I have always heard voices in my head. When I was eight years old, I found a spot beneath the concrete, city steps that went from one street to the street above, and that is where I hid, scratching out the conversations that only I could hear.
As I got older, my hiding spots became more creative. Crunched under the covers at night, holding a flashlight between my ear and my shoulder, I scribbled descriptions of worlds that only I could see.
My mother worked, so I was expected to pull my weight around the house as well as excel in school. However, sometimes I couldn’t help it: I hid in back of the clothes closet furiously jotting down arguments and betrayals. One time, in the grip of a pitched battle, I secreted myself beneath a broken down car with pen and paper.
It wasn’t that my mother was unsympathetic. No, she understood that I was different, but “even different has to make a living” she once told me. So, she kept tracking me down and assigning chores, and I kept slipping away to some other reality.
Nowadays I don’t have to do that. Nope. Just have to make sure my dogs don’t see me, or hear me, sneaking into my office. If I get caught there is a whole lot of bark-demands to be my “Muse for the day”.
Of course, I am using the word ‘day’ very loosely here. Much of my writing is done between the hours of midnight and dawn. I love the absolute quiet of those hours. My work on the land is finished for the time being, my dogs are all asleep, my wife is either reading or sleeping, the phone is silent, and the world outside my window lies wrapped in warm darkness. Sometimes, if I am fortunate, a coyote will sing.
When it comes right down to it, however, I write at any hour that my characters chatter too loudly for me to hear the present day. There are times that I pull my vehicle into a rest area so I can jot down bits of dialogue, or snippets of description. I have been known to rise up from my bed, and a sound sleep, wander half-blindly through the house searching for pen and paper to write down the argument clamoring in my head. Then, I can tell my characters to shut up and let me rest!
For this Blog Tour, Mountain Springs House asked me to explain my writing routine, how do I get those novels written. So, there you have it: my confession about my writing non-routine.
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