Simple Pleasures

One of my favorite times of day is in the early morning hours when the sun is just barely peeking above the mountains and the air is still chilly. The birds are just waking up from their nightly slumbers and cars idle in my neighbors' driveways, ready to whisk them away to work.

And here I am, sitting at my desk (a huge farmhouse table I searched high and low for), filling up blank pages with words of romance and conflict and falling in love. The house is quiet--there's no TV or music to distract me, just the birds eating greedily from my bird feeders.

As territorial hummingbirds chase each other away from the nectar I put out, my characters' voices fill my head and I scribble furiously to capture every one of their thoughts, words and feelings. Some days the words don't come so easily and the voices stay silent. But some days, when the morning sunlight shines through the trees just right, the words flow beautifully and plentiful, long past sunrise.

Yes, I write my books longhand. There's just something cathartic about putting a pen to paper and letting it scratch its way to the opposite margin. As much as I try to type my first drafts into my computer from the get-go, it just isn't the same. I have to let the words flow and not be distracted by the backspace key or that squiggly red line that appears under a word when I misspell it.

Somehow I have a feeling it doesn't matter how I get the words down, only that I do.