"Road Trip Wednesday is a ‘Blog Carnival,’ where YA Highway's
contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question and answer it
on our own blogs. You can hop from destination to destination and get
everybody's unique take on the topic."
Today I'm answering for my first RTW topic, and it is a perfect maiden voyage topic for me, folks.
This week's topic is: What time do you prefer to do your writing? Early Worm? Night Owl ? Any five seconds you can grab?
I used to be:
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Only I wasn't this blue and cool and lovely.
No. My eyes were redder and droopier because I'd already played a few Wii games with my young son or helped him with his homework or made him something to eat, and I was on my third glass of Malbec.
Sometimes fourth...but they're tiny bistro glasses.
And still, I could churn out several pages before falling asleep on my keyboard with a little chocolatey drool easing its way out of the corner of my mouth.
Chocolate drool because that's what I eat when I write.
Note to writers: Eating bowlfuls of dark chocolate with red wine is not a sound diet.
After ten pounds inexplicably found their way to my waist, I am now...
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Is 7:30 considered early? If not, maybe I'm just a "worm" and not an "early worm," inching my way though my manuscript.
It happened on vacation, of all places. My family was visiting a good friend in Michigan, and we were staying in a cabin on his little spread of land. We took literally a few steps out the cabin, and there was our private lake with our devoted loons and baby frogs hopping on wee legs.
Before the kids woke up (10:30? 11?), I sat with my laptop in front of the lake view window and wrote for at least two hours every morning. I traded wine for coffee and chocolate for almonds, and somehow wrote more than half a YA novel manuscript in just a few weeks.
Note to writers: I (highly) do not recommend abandoning wine for extended periods of time.
Now that the school semester is almost upon me, I've traded early morning sessions for evening again, and I have to admit that I was much more productive writing in the morning. It takes me a solid hour of deleting and pulling my hair before my muse kicks in at night. Coffee seems to kick-start the muse faster. It's a conundrum when you write best when you're supposed to be teaching writing elsewhere.
I wonder how many other writers need wine and/or coffee to settle down and focus on the first few productive paragraphs.
