I miss my mornings when I attach them to the end of my nights. I get all my best work done when nobody else is consciously thinking within a thousand foot radius of me (don’t ask me how that works.) So if you ever want to do me and my writing a favor, leave or go to sleep. There’s something about feeling alone that just boosters my creativity when I’m quietly working on a story.

The problem is that the only time the rest of my house is asleep is usually the 12am to 6am time range, and that’s just not a good time to be up if you’re planning on functioning anything remotely like a normal human being. I go through phases where I write little, but keep great hours, and phases where I write tons at all the wrong hours.

Part of what I hate about this system of mine is that it robs me of my mornings. True I get the wee hours of the morning, but those all blur together and are no fun in contrast to reasonable-people-morning hours. Eight o’clock to noon, all those hours have their own feel and flavor. It’s fun to watch the sky start to brighten, see it come to life with more light and color as the sun rises, start your day off with a crisp walk, actually eat breakfast, and make plans for the day. When you wake up at one p.m. after binge writing until four a.m., you just scramble to figure out what has to happen in the five hours before dinner, and what you’ll need to get done in the five hours after dinner.

Because after that, you’ll be writing again.