YouTube Is Saving My Writing Career

Listening to music is saving the day

Twenty years ago, I fell in love with my house. I loved the open concept. My kitchen is in the middle of the house, and you can walk in a circle around it. The house didn’t have as many bedrooms as I wanted, but you can’t have everything, right?

Now, I kick myself for that decision almost every day.

Why?

The answer to the why is because I have nowhere to work without interruptions and noise.

Someone is always banging around in the kitchen. The tv is on all of the time. The volume level is loud even though my husband swears that his hearing is just fine.

Because the tv is so loud, everyone talks loud and often.

I had thought by now that I could use the smallest bedroom as an office, but my adult son has firmly entrenched himself in there. He knows that his rent is cheap and he doesn’t like to spend money on anything but his car.

Things got even worse when COVID struck, and my husband worked from home. He was in one corner of our great room, and I was in the other. So not only did I have to listen to his zoom calls, but he had to listen to me argue with our teenage son. He got the first-hand experience of the boys banging around in the kitchen while he was trying to work.

It was a no-win situation.

I began to stay up most of the night writing, and then I would sleep until noon the next day. This led to the comments about my sleeping habits.

Finally, my husband was given a new office close to home, and now he works there every day. Of course, he won’t admit it, but he was as happy about it as I was.

Now, I only have my two son’s schedules to contend with. One goes to work very early in the morning and gets home in the early afternoon. The other is in school and sometimes has a job.

I never know when I can have the house to myself.

I’m back to getting up at a reasonable hour, and then I can squeeze in a couple of hours of peace and quiet.

Otherwise, I rely on my trusty earphones and the YouTube Music channels to help me concentrate. The problem is when a cool song comes on; I must stop to watch the video.

I’ve looked up songs and performers so often that Wikipedia wants me to give them a donation. They weren’t happy with the five bucks that I gave them to shut them up.

The earphones are not the perfect solution. The people that I live with still come and knock on my earphones to get my attention. They must tell me really important things like how they are going to take a shower or how much they need money. The shower report comes from the husband; the money requests come from the teen.

The adult son is usually the one banging around in the kitchen.

Some day I’m going to write the Great American Novel despite my many interruptions.

I’ve already written The Marriage Wars by Leeanne Beasley Berry. It’s available on Amazon.

But I do thank YouTube. Believe it or not, Led Zeppelin helps drown out the baseball game so I can write!