Today I really, really, really wanted to stay in bed. Did I? Read on …
Last night was weird. I’d just watched the ‘Mountain & The Viper” episode of Game Of Thrones, then went to bed reading a bit of X-Men: Days Of Future Past (having seen the movie at the weekend I was curious to read the original comic, with all its differences). I don’t remember much, but I recall many, many weird dreams – some clearly involved mutants, some possible involving gruesome trials by combat. I must have slept restlessly. I recall waking up once or twice. I recall disorientation. I recall being too hot and stripping a layer off at some point in the night.
Then the alarm went off.
6:30am. Boy did I not want to get up. I switched the alarm off again and lay there. And then I lay there some more. I contemplated how nice and warm the bed was, and how cold and dark the everything else was.
And then I got up anyway. Staying in bed was never really an option. Not sure if I’m simply not ready to fail yet, or if the prospect of having a rushed morning with nothing achieved was worse than getting up. Either way, I found myself swinging my legs out of the bed, grabbing a few extra layers, and creeping out of the bedroom.
This morning definitely felt different to yesterday. I was tired, I was slow, I was cold. Still, I stuck to the same routine (kettle, lemon, coffee, etc) and sat down to write. I’ve reached a point in the story where I needed to make a few structural changes, and I’m working from a literal first draft, so progress was far slower – in fact I only managed an 800 word chunk of editing today. But it’s still good. It’s still 800 words more than I would have managed if I’d stayed in bed.
Despite this, I do have an observation from this morning’s experience. Had I attempted to tackle writing in the evening, in a similar state of why-am-I-not-in-bed-ffs, I would have achieved nothing. I would have been checking twitter, looking at Facebook, reading blogs, staring into space, whatever. Instead, despite being tired and unenthused, I came to my writing before any of the clutter of the day had had a chance to build up.
This is not quite the same as having a clear mind, which I talked about yesterday. It’s more to do with not having to stop doing something else because I hadn’t started anything else. I didn’t have to make a conscious decision to ignore twitter, I didn’t have to switch the TV off, I didn’t have to wind down. In fact I didn’t even realise this until after the fact.
Once I stopped writing, and moved on to the, frankly, far more appealing task of eating (breakfast) it struck me that I hadn’t even thought about checking my twitter, my emails, my anything. I hadn’t got into any of those particular daily habits at the point, so I was, once again, free to focus entirely on writing. And drinking coffee. And keeping warm …
Oh – you get the point!