Last September, I was scheduled to appear on National Public Radio (NPR) to promote my new memoir, I Sleep At Red Lights: A True Story of Life After Triplets, in a back-to-school-themed show. But minutes before airtime, the NPR producer told me that country music legend Johnny Cash had died and my segment had been bumped for an obituary.

Unlike Hillary Clinton or J.K. Rowling, I didn’t have marketing or PR machines to launch me into the media matrix. This was to be my big break the equivalent of an obscure comic landing on The Tonight Show and in a final act of one-upsmanship, Johnny Cash stole my microphone.

Cash’s swan song forced me to e-mail more than 200 people the embarrassing update of my un-appearance. My Amazon sales ranking marooned itself at 10,023, moving neither up nor down, a perfect symbol of my public-relations purgatory.

This spell of self-pity lasted for a month, until Willie Shoemaker, the famous jockey, died. I realized that somewhere, in a cramped and airless radio studio, another first-time author was getting booted to make time for a treacly homage by Bob Costas or some other yellow-jacketed pontificator.

Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings. And every time a celebrity dies, a struggling author gets kicked back down into the shallow grave of obscurity. To see my life’s work pre-empted by the inconveniently timed deaths of the media-friendly had a terrible side effect: I stopped enjoying the obituaries.

In my 40s, I began to read the obituaries before the movie reviews the obits were more dramatic, revealing and instructive and now this simple pleasure had been ruined. When John Ritter died, instead of lingering over my teen memories of Three’s Company, I imagined hundreds of pasty-faced authors returning to their jobs at engineering magazines and Blockbuster stores, endless years of labor washed away so Rex Reed could prattle through six commercial breaks on Larry King.

Fall turned to winter and many fascinating people exited the world, stage left. I skimmed their obituaries with mounting irritation. By some small miracle (perhaps Willie Shoemaker rode to my rescue?), I was rebooked on NPR in early November. I prayed that any washed-up tennis pro or self-exiled Broadway composer who felt the need to shuffle off this mortal coil would exercise the common decency to yield until I was on the air. Frankly, though, I remained anxious. Celebrities dedicated their lives to hogging the spotlight. Why should they be any more charitable in death? As it turned out, terrorists bombed a Saudi Arabian compound the night before my appearance, bumping me again. The NPR producer rebooked me for Monday, one week before Thanksgiving. “Providing Saddam Hussein isn’t killed,” I joked. The producer laughed uncomfortably at my bizarre bad luck.

I spent 20 years as a reporter and knew that the news was inherently unpredictable. As a self-absorbed writer, I also wondered if I was having some cosmological influence. What if my potential celebrity was like a pebble dropped into the pond of Fate, and I was seeing the ripples of my existential impact? Even as an example of negative megalomania, the possibility that God might rearrange world events to crush my success was a powerfully seductive idea. Maybe I could hire myself out to Fox News or CNN to create crises during slow news cycles. The book-writing was not paying my bills.

That weekend, I scanned the news hourly. I could literally feel the gravity of my bad karma pushing and pulling the news two helicopters downed in Iraq, bombings in Istanbul, anti-Bush protests in England. And then billionaire Larry Tisch died. His empire was built on real estate and media -an irresistible portfolio for media tastemakers. I was toast. And yet, on Monday, the NPR producer said Tisch’s death would only carve 10 minutes out of my 60-minute spot. Unless Saddam Hussein was killed in the next few hours, I was green-lighted. I rode the train into New York City and walked to the NPR studio in total silence, hoping that no news was, finally, good news. Bruce Stockler is a humorist and the author of I Sleep At Red Lights: A True Story of Life After Triplets.

<B>A mother’s balancing act</B> Toward the end of writing <B>Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life</B>, a process that took three years, my deadline got unexpectedly moved up. It became clear that I would have to drop everything in order to finish on time. I couldn’t stop my job teaching writing to Duke students because it was mid-semester, and I needed the paycheck. But I figured I could pretty much take a hiatus from everything else for two months. My back was against the wall, and my husband, an utterly generous man, agreed to take over the lion’s share of housework and childcare for our two sons, ages five and eight.

Up until that point, I’d written the way most writers do: stealing time from job, family and sleep in order to write. My book, in fact, is about precisely these negotiations and hard calls. It features a woman my narrative self who is ambitious in several conflicting arenas that all take time and can’t easily be multi-tasked. In order to finish this book, I would have to temporarily live a different life. Lucky for me, Duke’s spring break fell during the two months when I needed it most. My students were headed to Fort Lauderdale to sunbathe, drink margaritas and have bad sexual encounters. (I knew these details from the short stories they wrote each semester when they came back.) I had different plans, though I was going to a writers’ retreat.

At the retreat, I worked incredibly hard: 12 to 15 hours a day. Still, I had a lovely room with a gorgeous garden view. I got to make my own tea exactly when I wanted it. If I took a walk behind the ex-mansion that housed the retreat, I often saw people riding horses. When I got back, kind friends empathized. <I>You must be exhausted. Are you working all the time? Are you sleeping? Don’t worry, it will be over soon, and then you can relax.</I> Should I tell them the truth that writing 15 hours a day was way easier than my regular life? Should I tell them about the horses? Of course I should.

"Actually," I said, "I’m doing really well. It’s Duncan who’s bearing the brunt of things." Quite frankly, my husband Duncan looked like hell when I returned. I hated to see him so ragged. His face reminded me of the faces of mothers I saw in the park when my children were babies and toddlers: pinched, exhausted, always checking their watches <I>how much longer will this day go on?</I> I couldn’t see my own face at the time, but I knew it looked the same. While I was gone for 12 days, Duncan did what millions of women do each day as routine: work a job and single-handedly run a household with young kids. It was hard work, much of it invisible to the larger world.

<I>Dispatches</I> actually features a chapter in which I detail my anger at Duncan for not doing what I perceived to be enough domestic work prior to 2000. He left it to me, I felt, without seeing all that was there. Yet here he was, three years later, doing everything so I could finish this same book. That irony didn’t escape me or Duncan.

I wrote <I>Dispatches</I> because most of the women I know are exhausted, and whether or not they have husbands, they’re doing the large majority of work at home. And yet they feel guilty for not doing enough. I wanted to give voice to this exhaustion and guilt in the hope that my readers might recognize themselves and feel entitled to a small break.

My own break the only one I felt justified in taking happened because Random House pushed my deadline forward. Not to imply that writing a book, even with a lovely view, is easy. In my experience, writing is always hard work. That’s what I teach my students; it’s what I know to be true myself. Still, I told my sister that I allowed myself to do things at the retreat I never did in normal life: take long baths instead of lickety-split showers, eat whenever I was hungry, do yoga stretches at night. "I want you to be able to do those things for yourself without a book deadline," she replied.

"That’s what I want for every woman," I said.

How do we get there? Because I’m a writer, I have to say that the first step involves telling the truth about what our lives actually look like. I was fortunate enough to temporarily leave my regular life in order to reflect on it, briefly, from a more peaceful point of view. <I>Faulkner Fox is the author of </I>Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life: Or How I Learned to Love the House, the Man, the Child. <I>For more information, visit www.faulknerfox.com.</I>