Morning Writing

I have always considered myself a night writer. Daytime is too rife with distractions for me to write well--the sun is out, errands could be run, other people are up and about, there are phone calls and mail deliveries to interrupt my concentration. At night, it's dark and quiet and there's no place else to go, no one to talk to.

But for the past several months my schedule has been so whacked and my brain so exhausted by evening that I haven't been getting much writing done. Which leads to more stress and more exhaustion. To try and remedy the situation, I've instituted a new writing schedule for myself: waking up early and setting aside a few hours first thing to do my writing.

I don't know how well this is going to work, given that I'm not a morning person and this is going completely counter to my natural preferences. I hate to wake up before noon, my brain requires several hours to start functioning properly, and I have to deal with all the daytime distractions. I've managed to do it for a couple of days now, and the results are decidedly underwhelming--a few hundred words yesterday, all of which got cut today to be replaced by a handful of new ones. But I'm chalking that up to the fact that my brain is still reeling from the change in schedule and will take several days to adjust. I hope in a week I can start to report actual productivity. The first steps, though, are to consistently show up at the computer first thing in the morning to make my brain realize I mean business.

I'm also disabling the WiFi on my laptop during that time period.

Desperate times, desperate measures.