Getting There

Pic of the kids fishing last weekend with their dad and granddad. Note: No writing occurred this day. 

What does your writing routine look like? I'm curious because I seem to have misplaced my usual 4 am, crawl out of bed, grope for the auto-brewed coffee, stumble back up the stairs to the computer and crank out a couple thou. Do you have a schedule that is currently working for you and, if you do, can I borrow yours? Just tell me where and when works for you and I'll be there, coffee, keyboard, and the shiny new WIP. Like a predawn writing boot camp thing?

Yep...I'll be there.

Anytime.

I'm ready.

Sitting here, with my butt glue, long enough for the magic to start to flow.

Any minute now...

What? You're calling me a procrastinator?? Me? But, but...

*hangs head* It's true.

What is it with me and a new book? Why does it seem like it's such an ordeal to get the momentum going, like an old lady trying to hoist her aging frame from a too deep recliner. Rocking back and forth, back and forth, back and...oh, up, almost, almost standing...and we're back down again. Forget pulling, the first few chapters feel like growing new teeth.

And still, I feel it coming.

You know, that time, place and space when you keep coming back to the story. Involuntarily. You'll daydream about it, start taking spontaneous notes about it. The skeleton of an outline you constructed months ago finally begins to sprout tendons and blood vessels.

Wooden puppet characters are becoming real boys.

Until, one day, all this thinking and spinning and changing and noting taking culminates in an energy urgency. "I must write this scene now!" And it has to be now because the fear it will otherwise be lost is too great (like a half remembered dream that you can't ever catch.) And that one scene, before you know it, is bleeding and breathing life into the next and the next...you're on a roll again.

Suddenly it not so hard to remember that you used to crank out up to 2500 words a day. (never mind that lately it has been more like 25.)

I do wish it were different. And, honestly, I suspect it is different for authors who choose to (or are blessed enough to) just sit down in front of their computer and shut themselves off from the outside world long enough to get there faster. It's just not where I happen to be in my journey right now. Right now I still have to manage transitions between a writing and non-writing life.

I love to write, it's true. When it all pulls together. When I look at the screen and word after word has piled up--just right. The joy and satisfaction that brings me is tremendous.

But I happen to have other joys. Louder joys. Living joys that need me. And I need them.

So, again, working-mom-writer is again blogging about her never ending quest for balance between all worlds. We get there, we always do. A little here, a little there, back and forth, give, take, beg the kids for five more minutes.

I wouldn't change a thing.