Writing isn’t my full time job unfortunately, not that I think it would be good for me if it was, I would spend more of my time procrastinating instead of actually doing any sort of work at all. I have to dedicate time to writing whenever I get the opportunity to between my work schedule and my volunteer work. It often includes dragging along my friend for the ride if I have a particularly large amount of time to give on any day, and if we're both free it's an added bonus.
Before I actually sit down to write properly, I have to eat something. Doesn’t matter what I eat, or how much, but I have to eat something, I never quite write the same without that part of my routine.
I find McDonalds a pretty good place to write. Because I live in a small community, our local McDonalds isn’t particularly busy, which means they never care if my friend and I are there for a long period of time. It’s out of my own house, and there is a lot less around to distract me from my writing. Even having other people around, you can easily do little writing prompts of people watching.
When I am writing my goal is each time to reach a certain goal by the time I go home. That goal could be to just write so many hundreds of words, or it could be that I need to sort out the current problem or plot hole. My goals are very rarely the same each time I go out to write, and often the goal comes to me on the drive to where ever it is we're going.
Even with such an unknown, distracting writing routine I have gotten a surprising amount of progress done on my current project since I started it in September last year.
Alex Butler