The Writing Process

...because I hear this is a common question.

Never actually been asked it, but I hear about it a lot.

I don't have one 'writing process', a routine I sit down and follow every day. I have two: the ideal, and the real.

My ideal writing process would be this: get up at an hour that makes my parents and housemates cringe, have something tasty for breakfast, make a pot of tea (black tea, for preference) and arrange it on a tray with milk and sugar and other tea implements, and drag the whole thing back to my room. Then sit and write and have tea all morning, then go off on a bike ride to burn off the remainder of said caffeine before lunch.

My real writing process (during the school year) usually involves getting up at an hour even I think obscene, going to lab or class, running around and doing massively important things for the rest of the day, crawling into bed at something approaching midnight and writing until I fall asleep on the keyboard. It works--I'm far too tired to self-edit, and if we're to be entirely honest, the ideal writing process usually ends in me getting stuck on Tumblr for three hours instead of writing. I have been known to sit in a tree with my computer to get out of range of the router, but that's been an unpleasant prospect ever since the ants took over my favorite orange tree.

...This turned out to be a much sillier post than expected. Oh well. Such is life!