So there's a saying (attributed to Mark Twain but probably not his) that goes like this:
If your job is to eat a frog, do it first thing in the morning.
And if your job is two eat two frogs, eat the big one first.
So are you sitting? For the past couple of days, I've been writing in the morning, before work. Something I perhaps should have considered before, but I am always hung up on finding the big chunk of time, chasing the flow state, the writerly experience. But I never get there. I just don't often get a significant stretch of time to devote to writing. And at most that can happen once a week, with a good dose of luck and lots of discipline. And, if I'm being honest, the stars rarely align.
But this is a revelation. I can only give it 45 minutes to an hour, but added up, that's way more time than I ever manage on the weekends. But more than that, my days have been...positively impacted. I've always said how good it feels to get something written, how much it improves my mood and outlook. And here I am doing it first thing in the morning, each day. It's relieved that pressure -- the "shouldn't you be doing X" thing that follows me around everywhere. Which is already improving my evenings, and well, I can't wait to see what it does to the weekend.
I also think (I have a lot of thoughts) that it's particularly useful now because I'm working on some hard things in the book, and these little visits are less painful that longer bouts would be. I get to parachute in, dump some words, and then spend the day letting them percolate. It's helped me to see the whole project a bit more clearly, and now I think the end is a lot closer than it was before.
And all I have to do is eat the frog first thing. :)
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