A Creature of the Dusk?

Daylight Savings Time is the invention of the devil.  Or maybe morning people–who I deem to be as bad or worse.  Those people who pop out of bed in the morning as if they’re popping out of a toaster, with smiles on their faces and obscene levels of perkiness.  I am the child of two morning people, though God knows how that happens.  I’m also a foodie where my parents are…not.  Perhaps I was switched at birth.  In any event, I don’t give a rat’s ass whether I have an “extra” hour of daylight after work.  After work I am tired and I want one thing.  To eat dinner and settle in for the night.  I’m not going to suddenly change that routine because some dumbass thought it was a good idea to make us get up BEFORE the ass crack of dawn when it’s still dark and sane people should be sleeping.

Getting up this morning at my “usual” time for work on DST after a full week of staying up late and sleeping until daylight or later is just flat brutal.  I did it.  I even did a 20 minute workout.  But, Jesus, it’s going to be all I can do to stay awake for the 4 hour stint I’ll be at work today.  And if I actually see my boss first thing–well after yesterday’s fiasco of threatening to break her fingers if she doesn’t break her habit of going right on ahead and editing things when I’m supposed to have the “final” draft, I just may commit violence.  My boss is one of those obnoxious cheerleader morning people who should be shot.

I suppose my “time” of day is somewhere between 3:30 and 8:30 in the evening.  It’s after the afternoon sinking spell when I can hardly hold my eyes open, and after my brain has finally come fully online.  That’s the span when I get the most accomplished (including cooking dinner).  So does that make me a creature of the dusk?  I don’t know.  My natural body clock runs from somewhere around 11-midnight and wake up at nine or ten in the morning.  Yes, I require ten hours of sleep.  I am at the upper end of that “average” of  hours.   You think I get that on any regular basis?  Um, no.  I’ve been sleep deprived since I graduated college.

In other, more positive news, I actually wrote last night for the first time in two weeks.  And it didn’t hurt too badly.  I was shooting for 250 words and got 263.  I know, small potatoes to some people, but consider this stretching my mental muscles after more than a month of inactivity other than plotting and revising.  I’ll shoot for 250 words a day every day this week.  Then next week, we’ll aim for 300.  Baby steps.  It is my hope that I will be up to a comfortable 500+ by the time MayNoWriMo rolls around.  I like the idea of MayNoWriMo.  Instead of the insanity of NaNo, you set your own goal, whether that’s 250 words a day or 2500.  I’ve never been a big fan of one size fits all for anything.  We’ll see where I am with Revelation when that rolls around.  I’m shooting for 35-40k on this novella, so depending on how the rest of March and April goes, possibly I’ll use MayNoWriMo to finish it.  That would be nice.  It would make up for lost time and I’d finish Revelation in 2 and a half months instead of the 4 months it took to write Forsaken By Shadow.  We’ll see how that goes.  I’ll also be juggling (prior to May) the formatting and release of FBS through Amazon, Smashwords (and thence Barnes and Noble, Sony, and others), and Scrib’d.  I really want to have all that taken care of by the end of April so that I can do a blog tour during the month of May.

All in good time.  I have to stumble to work now.

5 thoughts on “A Creature of the Dusk?

  1. I hate DST, too. Since that fateful Saturday night, a weekend of staying up to midnight (MidSouthCon), I have not been able to get to sleep before midnight. Getting up at 5 a.m. is not working out well for me, but they just won’t allow me a late pass every day at work! It’s brutal and I’ll be glad when my mind/body adjusts to the shifted daylight schedule.

    Maybe we should live in AZ where they don’t engage in such foolishness?

      1. I know, I know. It is a major drawback. But this time-change is kicking my ass today and almost makes the heat seem a mild trade-off.

        Maybe if I could get some words written tonight it will help reset my inner clock. But my goal to get up earlier has surely been nixed. No way, no how, not now.

  2. DST, in combination with an atmosphere induced headache, kicked me square in the head on Monday. My sympathies are with you.

    Good job on the writing, though! I finally decided to just START this book I’ve been plotting for a few weeks, because it was getting to the point where the thought of writing on anything else was making me physically ill, and I felt tired all the time. That’s no way to live.

    By the way, I went back and read your posts on making the conversion from pantsing to plotting- Thank you! There was a lot of really good info there, and I clicked through to Jim Butcher’s blog, another bevy of good stuff. I’ve utilized some new stuff in a short story I just finished, and I think it helped a lot.

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