I take a nap on Saturday at about 2:00 in the afternoon. Although, I guess you can’t really call it a nap when it lasts six hours.

I end up staying up all night and feeling pretty worthless, partially because I only did two out of twelve things on my weekend “TO DO” list (dishes and laundry), but particularly because I hadn’t written any fiction in a while.

I make a pot of coffee so I don’t go back to sleep, as sleeping would throw off my cycle off so bad that I might not make it into work on Monday.  It’s happened before.

I am about 2/3 of the way through the coffee when something, maybe the hallucinogenic mix of caffeine and over-tiredness, gives me an idea for a story. By 9:00 AM Saturday I’ve banged out a 2300 word short, which makes me feel a lot better about myself. I feel so good in fact that I continue to ignore my TO DO list, and get in two games of Starcraft II before I finally fall asleep about noon.

This time I keep the nap to a more respectable five hours and feel rested enough to mow my lawn (TO DO #3), but not quite good enough to weed trim (TO DO #4).

I read a bit of Terra Lemay’s live journal. She talks about how she keeps a log of the number of words she writes, and even has a cool little graph.  I find that to be a stellar idea and add a worksheet called “Word count” to the Excel writing file I have set up to track my submissions.

I enter in my one word count data point and wonder if this is going to be the type of thing I stick with, or if it will end up like the treadmill, a dusty embarrassing reminder of how, if I were a racehorse, I would be summed up as “good out of the gate but dies at the first turn”.

I feel pretty tired Sunday at midnight, but do manage to get in two more hours of StarcraftII before finally hitting the sack.

James