I usually write until 2am or so and sleep until noon.  She gets up at 8am every day.  Now she has me rolling out of bed at 9am and I'm too tired to stay up late to write.

I need to get into a trance to do my best writing.

I know that sounds nutso, but other writers call it their 'writing zone.'  You have to be in the mind and world of your characters to really get out a good story.  I can't do that on little sleep, or when I have too many distractions.

So I haven't gotten out a story since Mid-March and my 30 day average income has dropped by $1,000.

Yeah.  It's that extreme.

Being a full-time author is not easy, otherwise more people would do it.  It means banging out quality work at a fast clip and regular rate.  When life interferes with that I take catastrophic hits to my income.

Right now the situation is still okay.  I can live on what I would make if my average income stayed the same.  The thing is, it's just going to keep dropping.

I have to put out a new story.

So I'm figuring out how to get my writing done in this new lifestyle.  I'm writing this blog outside the RV in a table I set up.  There are outlets on the outside of the RV I can hook into and I'm still in the range of my hotspot for Internet.

Here we are!  We tow with that Nissan Armada there.

I'm trying to see if I can finish the sequel to last month's short story.  It's tough getting in the zone out here because there are people going by and bugs.  However, a few cups of wine always seem to help.  I'm sacrificing some dinner calories in order to have two cups of merlot now so I can get this story done.

 It's frustrating because when I'm really 'in the zone' I can write an entire story in six hours.  This story goes on to make me $300 in one month, and also revives sales of my older titles.  And yet, I've been struggling with this one short story for WEEKS.  Dang it, Yamila!  Get this shit done!!

Another thing we need to adapt to now is preparing food in the small home.  

The RV is just not suitable for food prep that requires multiple dishes and pans.  My cooking is basically sticking meat and spices in the crock pot (like this pork shoulder) and then serving it for lunch and dinner with salad or canned vegetables.  I'm ashamed to say that we've been using up some paper plates we had from our last camp trip rather than dirtying real plates.  I just need prep and clean up to be easy.