I’m being stalked and molested eaten by the procrastination monster. Yes, again.

But, in some ways, I don’t feel too guilty. Why? Because I passed my writing goal for the day (1.7k) AND I outlined scenes til almost the end AND I passed the 45k mark in my YA werewolf paranormal, Wolfsong. YAYYY -boogies with a bag of cookies!- I don’t feel too terribly bad about slacking, probably because I still plan on writing another scene tonight, but we’ll see. Maybe the you-should-sleep monster will strike. And then, alas. I must sleep.

So anyway, as I fiddle around with a character bio for a character I may never use, I ponder the question… When do you write?

Before my parents got divorced, we had a room specifically for the computer. It was a tiny room, with bookshelves lining the walls filled with book after book…most of it nonfiction. The desk was merely a cabinet plastered to the wall, and tbh, it was too high to type comfortably. But it was all we had. I started writing in the sixth grade, when I was pulled from public school and homeschooled due to my anxiety. Being an anxious person, I had two friends…both of whom were in school. I was bored. A lot.

So, I started making up characters. I would act them out, play their dialogue in my head before bed. I would throw them into all sorts of dramatic situations and they slowly created their own stories. Locked away in that tiny little den, the door sealed behind me, I would sometimes miss dinner by being so wrapped up in Fantasy-Land. I wrote a lot in a short period of time. And I wrote during the daylight hours. Being a kid, I had a bed time.

Then the computer crashed. The dummy who had built it for my Dad (and bless his soul, he went with something cheap) forgot to install a FAN. So the computer died. I barely extracted all my writing onto floppy disks. Then I was stuck with the monster of an AST computer running Win 95… And since the computer downstairs was right in the middle of everything (blaring TV, yelling kids…you name it)…I started writing at night. After everyone was in bed.

And it stuck. Through the divorce when I was seventeen, our computer (we’d gotten a new one by then) was in the only place possible to have internet at the time: the middle of the freaking kitchen. I kid you not. So, once again, I wrote at night. I stopped writing for awhile, because my sibs outgrew bedtime as well…so they were up, playing Rockband, watching TV. Blah blah blah noise noise noise. I’d write from midnight til four am. It would especially suck when I’d get this brilliant idea, a lead for a story or a character…and someone was either yapping, or on the computer (or, my personal favorite: on the computer, yapping!)

This last year, my grandma bought me a computer for my room. It was a hassle, getting everything around. We picked out a giiiiiant oak desk with a roll out keyboard and a very nice Dell running Windows 7 (so, naturally, I named my computer Seven). It took about two months to get used to not being -stuck- writing from midnight til four. It was such an engrained habit that it was hard to break. I slowly switched from typing on Old Computer to Seven… Suddenly, if I get an idea at noon…I can write it.

It’s totally boosted my productivity. At least until I got net on Seven. Now it’s procrastination station. I still adore the crap outta it. It just takes more willpower to get stuff written.

So, when do you write?