Early to bed, early to rise.

For reasons I won't get into here, writing at night--which I used to be awesome at, since I'm the definition of a night owl--was becoming problematic.  I was tired, inefficient, and unenthusiastic.  Not unenthusiastic about writing exactly, but really just unenthusiastic about anything that had to do with putting forth any sort of effort.  The days would exhaust me and the exhaustion, both mental and physical, would carry over into my evenings.

So I rethought my schedule.  I know I can't be a writer if I'm not writing, and there's nothing I want more than to be a writer--one who writes good stuff that gets published.  In order to move forward with that very important goal, I knew something had to change.  That something ended up being my wake-up time...and my bedtime, too.

I need time to embrace my weird.  I can't do it very effectively when other people are around, whether they're talking to me or just simply being present in the room.  I can, however, embrace my weird if I'm the only one awake.  So now I get up at 5:30 AM and go out to the living room to start writing while it's still dark out.  This sense of aloneness combined with the darkness allows me to properly embrace my weird and use it to my writing advantage.  Because of this, I've made significant strides not just with Emerson, but with other writing projects, too.  And now I use my nights for reading writing articles/blogs, doing story research, and other relevant stuff that I don't have to concentrate as hard to do.

I am not a morning person.  This shit's not easy.  But when I have a really good reason for dragging my butt out of bed in the morning, I've proven I can do it--I've been doing it for 2 weeks now.  And I don't plan on stopping anytime soon.