Sunday, September 15, 2013

Daily Writing Schedule

I had to change my daily writing schedule.

That's not the reason you haven't heard from me on here. I've been beta reading a novel and, if you follow me on facebook or twitter, you'll see the reviews I've been doing for Tangent Online.

But some of you may have also noticed a change in the season: school started! No, I'm not going to college (whew). I babysit a grade schooler beginning at 6am every school morning. Over the summer, my children have generally been waking up from 6:30-7:00am and going to bed at 8:30pm and I have been going to bed at 10pm, leaving me about an hour to write in the evenings. There's not a lot of wiggle room in that kind of schedule. So, I started setting my alarm for 5:50am with the plan to do my writing while the older child does a quiet activity.

Does that sound insane to you? I used to have to get up even earlier when my oldest child was 1yo and decided that waiting for the sun to rise is for underachievers. Was that fun? NOPE. I'm what most people would consider a morning person, who, left to my own devices, wakes up around 9am. Waking up 3-4hrs earlier still sounds insane to me, and the idea of having the clarity of mind to write sounds laughable.

Thankfully, it's worked out better than I had feared. This schedule is still not my first choice and I "sleep in" on the weekend, but most school days I get 45 minutes or so to write and I usually get to bed at a decent time. I'm not as sleepy as I feared I would be, which I attribute to getting dressed immediately and nibbling on something while I open my project. Switching to the netbook also frightened me, but the small keyboard hilariously matches my child-like hands and the equally hilarious slow processing power greatly reduces internet temptations. So, I think the trade off has been about equal. If I could get the kiddos to sleep until 7 every morning instead of randomly, that would make me very happy with my writing time.

Not that I wouldn't switch back to writing in the evening, in an instant! At what age do kids start putting themselves to bed?