The holiday season always catches me off guard. I'm never prepared, even though Thanksgiving and Christmas come around the same time every year. It's always difficult to focus on writing when there are family functions to organize, food to cook and gifts to buy. As much as I love all the madness, I've never figured out how to stay ahead of it.

The nice thing about holidays is that they usually afford you more time at home. But, this is rarely used for writing projects, the purpose is to spend that extra time with family. So, to stay motivated, here are my top five ways to keep writing during holidays:

5) For every chapter I write I get a slice of pumpkin pie
4) Family gatherings will become focus groups to help me work out plot problems
3) I can setup my computer at the dinner table so I can write in between courses.
2)To avoid Christmas shopping, I'll just give everyone chapters from my book

And my number one solution for staying motivated to write during the holidays is...

1) Convince my husband that the number of pages I write between Thanksgiving and Christmas is the amount of money he must spend on my Christmas gift