listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door: let's go
-- E.E. Cummings
A significant portion of my day is spent writing, reading, and/or editing. I don't have a posting process so much as I have a writing process or, as one author friend has been known to call it, a method for existing. Sometimes I think it's just How I Try To Adult. Warning: this is going to seriously bore you.
It is rarely writing etc for just one thing. Typically, I bounce from an early morning reading of new posts on Mizahar and news-media articles over my coffee, to replying to various editorial emails and messages and also sometimes Miz PMs through my morning routine (feed the dog, go for a run, take a shower, do something with hair/face, grab pre -made lunch/make lunch, yell at the sky for the weather, figure out where the [AHH] did I put my shoes.)
Fast forward through the commute where I turn music up incredibly loud and let my brain do whatever it's going to do, but nothing at all with phone or tablet but just the space around me. Still time while in motion. Arrive: Office. Coffee No. 2, lunch in 'fridge, hello, good morning, are those pastries for everyone? Bring me all the muffins and bagels in the land! Who put this on my desk? Cute shoes. Turn computer on. Everything opens -- Madness begins.
I'm a multi-tasker. I tend to read drafts, revisions, script bibles, blogs, and Mizahar while doing the more active process of my job. I'll write half a post while on a conference call and outline some critique notes on a split screen with my meeting notes. I have multiple on-going conversations on Google Hangouts and AIM throughout the day about this plot or that story arc and its's about my thing or their thing or a work thing or a Miz thing. Most days I am co-writing the first drafts of scenes for this or that project in an endless back and forth string of emails that are not entirely dissimilar to a Mizahar IC thread. A scrap post might go up at lunch and by the time I get home I sit down with a mental To Write List.
When Mizahar is on that list, I grab something to drink -- tea or wine -- take off shoes and open the windows. I sit down at my dining room table (read as: "casual" work desk) with my laptop and open up whatever program I'm going to use. I don't always use Scrivener or Word or Google Docs or just gmail drafts. If I'm finishing up something I've already begun, I obviously start in whatever program I ended in, but otherwise there's no rhyme or reason. It's whatever I'm doing at the time. When it comes to picking what threads to reply to, I never go in order. Sometimes I pick the older. Sometimes I pick what I'm most inspired for. Other times I go with one a player has been begging about. And still more times I actually get someone to pick a number between 1 and whatever for me and start with that one. It's that random. That random. (I'm emphasizing this for anyone who is under the mistaken impression that I have made you wait this long for a reply out of some otherwise unrevealed dislike or disinterest.) I post something, I re-read it, realize I am a complete failure and go back to edit the numerous typos or what-have-you. Mizahar doesn't get the pre-editing from me most everything else does because it's undemanding, it's my free time writing place, lacking obligation and stressful demand.
I end up getting distracted by whatever is going on in life and coming back to it. If I'm really into what I'm writing, I get active about it and stand up and walk around and pace and come back to it and bust a move to the music playing and sit back down again. Sometimes I'm done "being good" and I grab my ipad and move to the sofa. Often I am writing something else in conjunction with a Miz thing. Write a post, hack out a few thousand words of XYZ, and forth and back again.
So that's it really. The weekends things tend to get more devotion. Early morning, pick one thing, fall into the clear of it and try not to surface until you're 5thousand words in. Sometimes write around chores. That's what I'm doing now. On that note, I need to find something to eat.
