Writing first thing in the morning is a wonderful feeling. Ideally, I want to be diving headfirst into fiction long before the sun comes up. There are a few problems with this, however. To begin with, I hate waking up. I set the alarm for 5:00 and didn’t get up till well past 5:30. It is still dark and I am still here at my desk typing away, but man it took a while to get going. Still, this is the way. When I did the reset and added up all of the things I needed to be doing in order to promote a successful and healthy lifestyle, I found that I was going to be working a six hour day… that doesn’t include my day job. This is not what I would call ‘actionable intelligence’. Which brings me to the second hurdle to morning writing: I have too much going on.
Sure, I am finding time to do fiction, but I also checked and responded to work emails, because I teach in a few hours. I love the teaching, but I am having a hard time compartmentalizing the things I need to do, most likely because there are far too many things that I need to do over the span of a day. Once I read about a method where you divide up your day into one hundred or so squares/blocks of time and in that time you are supposed to mark off all of the stuff that populates your day and your life. What became clear to me upon discovering this method is that I tend to have a lot of stuff, and most of it involves dealing with other people’s stuff. Being a dad remains a full time gig–even in a half time situation. Mentally, I am still there well into the week they are not here. What changes is how much time I spend making sure they get from point A to point B relatively on time. Beyond that I remain disorganized in the teaching sense. I’m a tinkerer and always tinkering with the content and the content delivery, which leads to me cramming new information into powerpoints hours before class. This too subtracts (detracts?) from the writing.
I suppose the bottom line here is that I’m pulled between a handful of core things in my life, and it is tough to lock into a schedule that allows proper time for everything that needs to be done. What I think will work best is if I continue waking up bloody early and devoting a good chunk of that pre-dawn darkness to the work. Perhaps I’ll even cruise over to youtube, flip on a slick background feed like ambient renders, and upload my mind into a story. That is what I want life to look like for me in the wee hours. This way, by the heart of the afternoon I can be out in the streets or in the woods with the woman I love. Maybe I’ll even get in a game or three in the early evening. That sounds like a perfect life to me.