It’s four minutes past the double zero digits… Earliest I’ve been up in awhile. No seriously my friends’ kids get up at six a.m. I can’t even imagine the pain of waking up that early. I was born a night owl. My theory is you are either the one or the other.
This morning started off bad. I had set my alarm for our first family zoom call spanning from New Zealand to South Africa to Britain. But when I was hazily putting my phone on one minute before the zoom call starts I received lots of notifications.
I had gotten the time wrong. Meeting over. Without us. Minor detail that SA and Britian also differ in time got lost in translation. Lucky for me my family made another call because they wanted to chat to us too. Even though the NZ bunch needed to go to bed. I needed to wake up so I got coffee. Half of our bunch (the night owls) surfaced long after the meeting ended.
I’ve been slowly, very slowly starting to write my next novel. The painful process of giving birth to the previous one seems to have put a slight damper on my enthusiasm for the next one. Or maybe I’ve learned patience. I hope the latter. A book doesn’t get made in a day. At the moment it takes me two years. Two years people.
Part of me hopes it will get easier as I gain experience. And in some ways it is easier but in other ways not. I love the creative moments when the story plays on my imagination like a movie screen and I’m just as clueless about what comes next as everybody else.
For instance my characters were running away from the bad guys and the next moment they went downstairs into this hacker friends’ secret room. I didn’t even know he existed! What I don’t like is fact finding. What month is it. What is the weather like. What us the time difference if they go from A to B.
I don’t know if all authors do this but I like sticking to real facts in between my imaginary characters and storyline. Today I was bored and eventually started working on the facts. Decided the date for the story. Got the weather. Etc etc.. Then I started writing a scene and before getting very far my other half said I needed to stop. I said: “but I haven’t been writing long?!”
“You’ve been working for two hours.” Total unbelief on my face.
Now I know how my nine year old feels when I tell him he has to stop gaming. It’s been two hours. He’s always says it’s too short. Ha ha ha. I feel like that about writing. But it’s not my full-time job. Taking care of my family is. So I swallowed the grumble and put the kids through the bath.
Time to sleep now for this night owl. If I didn’t need sleep I could write all night.. Imagine that.
Clara Berge 