Mornings
I am not a morning person. I am a slugabed, wake-me-when-the-world-is-dark-and-happy-again type, stumbling for the kitchen to get coffee.
I recently found a day job, which has been amazing in the financial department, but required a re-ordering of my schedule: I need to now be somewhere looking professional at 9 in the morning. There's a half-hour commute. And my kitchen is currently being refurbished, which means no morning coffee (unless I was willing to resort to instant, which we all know is a bad idea).
I expected to grudgingly deal with this situation. Yet last night, after some carousing in celebration of a coworker's leaving the office to return to the teaching life, followed by an exceptionally successful Arkham Horror game (the players won!) in which more carousing occurred, I pinged awake this morning with only slight reluctance and staggered towards the shower, no "snooze" button involved.
Because I needed to get my edit on. And the interval between 7.15 am and 8 is the one span of editing time that will never be wrested from me by work, friends, or family. It's not my only time in the day -- I'd never get anything done otherwise -- but it's a start.
And it's awesome. I can take that time to review edits made the previous day, to really drill into a particular paragraph, to tie characters more tight to one another or just to contemplate how an eight-foot-tall, one-ton statue moving might look to a smaller, fleshier observer.
Maybe I wouldn't recommend this wake-up technique to everyone; people who don't feel a pull to any writing implement in the neighborhood might not like it. But maybe this is what people mean when they say, do something that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning.
I recently found a day job, which has been amazing in the financial department, but required a re-ordering of my schedule: I need to now be somewhere looking professional at 9 in the morning. There's a half-hour commute. And my kitchen is currently being refurbished, which means no morning coffee (unless I was willing to resort to instant, which we all know is a bad idea).
I expected to grudgingly deal with this situation. Yet last night, after some carousing in celebration of a coworker's leaving the office to return to the teaching life, followed by an exceptionally successful Arkham Horror game (the players won!) in which more carousing occurred, I pinged awake this morning with only slight reluctance and staggered towards the shower, no "snooze" button involved.
Because I needed to get my edit on. And the interval between 7.15 am and 8 is the one span of editing time that will never be wrested from me by work, friends, or family. It's not my only time in the day -- I'd never get anything done otherwise -- but it's a start.
And it's awesome. I can take that time to review edits made the previous day, to really drill into a particular paragraph, to tie characters more tight to one another or just to contemplate how an eight-foot-tall, one-ton statue moving might look to a smaller, fleshier observer.
Maybe I wouldn't recommend this wake-up technique to everyone; people who don't feel a pull to any writing implement in the neighborhood might not like it. But maybe this is what people mean when they say, do something that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning.