My son thinks I should write these the day before and activate some sort of automatic timed post for first thing in the morning so that they drop into your inboxes when you wake up. He reckons people prefer that and also more people will get to them, it being the habit of most of us to pick up our phones and see what’s what before the day’s begun. Which is true. Except for this, that a whole lot of you are waking up now, you being in America and not Europe, and also I’m on holiday, a decision made on the Eurostar where I said I’d post any time I liked. Also, something else. If I was as organised and logical as he’s suggesting, I’d have a piece of writing hovering with one foot out the door each evening and I’d think about it, I wouldn’t be able to cope. These pieces stay with me even after I publish, it’s only the shunt of tomorrow that pushes today beyond reach. I’d go back and change it if it hadn’t already gone the moment I get that feeling, finished, that sense in my blood that this is it. Because here’s the thing. Even the words I imagine I’ll write while making my coffee to bring up and drink while I type, even those words so close to the actual and which seem so perfect while the kettle boils are often not the ones that get first dibs by the time I’ve gone upstairs to sit at my desk. Others have arrived that I wasn’t expecting. The point is immediacy, the white knuckle ride of not planning and not knowing what I’m going to say or how I’m going to say it, how it will continue or how it will end, and not being able to think or go back, not be tempted to change a thing. Not a single word. Like this. And how I feel this evening will not be what I want to say tomorrow. But rest assured my son, when we get back to the UK I’m going to start the early morning routine again, it being the only time I can write these posts once normal work resumes, and you will say why are you always so tired except you won’t because you’ll be in Armenia. You’ll read these over lunch unless you can sneak them into morning class, you won’t get them first thing no matter how early I get up. And the house will be quieter without you. And I will miss your logic and I will miss you. And I’ll probably write about that.
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I always love to hear about other writer's writing process, not sure why but it's a slight obsession for me. It's fascinating to me how sometimes we (we writers, we people) try to think of productivity 'hacks', ways to increase our viewership / readership, get more opens, get more subscribers, and more than half the time these hacks simply dry out the flavor of our writing like an over done steak. I know I am guilty of it but I try to balance my desire to simply "write what I want to write" with something that someone, somewhere may actually want to read which may or may not be about my daily writing ritual of sitting at a wooden desk.
‘Missing him’. Painful and brave. We love them completely and then have to let them go. No one said life was fair