Guest post by Liz @ Fictional Candy

I am really excited about today's guest, as I have the pleasure to introduce my dear friend (and great blogger) Liz from Fictional Candy!

Liz is a 36 year old single mom to one. She works full time, She blogs like crazy. If you take a chance and get to know her you will find she is loyal, trustworthy, generous, and completely obnoxious. Let's not forget smart-ass. For the people who don't want to take the time to get to know her, well, that is completely their loss. Because she is awesome. Feel free to email her, she loves chatting with new people!

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Hi everyone! My name is Liz, and I run Fictional Candy.  First I want to say a great big Thank You to Franny for having me over here at Mind Reader!  This is actually my first guest post, so hopefully it won’t be too horrible!

When Franny and I were discussing subjects for this post, she had a couple in mind that were really great.  In the end we decided that I will write about motherhood and blogging!  Sorry guys, if you are out there, you might not find this one too interesting.  But if you do, I live in Detroit, MI and I’d love to hear from you *wink wink*

I am a single mother to one very obnoxious and wonderful four year old girl, Leah.  I have her all of the time, no weekends off.  Ok, an occasional weekend when she goes with her grandparents.  I also work a full time day job.  And then on top of that I run Fictional Candy, which posts just about every day.  And then on top of all of that I do the laundry, cook the meals, clean the house (sometimes!), mow the lawn, weed the garden, and everything else that everyone else does.  Whew, I’m tired already!

How in the world do I balance it all?  Heck if I know!  Most days are a juggling act.  We get home after work and school, and I get dinner started.  I let her watch some cartoons and I will usually sit down with my kindle and we just relax for a bit.  That is the key, I think.  It helps that Leah is super independent, and often she doesn’t even want to play with me.  It helps give me that much needed “me time”.  And my “me time” is pretty much devoted to blogging.  It also helps that I read superfast, although that is more out of need than pleasure.  I also take lots of notes, because trust me – I will forget.  I’ll have to look at the most wonderful drawing of a shark climbing a tree under a rainbow eating a flower singing a song in the sun, or deal with a spill… or hey, cook a meal, and the thought is gone.  My kindle goes with me everywhere, and if I have more than 5 minutes to wait, I’m starting it up and reading.  Or sometimes I’m taking notes for things I want to do on my blog, like an upcoming feature where I interview other bloggers (including Franny!).

Another thing that helps is the ability to (sometimes barely) function on only 4-5 hours of sleep LOL.  Luckily I was this way even before my daughter was born, because it sure comes in handy now.  Nearly all of my blogging is done late at night, nearly midnight.  When it’s peaceful and quiet, I start the process of writing out my reviews – I keep them all in word documents and then the coding for my posts.  Blogger makes it easy, not like in the olden days (haha) when I learned to code the long way.  And here is something I couldn’t live without – Google Docs.  Anything I think I will need that I will need to access from anywhere goes there.  Calendars, review lists, spreadsheets.  Google docs combined with my super fun smart phone make my life a lot easier! I do a lot of color coding for status updates and I check it all the time.  Hey, OCD has to be good for something.  If I’m not going to use it to clean my house, I might as well use it to keep Fictional Candy running as smoothly as possible!

So as you can see, I tend to run on.  That’s probably partially why I enjoy blogging so much in the first place.  I get to talk and talk, and no one is right there to tell me to shut up! On top of that, I have made so many wonderful friends in the readers, bloggers, and authors I get to deal with on a daily basis.  It is a very time consuming hobby, any blogger will tell you that right away.  But even before they tell you how many hours it takes from their day, they will tell you how much they love to read – and to talk about  what they read.  And that’s why we are all here.  Thank you, again, to Franny for having me over to Mind Reader.  I really appreciate the time and space.  And thank you to all of you for reading my post! Have a terrific day!