There is a rooster inside my head that goes off like the most reliable alarm clock at 5 every morning if I’m not already awake—which most often I am.
At times in my past I tried staying up later in hopes that would cause me to sleep later. It didn’t. It only left me resembling a zombie throughout a very sleep-deprived day, after my usual anonymous rooster awakened me at 5.
So I resigned myself to getting up early (and going to bed commensurately early). As a result, I have a long workday (not a bad thing for a writer) but a short evening (which, fortunately, my S.O. doesn’t complain about—we each do our own thing in the evenings, which is pretty much the fabric of our relationship anyhow).
My workday starts almost immediately after my feet hit the floor. Not only do I wake up early, I wake up fully awake and alert (unlike my S.O., who wakes up groggy). But by 4 or 5 PM I am dragging a**, and spending any part of the evening working is not an option.
Still, that gives me the better part of 12 hours to get as much work done as possible, allowing for such interruptions as phone calls, emails, and bathroom breaks.
A writer needs to be disciplined, and I think I am. I don’t spend endless hours on the phone yakking with friends, I have never played games on my computer or my cellphone, and when on one occasion I chided myself aloud to a friend for spending too much time on email—my email being a mix of business and personal—the friend I was talking to disagreed with me sharply, saying she didn’t know anyone else who works as hard or diligently as I do.
But it always seems there is more to be written (or edited, which I do also, but especially more to be written) than I have time for. Sure, I have over 100 published books to my credit, but what about the next 100? Where are they coming from? I keep having the feeling that I’d better hurry up and work faster. I keep regretting that I no longer have the stamina to put in 17-hour days as I did some decades ago. I know I have to make the most that I can of my 12-hour workdays.
Speaking of which…it’s time to stop blogging and get to other writing. The day is fast winding down, and so is my energy. Ah, to have the stamina again that I had at 30. (I wouldn’t want to BE 30 again—just to have the stamina and energy I did then.)
But I need to get going. I already have over 100 published books to my credit, but there are 100 more books waiting to be written.