Getting it Together

The alarm got me up about an hour and a half earlier this morning. It would probably have worked better if I hadn't hit "snooze" for at least half an hour and then turned it off entirely because it was disrupting my sleep. But hey, baby steps are still progress.

It seems like if I start getting one area of my life more in order, it seeps over into other areas of my life. I've been writing more steadily while getting my physical space organized, and yesterday I got some exercise. When I was sorting through some old magazines, I came across one with an article on getting in shape, and it talked about doing 300 minutes of cardio a week. My weekly exercise consists of a dance class, the occasional walk to the post office or library and maybe doing the Hokey Pokey with the kindergardeners. I'm going to start by aiming for 100 minutes a week. Not all of the dance class counts because it's mostly strength, not cardio, though more of jazz counts than ballet. Taking a short walk in the sunshine and fairly cool temperatures did manage to wake me up a bit yesterday. I'll try to do that more often.

I'm really, really close to the end of the book I'm working on, so I'm going to buckle down this week and try to finish it. Then next week I can start the prep work for the next book. The next thing is going to be kind of an experiment. The entire story takes place in one 24-hour period, so I'm going to attempt some method writing. I know I can't write a book in a day, but I'm going to see how fast I can get that first draft done so I can maybe capture that sense of speed, intensity and urgency in the book. By the end, I may be as tired and fried as my characters are, which may lend authenticity to it. I'll probably have to do a lot of revisions, but I'm hoping that writing the first draft quickly will give it a certain energy. But to do that, I'll need some tight planning, including an hour-by-hour timeline of events and figuring out all the characters in advance. I may be insane for much of the next month or so, but it could be fun. I do write pretty quickly, but I don't write for long stretches of time, maybe a few hours a day at most. I want to see if I've got the stamina to do more than that.

And then what I work on next will depend on a lot of things. I do have an idea I want to explore, but it's going to take a lot of research.