Now that I’m mostly adjusted to my new sleep schedule of getting up at 4:30 (and, more importantly, staying up), it’s about time for me to take the next step in my nefarious plan. (Sorry, self. I should have warned you there was a nefarious plan involved.)
John Scalzi recently decided to stay off the internet until after noon or 2000 words of pay copy, whichever comes first. (By “recently” I apparently mean “Holy crap, that was all the way back in January? Where did the time go?”) I thought this was a brilliant plan at the time, and still do, but until recently my ability to adopt something similar has been dramatically crippled by my general state of non-sapience prior to noon.
But no more!
I’m about as adapted to a morning schedule as I’m likely to get any time soon, and I have summarily used this morning free time to do some amazing things. I now occasionally answer emails. I finally finished Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces. I started using Remember The Milk, which I still need to mention at some point. But I haven’t gotten around to using this time for its original intended purpose: writing.
Hence, for the foreseeable future– assuming no significant failures of self-control on my part– I’m going to be staying clear of most of the Internet until noon or 1000* words on Thursday-Monday**. So I guess I’m going to go do that now.
*Historically speaking, 1000 words is very reachable for me when I get a few hours to write and am not completely blocked. I strongly suspect that I’ll be able to pull closer to 2k when I get into the rhythm; time will tell. (I actually need to average about 1700/day to hit my current target for draft 3, but a lot of those words will be scenes I’ve already written imported from draft 2 and tweaked to fit.)
**Tuesday and Wednesday are my Saturday and Sunday, being the days Kat has off right now.
Current music: Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes, via Pandora. Turns out this is great music for waking up in the morning. (On a related note, I love the new Pandora interface. Anyone else have thoughts on it?)
If this had a thumbs up button, I would’ve used it.
Now that you mention it, I really should figure out how to add Google’s new +1 button to the blog. I’ll file that in with all the rest of the blog redesign stuff.
Oh also: owl city and jason mraz’s the remedy both make good pandora stations for mornings
I reckon I’ll try both of those. It’s not like I’m running out of mornings any time soon.
[...] little while ago, I stated a new goal to stay off the Internet until I had 1000 words written or noon, whichever [...]