Kit Gray, author of The Black Cat Detectives mystery, is visiting Ascroft, eh? today to share with us how they balance writing and the solo-parenting life.

Welcome, Kit. I’ll turn the floor over to you –

I wasn’t planning on becoming disabled and being my daughter’s only parent, but here I am. And you know what? It’s AMAZING.

Sometimes, it’s hard, of course. But I wouldn’t change a single thing about how my journey has gone so far, because I love who my daughter is and I love my life.

I know a lot of people who are parents. I even know a few who are doing it alone, like me. I have a lot of writer friends with young children. I don’t know any parent who doesn’t struggle to find time for their own interests. I get it. When you are the only caregiver for a kiddo 24/7/365, it’s incredibly difficult to find time and energy for writing.

So here’s a bit about my journey and how I make it work. Hopefully, this is helpful for any parents out there trying to figure it out as you go.

1. Acknowledging the reality.

I loved my daughter’s toddler years. She was a tiny, adorable little thing with zero fear, a bottomless yearning for adventure, a nimble and clever mind, and emotions the size and volume of a stampeding herd of wooly mammoths. My only opportunities to write were usually when she was asleep. Advice like “a serious writer will write everyday” was so destructive for me. It took me a while to realize that I got to decide for myself how writing fit into my life. For me, that meant a lot of adaptability and nimbleness. That didn’t make me any less serious about writing. I did what I could, and told myself over and over that it would get easier.

2 Finding rhythms and strategies that work for you.

The winter after my daughter turned four, I started a new bedtime routine where I’d build a fire in the fireplace after bath time and make a healthy snack. We’d put on a movie, and for ninety minutes, I’d write. The entire first draft of The Black Cat Detectives was written during those wintry fire-time evenings. Afterward, we’d have a dance party to get our wilds out, and we always finished with a slow song called Days Aren’t Long Enough by Thomas Dybdahl and Lera Lynn, during which we’d drift around the house saying goodnight to all the fur family, then story time and off to sleep.

Adorably, one night my little four-year-old daughter asked me to read her some of what I’d written. I left out anything too intense (there wasn’t much of that, it being a cozy mystery and all), and I was shocked to discover that she was rapt the entire time. The next night, she asked again, and then again. When I had a night where I was feeling too cruddy to write, her little face fell.

Talk about motivation!

3 Ups and downs don’t mean you’re failing.

I bet a lot of you are really good at being hard on yourselves. Me too. So when I’d have chunks of time where every day was filled with new challenges to surmount and new barriers to crash into, and my writing would fall by the wayside, I was really good at telling myself that maybe I wasn’t a *real* writer after all. Maybe I wasn’t putting enough into it. Maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough.

Guess what? This thought-spiral was actually far more of a drain on my ability to write than life’s obstacle course. I had to accept that I am not a slow-and-steady person. I am a wild, passionate bursts of effort followed by fallow periods person. My disability is part of that, but honestly, a lot of it is also how my brain works. But the better I understand that about myself, the better I can give myself permission to work in my own rhythm. These days, I’m pretty much always working on something writing-related. Planning, drafting, revising, editing, marketing… I try to lean into what feels doable for me and not stress about the things that I’m not doing, but “should.”

Am I good at it? I’d like to say yes, but like everything else, I have my ups and downs.

4 It does get easier! Lots!

When my daughter was a toddler and I’d tell myself it gets easier, I mostly meant less impossible.

What I never imagined was that my daughter would become one of my biggest fans. She always wants me to read her whatever I’m writing. She’s remarkably precocious for a 9-year-old, but I’m sure you can imagine there are still plenty of things I skip over, and some entire projects that are not age-appropriate.

But Bippity, Boppity, and Boop? She’s their biggest fan. She even wrote her own early chapter book, about 4000 words in 12 chapters, in which they meet a magical faerie fox and save the world from a tyrant.

I always tell her she’s welcome to participate in my author journey, but her job is to be a kid, not to support me. I don’t ever want my journey to occlude her childhood. Not even a little bit.

But time after time, she eagerly joins in. She learned close-up magic with me when I was researching. She brainstorms with me about marketing content, gives feedback on my Canva designs, comes along to author events, even gives me editorial notes on drafts of new work when I read it to her. She’ll go, “mama, I don’t think that’s how Boppity would react to that,” or, “I like that scene with the tree, but wouldn’t it be even more amazing if you tried this instead?”

When I had a rubber stamp made for a seal I can sign at book events, I had one made for her, too, in case she wanted to sign books with me, on the dedication page where her name appears.

The grin she gave me when she saw it?

Best motivation ever.

Thank you for sharing this with us, Kit, and good luck with The Black Cat Detectivse mystery. Readers can learn more about Kit Gray by visiting the author’s website and their Facebook, Goodreads, Storygraph and Instagram pages. You can also follow them on BlueSky and Twitter/X.

The book is available online at the following retailers:

Penguin Random House     Amazon       B&N      Bookshop.org 

About Kit Gray: Kit Gray aka Elise Scott writes from their lived experiences of queerness, disability, neurodivergence, fat-positivity, and petting three cats with two hands. Their life has been an adventure, from facilitating equine therapy for trauma survivors to counseling at-risk youth with the aid of an inordinately large sub-woofer and beyond. They earned their BA from Mount Holyoke and their MS from Capella University. Their debut novel, a cozy mystery featuring three kittens with the ability to bend the laws of physics, who must solve a murder to save their rescuer from the human pound, was published by Crooked Lane in May 2026. Elise is a Not Quite Write Prize winner and Best-of-the-Net nominee. Their short work has appeared/is forthcoming in The Advocate, Choices: An Anthology of Reproductive Horror, The Not Quite Write Anthology 2025, The B’K, Five Minutes, Knee Brace, All Existing, and Quibble, among others.