Golden Hour

All my life, I have been a night owl. Some of my best stuff happens under the glimmering moonlight. In the tranquil hours after everybody else has gone to bed, I slink off to read or play video games, sew, knit, create.

I tend to get lost in what I do. One moment it's 9pm, and the next, it's 2am. Even when teaching had me up with the sun, this habit of creating under starlight lived on. I just slept a lot less. Don't get me wrong, I do love getting up with the sun. There is something magical about mornings as well. I think I love the hours when the world is still, quiet and sleepy. But I've never created in the early morning sun.

That changed a few months ago. When I started to seriously consider writing for a living. When I was no longer sure my job would still be there at the end of this pandemic. I began a class at the Novelry. An online community and 'school' of budding novelists. The course work offered the structure I've been looking for.

Most importantly (to me), it gave me access to a community of experienced authors and not so experienced aspiring writers to support me along my novel journey. One of the things the course suggested was writing with the rising sun. At first, this was a struggle. My morning routine has always been haphazard. Wake up, feed my dogs, walk my dogs, eat, drive, sit in my classroom waiting for students to arrive, chit-chat until class starts. Never in that order, Sometimes I took an extra fifteen minutes in bed in exchange for breakfast. Sometimes I swapped out extra planning time for student talk time. The one consistent thing was by the time I started teaching (aka working), I'd been up for hours. So the notion of rolling out of bed, letting my puppies do their business, and getting straight to work was a challenging one. I'd sit on my patio and complete my course work slowly while sipping my tea and listening to birdsong.

Now I know that new habits take roughly 30-60 days to stick. The more drastic the change, the longer it takes. So while going to bed fifteen minutes earlier every night will take 30 days, cutting out all sugar from your diet and living a life of chocolate free sadness will take 60 (providing you actually do it every day.) Knowing this and practicing this are two very different things, though. So the practice of starting my brain for 'work' within 30 minutes of waking up after a lifetime of giving myself hours was a challenge.

I started small and set a timer. Five minutes of writing in my journal. Then five minutes in the journal and five on the computer. Then ten minutes, twenty, forty, an hour. It took around 90 days. Around the time, I was supposed to complete my novel with the Novelty. This didn't happen. Not for lack of trying, but partly because I had to start over, partially become some stories and worlds take longer to build than others. By September, I found my rhythm. In the mornings, I create. I write unburned. No worries about spelling or sentence structure or even if what I write is good (sometimes it is, and sometimes it's not). For one blissful hour, I have no internet, no distractions, just me, and words. And it is wonderful.

I still found my need to create sneaking back up in the evening hours when my house is asleep. At first, I used this time to edit. To review what I wrote in the morning and to fix what needs to be fixed. But with my 2021 goals being to blog and book review and get on with social media, I've found I am now using that time to do those things. In the last few weeks, I've been adding to my morning writing time. I've gone from an hour to an hour and fifteen. Next week an hour twenty. One of the hardest things for me to do is 'stop' There is a method to 'not letting the well dry up," but when you are used to working 7-9 hours in a day, it's hard to think of only writing for an hour as being not enough. But I remind myself that this is seven days a week. No, I don't take weekends off. It doesn't bother me. For me, it's like exercising. I don't not do it on the weekends; I still get my butt out and walk or hike, I still get up and write.