Briana Morgan asked me to write a post on focus. How do you focus on your writing when there are a million distractions pulling at your poor mind in all directions? How do you manage to sit for hours and just write, without checking your phone or email or news or staring at a cat chasing a chicken across the road or getting sucked into research justifying it with the need to know exactly how many goats it takes to eat a field of blackberry bushes in a day?
Simple.
Read MoreIt begins with a nefarious thought, or a tail of a delicious nightmare, or a hatching tweet, like, really, an idea expressed in 140 characters that pecks on the inside of my skull, or my characters screaming, tearing at each other's hair or staring forlornly at the dusty road of the plot they were supposed to travel the day before and didn't get to, because I have written it in a different way. These and other thoughts skitter into a corner of my head and from there press and push and kick at my eyes and I hear their annoying trilling noise. Only it's not them. It's my alarm. It's 8 a.m. and it's time to get up. Naturally, I feel for the damn thing on the side of my bed and wave a fist in its face. It's designed to stop screeching. It does, sometimes. Sometimes it doesn't and I have to open one eye and see those red numbers glare at me.
This is how I wake up.
This is my morning.
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