As a writer you try different things until you find something that works for you. I’ve already decided that I would try writing in the mornings—because I want to make this novel revision a priority in my busy life.

I haven’t done it in earnest yet, my first full week started today. It was rough but I gave myself 30 minutes to actually wake up and drinking strong black tea did wonders. It’s amazing how much you can accomplish in an hour.

My goal is to increment my morning writing by 30 minutes until I’m writing for a full two hours before the day job begins.

I’m also trying out something else. I’ve tried to write longhand but it’s not as fast as when I type. And let me tell you I can type fast. Like 85-90 wpm with almost 90% accuracy. But the problem I’ve found is that when I’m putting in a new scene or just free-writing, I can’t seem to turn my “internal editor” off. I’m always backspacing and correcting and it pulls me out of the story.

So I tried typing with my eyes closed. I peeked just to make sure I wasn’t typing jibberish but once I knew that my fingers were on the right keys, I closed my eyes, visualized the scene and just started typing. It was AWESOME.

Even though it does sound kind of weird, it helps me stay within the scene and not so much worried about the words, grammar and other stuff. I’m right there in the scene with my characters.

Of course, there might be more typos than I usually have, but I also have more words and pages. I’ll keep up this closed eye experiment and see how it can help me out to make my goal of a first round revision draft by December 31st.