Stamina

The youngest Urchin is now officially a public school student. She goes to half day kindergarten. On the bus. Which means I don't have to spend half the time she's there driving back and forth to drop her off and pick her up.

Translation: I have almost three hours in the house by myself!

And to those who read this blog who are writers, you know what the underlying meaning of that statement is. I get to WRITE!

I started writing when the youngest Urchin was a little over one year old. She just turned five. So for the past four years I've been taking stolen moments in chunks of ten to twenty minutes to write. And, astoundingly, I haven't finished a manuscript. Go figure.

But now, I have almost three glorious hours of morning, when I'm not already completely frazzled, (okay, getting them on the bus in the morning does have some frazzle-like qualities) to sit and work on my w.i.p. Astounding.

The first week I was disappointed with myself. I only wrote for about an hour each day. I'd get up and wander off to do some housework, check on a suspicious noise (I live in a house built in 1826 and am completely fearful of ghosts.), check my email. I tried to write it off as my miniscule attention span. I own this shirt for a reason.

picture from whatonearth.com

But what was really happening was I needed to build up my writing stamina. For years I wrote in this disjointed way. Now I needed to work up to marathon proportions. (Thanks to Misty and Natalie for backing me on my theory.)

And so I've begun. I'm up to a little over two hours a day on my writing. Which is exciting, but as with all writers, other things pop up in the process to stall or derail us. But one problem at a time for me.

So, have you had any writing epiphanies? How do you like to write? If you had a house to yourself for three hours, what would you do?