Remember last June?

Standard

I hope you do.

Anyway, I wrote a post about a book called Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence, which was not only about the way real fights differ from what we expect, but is also about how we deceive ourselves about what we can do and what we can’t. My original post is here: blog / LiveJournal.

Well, last night I had another “Meditations” moment: For quite a while now, I’ve been a morning writer. Physically, I’m a night person, but I could never get anything accomplished at the end of the day–too tired, too distractible, too many other things to do. For years, I’d come home from work and get nothing done on my projects. Once I started waking early and writing before work, I was much more productive.

But why, exactly, was that? Did I say tired and distractible? That’s just me defining myself as a person who can’t do some perfectly reasonable thing, and last night I walked out of my day job after a full day’s work and my usual morning writing session to head to the library.

There, I put in another two and a half hours on the copy edit. I expect to finish the whole thing today.

Can’t write/revise/whatever at the end of the day? Why do I tell myself these things? And how long is it going to take for me to break that habit?