How Should You Spend the First, Best Hour of Your Day? (Part II)

In the previous post I confessed that I have been spending the first, best hour of my day NOT on writing (my passion, my profession, my identity, my bliss) but on New York Times word puzzles. 

My work-in-progress was stalled. I thought it was simply because I was stuck, unsure where the story should go next. In fact, I told myself, maybe sinking for hours into the La Brea Tar Pits of the puzzles might be, oh, I don't know, a sort-of meditative practice that might actually help me get unstuck. 

But of course, the truth I was avoiding was that I was stuck because I was allowing myself to do New York Times puzzles instead of putting in a faithful hour a day sitting, pen in hand, trying to unstick myself. 

It was my sweetheart, ruthless though loving truth teller that he is, who pointed this out to me. 

I had to admit he might be on to something.

So for two solid weeks back in December, I made a commitment to myself to return to devoting that first, best hour each day to writing. 

I prepared everything the night before, carrying my writing materials and hourglass up to my writing nook and even filling the electric kettle with enough hot water for a pot of heavily sugared tea, with teapot, mug, and teabag in readiness on the kitchen table.

I allowed myself to get up even earlier than usual, at 4:00 (the earlier I get up, the happier I am all day, though impossibly smug). While the water heated - maybe for ten minutes - I did steal a peek at the puzzle. Cold turkey was a bit too daunting. But then, teapot filled, I tiptoed upstairs, settled myself on the loveseat, and wrote - WROTE! - till 5:30 or so.

The pages came pouring out of me. I wrote the entire last third of a 45,000-word draft in those two weeks, and the scenes I wrote were GOOD. Dare I say, with an author's besotted love for her own creation, they were WONDERFUL. All day long, I hugged myself with happiness for what I had written and could hardly wait till the next morning to see what would happen next as the story hurtled toward its climax and denouement with the fabulous force of momentum making it happen. 

Oh, and I still finished the puzzle every day, doing it in bits and pieces, as a palette cleanser between other activities, which turned out to be a much better way to approach puzzles, at least for me. 

Oh, dear ones, try using the best hour of YOUR day for what you love best. It might work as much magic for you as it has for me. 

How Should You Spend the First, Best Hour of Your Day? (Part I)

For most of my career as a children's book author, I published a book for young readers just about every year while working full-time as a tenured professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado and raising a family. My only secret was this: I devoted the first, best hour of the day to my writing. 

That is the whole entire secret right there. Wired to be an early-morning person, I woke up every morning at 5 a.m. (without an alarm), made myself a steaming mug of Swiss Miss hot chocolate, and curled up on the couch with my beloved clipboard, pad of narrow-ruled white paper, and Pilot Razor Point pen, to write for exactly one hour, timed with my most-beloved-of-all hourglass. 

Then, almost a decade ago, I took early retirement from CU. Now I had all day to write! Now I could write whenever I wanted to, all day long!

I did keep on writing books for young readers. But - funny thing - I wrote not MORE but LESS than I had before. With all day to do it, I also had all day NOT to do it. NOT doing it started to become my default setting. 

What did I do instead with my first, best hour of the day? Well, some of it was spent helping to take care of live-in grandchildren, a worthy activity I don't regret. But in recent years - oh, this is terrible to say!! - I have been giving the first, best hour of the day to New York Times puzzles. First Wordle, which after all, does take just two minutes followed by the fun of texting my score to a select few recipients. The new Connections puzzle, though sometimes infuriating, can be dispatched in five or ten minutes. 

But the Spelling Bee... oh, the Spelling Bee... 

It's possible to get lost in it for hours. Once upon a time I was satisfied if I got past the lower levels of Solid, Nice, Great, and Amazing, all the way to Genius. But then I learned there was the level of Queen Bee, where you found absolutely every word recognized by the puzzle. I became so obsessed with the NYT Spelling Bee that sometimes in the night I'd wake up and realize it was now past 1:00 a.m. here in Colorado (the puzzle for each day is released at 3 a.m. ET), and I'd actually leap out of bed to start doing it. 

Would you say I had a PROBLEM? 

To answer my original question: what you should be doing in your first, best hour of the day (whenever that falls for YOU in clock time) is what matters most to YOU (whatever that is in your own personal priorities). It should almost certainly NOT be hunting for one last eight-letter word starting with CO and one last six-letter word starting with PL. 

In the next post I will share my somewhat successful journey toward reclaiming that first, best hour of the day for the purposes of my true, best self. 

Starting the New Year - 11 Days Late

Things are looking up for me and my broken elbow! Surgery with the very young but very capable orthopedic doctor a week ago today! I am now the proud owner of six screws and one metal plate to hold my once-shattered elbow together from now until the grave. Then a few frustrating but healing days with the left arm cradled - i.e., imprisoned - in a huge, heavy, bulky, awkward, almost utterly incapacitating splint and sling. Then.... yesterday! ... the post-op visit where the loathed splint was removed and the arm was set free! Hooray! I can cuddle beside my sweetheart without this forbidding barrier of the enormous, lifeless arm lying in bed between us. I can type with both hands! 

What else in life is needed for happiness? I now know that the answer to that is: nothing.

But. . . I am so far behind on EVERYTHING! The year went right ahead and got started WITHOUT ME and now I'm panting - with my still-depleted store of energy - to catch up.  Already, on January 11, I'm ready to give up on 2024 and admit defeat. Maybe 2025 will be better? 

But this would be just a tad premature, don't you think? I have to find a way to give myself permission to start the new year 11 days late - or maybe, start it on Monday, the 15th, halfway through January, which feels a little less random. Or even... just ease into it? Just start doing a few of my pleasant little piddly tasks (like writing this blog post) and see what happens?

I've already developed, over the past decades, a few ways to trick myself into summoning the motivational energy that comes from new beginnings even when these beginnings don't fall on the most auspicious times of day or month or year. I fell in love with my trusty, trademark hourglass in part because the new beginning began whenever I turned it over, whether right on the dot of 5 a.m. or at 5:03 or even - heaven forbid - at 7:30. I inaugurated the practice of starting a new life on the first day of each month just so I could have that "5-4-3-2-1 Happy New Year!" energy twelve times a year. 

The saying popular in the years of my youth - "Today is the first day of the rest of your life" - was designed just to allow us to have a new beginning WHENEVER we need one. Today can always be the first day of SOMETHING.

So: today is the first day of a life with a partially healed fractured elbow and partially restored level of functionality. I'm giving 2024 another chance.

Starting today.

Starting All Over Again in the New Year - with One Big, Unexpected Hindrance

 Happy new year!

 As you may or may not have noticed, and as I myself barely noticed, I haven't posted on this blog since May. I was too busy with my sweet new romance, and feeling discouraged about the current children's book marketplace, and trying to decide whether I would ever write another book again, and then finally falling in love with a new book idea and spending the rest of the year happily scribbling away in my upstairs writing nook on my hour a day of writing bliss.

 But now it's the new year, and I was filled with plans for starting all over again with every once-beloved activity under the sun. Blogging again! Teaching an online course for the graduate programs in children's literature at Hollins University! Working with my mentees through the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators! And revising my beautiful book to share with my writing group and then with my agent and editor. I could hardly wait for the new year to begin!

 Alas, two days before Christmas, I was off to the grocery store with my two little granddaughters, and one of them was leaping and bounding with wild, uninhibited joy for the coming holidays, when she leaped and bounded so exuberantly that I tripped over her and fell hard onto the parking lot of King Soopers. “Are you okay?” a concerned stranger asked me. “No!” I wailed. Because I wasn't. He helped me up, both my grown sons were summoned, I was off to urgent care, and it turned out to be a broken elbow, with surgery now scheduled for this coming Thursday.

 What is to become of all my cherished plans? How can I type with one arm in a sling? Thank goodness it is my left elbow and not my right, but it is much harder than I realized to accomplish the tasks of daily life with only one good arm. Adjustments will need to be made. In fact, I am composing this right now, as an experiment, using the dictation feature on my laptop. Somehow this will all work out, right? So many of my friends have had similar surgeries, and they have survived. I suspect I will, too.

 At least I am writing this blog post today, just as I promised myself I would do. So I'm counting this as an auspicious start to the challenging first month of this new year.

 Wishing all of you health and happiness, and avoidance of unpleasant encounters with gravity, in 2024!