Routine (the dreaded spreadsheet!)

Despite all our great ambitions of sitting down and simply pouring our souls upon the page in a mad rush of writerly creativity, the reality is that writing is often danged hard work. For me at least, I have to build a routine of writing that works and keeps me on task.

For my first book, "The Hand Behind the Mouse: an intimate biography of Ub Iwerks" I had a routine where I wrote my parts primarily late at night. Usually I would wait until the boys were in bed at 9 and then would go down to the basement and type and type and type. Sometimes I'd be up until 1 or 2 am if I was on a roll, and sometimes even if I wasn't! More than once I fell asleep at the keyboard and once I fell asleep with my hands on the keys. When I awoke I had 400 pages of bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb's.