Episode 14 with Nadia Mikail: Employment Lawyer Balancing Being An Author

And the reason why I asked that was because obviously Given that your nine to six is focused on law, I'm curious about how you have the time and dedicate the time from work or during your free time to actually focus on your novels or your next projects.

Tell me through the reality when some days you can have a draining day, how do you come back to work and also decide to focus on your next project, for example?

Honestly, truth is it's so, so hard.

Yeah.

Which I'm sure you understand.

Like, it's just hard.

It's a job alongside another job.

And, you know, often, like, something has to give.

You can't give 100% to everything all the time because that's just you burning out, right? And I'm sure you understand that.

I mean, for example, it took, like, three years between my first book and my second book.

My first book was published and written in uni.

And

obviously, you know, uni is hard like it gives me a lot of time yeah yeah yeah and things like that too a lot of free time it's a lot of like discovering yourself and your interests as well so after my first book I entered I qualified and I entered the workforce and it's just so so hard I come back after my 96 and I've written very like technical, very like peering through documents, very

evident

stuff all day.

You've gone through like four hours of like emails to add to a bundle and you just think, oh my God, no more screens today, please.

Eyes

hurt.

And even if it's the thing you love, it just feels like your brain just wants to switch off and it's just like, You don't want to do anything anymore because I mean, the truth is, as you know, the thing you love is still a job because otherwise it's, you know, it's, it's a, otherwise for me anyway, I want to be good at the thing I love because it means so much to me.

I want to be passionate and put in effort.

into it and the truth like for writing that means you know research into the things that i'm writing about or reading a picture my my skills are up to par or just to get into the mindset of writing and because your brain still views that as work you know it resists the shift from work to more works just wants to relax so it's very much very hard and it very much requires for me i'm sure it's um easy for other people but for me it really requires a sort of discipline I just wasn't used to

before.

yeah it sounds like the reality is whenever you come back from work especially from what you were saying you were looking through a lot like technical terms that's already like word fatigue for lack of better word i don't know that you're already facing and then after that then when you want to dedicate the energy to like your next project it's just like oh my gosh i have to do this again you mentioned about discipline how do you get over that do you just literally tell yourself like hey i am gonna put in 15 minutes every day non-negotiable for me to just do something or research or whatever just so that i can get through and develop the project etc

yeah um i think You know, it very much helped because I've got a good relationship with my publisher and I was like, you know, you have, I work out with her quite early deadlines for which to send in my next draw, for example.

I think that really works for me because it'll just be somewhere in the ether.