Your Typical Day As A Writer

our typical day as a writer...

Sara's just done a post detailing her usual daytime routine. Now here's mine.
(Read on, three bits of really exciting news will follow!)

6 am - alarm goes off. I don't leap out of bed. Cat lands on belly and purrs. Other cat sits on the floor and stares up at me.

6.10 - get up, write for an hour (this is a NaNo- or Drafting-Stage-only routine. Otherwise, sleep wins out).

7.10 - shower, dress, head out the door. Read for beta reviews or book reviews on commute, run errands before work.

8.30 - 4.30 - work. Work work work work work.
At lunch:
run errands,
lunch with friends or family (especially if I'm starving from having skipped breakfast),
write,
edit,
work on Alfred Russel Wallace transcripts,
work on translations if I've received any
OR (not 'and'. You didn't think I was going to write 'and', did you?)
clear emails (saving blog comments and emails that require longer than one line for later).
Sometimes I drop everything and make lists just to clear my head. Wrote up a revised Christmas gift list today.

4.30 - 6 pm - read on afternoon commute. Get groceries, do dishes, make dinner and eat it, read the paper and maybe flip through a magazine. Do other chores if I'm out of clean clothes or people are coming over (read: speed clean the bathroom).

6 - 10 pm. here's where things get tricky. Ideally, I type up my words from the morning (I'm more inclined to do this during NaNo, otherwise I save it all for the weekend). It takes me about an hour to type 1000 words because they invariably need editing.
Other times I do blog-related stuff. There're exercises on the Forum to attend to. Pub Trivia Night on Mondays! Knitting to catch up on, friends to visit with...
And if Diana Gabaldon has a new book out, this entire schedule goes out the window: I read. (That's where the girl in the Martini glass comes in. Kidding! I'd rather have a single malt...)

Speaking of which, ooh boy! Now it can be told: a number of us November Birthday Girls got together on the Forum for a colossal Big (not beg, big: Bigging 101 rules), including Karen Henry of Outlandish Observations. And Diana Gabaldon gifted us with not one but two excerpts, one from The Scottish Prisoner and one from the next Outlander book, Written in My Own Heart's Blood.

Also, our Campaigner Challenges eBook is here! The wonderful Cat has put together an ebook of 176 stories from 81 participants in Rach's Campaign Challenge, including mine. All proceeds go to Help Harry Help Others to fund research on brain cancer.

Available now on Smashwords and Amazon.

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Random contest alert! Gotham Writers' Workshop Young Adult Novel Discovery Contest.

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How's everyone doing with their goals for A Round of Words in 80 Days? I've been writing consistently for Ayten's story, and collecting reviews from beta readers for Out of the Water, but it looks like December is going to be editing month for the latter. I'm excited because now I can see all sorts of places in the novel where I can cut words - scenes I was too close to before and didn't want to chop off. But I'm at 110,000 words, so I've got lots of room to play. And here I thought I'd be querying already... Still, better to polish as much as I can.

Hope everyone's having a good week!