Queen Of The Castle

A few weeks ago I got an e-mail from a sweet lady asking If I would be interested in participating in her bloggy book tour. The kicker was that she would send me her book.....FREE! Now if you know me at all, the word FREE makes my heart start beating faster as a beeming smile stretches over my face. There is nothing (well maybe a few things) that I like better than Free stuff, so of course I jumped at her offer. I wasn't sure what to expect and was very happy to recieve one of the most funny, insightful and encouraging books I've seen, written especially for Moms. So in an effort to be all reporter-ish she agreed to answer my questions so you could get to know Lynn Bowen Walker and her book Queen Of The Castle a little better.

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Tell us about yourself

I’m the mom of two sons, and wife of good King Mark, king of homerenovation projects, who is currently blissfully demolishing our masterbathroom.

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What prompted you to tackle the project of writing a book?

I actually wasn’t looking to write a book about homemaking, I was lookingto read one. Like many women, I’d gone to school and trained for aprofession in the working world – in my case, journalism. Then I foundmyself home, raising a family, without the slightest idea of what I wasdoing! I looked for a book to help me learn what I needed to know, fromhow to manage my time, to how to keep my kids from becoming televisionzombies, to how to cope with all the housework, grocery shopping, andschlepping kids around. When I couldn’t find the book I was looking for,I finally decided maybe I needed to write it.The joy of being on the ditzy side is every time I pick up Queen of theCastle, I’ve forgotten what I’ve written. What a good book, I think! Iwonder who wrote this? :)

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Were there times during the process where you felt like you’d bittenoff too much or was it a smooth process getting everything down into bookform?

I wrote the book over a period of about seven or eight years, so I wasn’texactly working at the speed of light. One of the biggest challenges wasthat I was so busy being a homemaker, I didn’t have time to write aboutit. So I just wrote when I could, from the bleachers waiting for bandconcerts to start, in the car waiting for Little League practice to bedone, that kind of thing. There was a point, maybe about 2/3 of the waythrough, when I wondered if the book would ever truly be finished.But in the end, I’m thankful it took as long as it did. I think thefinished book is richer for all those years of writing just a little at atime. It’s like the difference between instant soup and a long-simmeredstew.

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What gave you the idea to incorporate the word of the week intoyour book?

I just love words and think they’re fun. As I read other people’s books,I’m always diving for the dictionary – some authors use really big wordsthat I’ve never heard of! I thought it would be fun in writing Queen ofthe Castle to include some of those really big words and theirdefinitions, so now we can all use them. :)

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So what’s the most important piece of advice you would give to moms living in the trenches of marriage, housework and parenting?

Oh my, what a question, Gayle!I think having perspective is important – realizing that what reallymatters in our homes is our relationship with our husbands and our kids,not how pristine the bathroom floor is, or how often we grind our ownwheat and make our own bread. We women can be so hard on ourselves. There are so many aspects to the job of running a home, and no one can begood at all of them. But somehow we expect ourselves to be.The other thing is to remember that even the really hard stages ofmotherhood do pass. There were times I wondered if I’d make it throughthose sleep-deprived, labor-intensive baby/toddler/preschool years. Buteventually you no longer have to hose down the kitchen after the kids haveeaten. Eventually they learn their multiplication tables. Eventually,they can even – sniff! – drive themselves to baseball practice. So if youfind yourself in a hard stage now, know that in just a year or two you will likely find life to be a little easier.

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Thanks so much for letting me visit your blog, Gayle.

It's been fun!:)

Lynn