why I am up so early

I try to get up early every morning now. I feel that this is the only way I can get any real writing done. Granted as I write this it’s the middle of a Sunday afternoon. And perhaps if lazy Sunday afternoons happened every day I might get more writing done then. Back when I was a member of a writer’s group that met every Monday night I would write all Sunday afternoon. By the third semester of the workshop I had started working on my novel, Icarus. I think that I finished my first draft in the middle of 2008. I started working on revisions but never really got back to it for a long time. Now that we’ve pretty much moved into our new house I feel like if I really want to write I must do it for at least an hour a day or so and the best time is early morning.
So I get up without an alarm clock around six. Hopefully I’ve remembered to set the coffee pot. I switch on my obsolete little IBM Thinkpad®. It’s got almost no battery life and I disabled the internet capability. I wrote a lot of Icarus on it. Now I have started my second draft in earnest. I have abandoned the epistolary style that switches points of view for a limited third person POV. I have eliminated the dreadful opening narration and replaced it with several expository scenes to follow the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule.
Some mornings I will also compose a blog and post it. Yesterday morning I just typed a few paragraphs about how cold mornings feel like they’re eating my soul.
I think that as long I’m spending time writing it’s okay.
I have several other stories that I started over the years. Some of them I’ve described on this blog. I started something else a few weeks ago. I’ve thought about it for years and seriously considered it for about a year. I want to write a memoir about Naomi. The three and a half years from her illness to her death will of course be only part of the story. There are stories from before she was even born I could include. And then the weeks, months and finally years after we lost her has me stumped. I think that aside from my habitual procrastination there is another heavy reason I don’t want to start this memoir. I’m not sure how it will end.