azdak

For the last month or so I've been getting up at 5.30am so I can write before the children get up. I don't actually start writing then - I feed the cats and make coffee and answer e-mail and read my friends list - but I'm usually writing by 6am, and I've consistently produced around 1,000 words a day. Last week, however, was a holiday, and though I still woke up at 5.30 I would roll over each time and go back to sleep. I was still the first person up, I still fed the cats and made the coffee and read my flist and did some writing, but the words started to come more slowly. And they weren't good words. They were flat and boring, of the "He looked to the left. There was a door. He went through it," variety. I still wrote them down, because even boring words are better than no words, but I started to wonder if there was really much point in struggling on with the current project or if I needed to take a break from it.

This morning, school started again and I was up at 5.30. And lo and behold, the words flowed like water. I went back to one of the sections I was unhappy with, and a thousand tiny details of motive and attitude occurred to me. The character acquired, along with some sensible conversational strategies, a nice line in sarcasm, and I decided I didn't want to take a break from the project after all.

The moral of the story is: I have a brain that likes getting up at 5.30 ack emma. This is a bit of a bugger, in that the rest of me is less keen, but it is so much better than not writing, that I can't really complain.

On a much more interesting note, Bexy's puppy arrives tomorrow. It is the most expensive dog ever (I won't say how expensive, because I am ashamed, but it is over £1,000). In my view, dogs should come from the dogs' home. However, it is Bexy's money, which she earned all by herself, and it is stage one in her plan to become the greatest dog trainer in the world, for which you apparently need a pure-bred labrador with a pedigree as long as Aragorn's. As we can't afford to help her become an Olympic dressage rider, and as her only other hobby is looking up Taylor Lautner sites on the internet, I am prepared to put up with a puppy. This means we will now have as many animals in the house as people, and I'm hoping Lucky will feel as maternal towards Master Fudge as she did towards the kittens. I don't want her to feel her place as Number One Pet is in any way threatened. It's bad enough that she has to share us with horses and cats.