I’ve made it through a whole week under my new plan to get up early to write. That would be early as is in before 6:00 a.m. most days (the only exception was 6:30 on Saturday). Of course, I’m ready to go to sleep by 9:00 p.m., but I can live with that if I stay so productive. Shocking as it is, this schedule is working well for me.

Two things kicked off this radical change. The first was a conversation with the excellent Eileen Gunn (Night Person), who said she’d been doing the early thing. I was dubious — I’ve been aware of this strategy for a long time but I find getting up in the morning so painful I didn’t think it would work for me.

The second thing is jetlag. On my first night back in GMT I woke up at 3:00 a.m. I tried to go back to sleep, but instead ended up with a story idea. By then it was almost 5:00 and I figured I might as well get up and outine it. And after that I figured I’d work on the novel rewrites I was so excited about. When I woke up at 4:30 the next morning, an idea for the rewrite got me out of bed at 5:15. And when the same thing happened again the next morning, I realized this early morning was crazy it just might work.