Craft Week – When

Hi! Today’s topic is about when I write.

I do most of my writing after 10pm. I always have, since I was a teenager. For whatever reason, my brain focuses really well in those wee hours. When I’m on deadline and things are rolling, I’ve stayed up until 4 or 5 in the morning. Even when I worked the day job, I tended to stay up way too late (2 am was pretty common)(I also tended to arrive closer to 10 than 9)(and I drank lots of tea). When I’m not writing, my favorite part of the day is reading for a few hours while The Playwright and Monkey sleep next to me. My schedule, if it can be called such, is basically: sleep until 11am, catch up on blogs and twitter and email, late lunch, work for a few hours OR take a nap OR run errands, dinner and social time to hang out with my husband or friends, writing time.

It’s been almost a year now that I’ve been writing full-time. I still don’t quite feel like I have the hang of it. I totally imagined that I’d be going to yoga classes and cooking fabulous dinners and spending my evenings hosting dinner parties and girls’ nights. I thought it’d be a cinch to read 100 books this year. Um, no. I am still a scattered mess; I still don’t feel like I have enough time; I still spend way too much of it on the internet. I mean, Facebook totally busted me reading celeb gossip about Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth on the HuffPost the other day. I’d like to think that in another year I’ll have discovered a magical secret to time management, but I kind of doubt it.

I beat myself up a lot this spring for not being more productive. For not having a “normal” schedule. The Playwright is a total morning person; he’s often having lunch meetings with directors or finishing up his day job work as I’m dragging myself out of bed. But you know, I think it’s okay to do whatever works for you. And to adjust as you go along. The CapFringe Festival is coming up in July, and for me that means I’ll be spending a lot of evenings out of the house seeing plays and socializing at the Fringe Tent. But I’ll also need to revise and line edit the second half of STAR CURSED, so that afternoon writing time (not napping or emailing) is going to be key if I want to juggle the social life plus deadlines.

What about you? When do you write? Are you happy with your schedule?

Is there anything you’re curious about that I didn’t cover in my where, how, and when?