Comments on: Do Your Own Thing

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By: Bob Younce at the Writing Journey

Bob Younce at the Writing Journey — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 11:06:02 +0000

I’m up and writing early out of necessity. My oldest gets up at 5:30 for school, and so I’m up anyways. Given my druthers, I’d be sleeping later.

It took about six months of doing it every morning, but I discovered that I’m a lot more productive between 5:30 and 7:30 AM than I am between 10 and noon. I spent a lot of mornings the way you describe – cold coffee grounds and all.

I will say this: there is a quiet to the morning that you can’t get later in the day. I think it is this lack of noise and even light that keeps me focussed.

I’m hoping that, once the kids are in High School, I can go back to sleeping in and working later. I definitely prefer it. I’ve had to start going to bed at 11 PM, which means no Letterman. But the morning thing is working all right for me now.

By: Alyson

Alyson — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 08:52:30 +0000

Thankyou, thankyou, thankyou Linda. I know all of this intellectually but sometimes I just need to hear it from an external source. Your timing, as usual, is fabulous.

By: L Maloney

L Maloney — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 18:28:05 +0000

Great blog and wiki.. I was glad to discover it, and have added you to my list at http://writerinfo.blogspot.com.

By: wordwych

wordwych — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:48:31 +0000

Great post, Linda. It’s always nice to have “permission” to do your own thing. I’m a lifelong night owl. My family jokes that if it weren’t for my love of garlic, I’d have made a great vampire. Alternately, they joke that my body clock is on the West Coast while the rest of me is on the East Coast. I have found that I am at my best between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m., and have been known to write until dawn. The editors at the paper where most of my work is published have got used to the fact that my e-mailed articles and photos are sent out in the wee hours, and they know that while I will haul my rump out of bed to do an early morning interview, I do so only because I could not arrange a later time. I spent decades fighting my own body clock, all the way through school and through my various “regular” jobs. While I can write well during daylight hours, I find it’s a bit of a struggle. Yet at night, there’s hardly any struggle at all. I think my brain just works better in the dark. I learned long ago to keep a mini cassette recorder (now a digital recorder) beside my bed for those middle-of- the-night-genius thoughts that pop into my head as I’m trying to disengage my brain and go to sleep.