Sometimes I do that. Say I need to finish a page, or write a hundred words or something.Cause I need to learn to stay with stuff.

Deborah, have you always worked the way you do now?

Yup. I started writing and publishing the first batch in the late eighties; Jo was born in 1979. I wrote my first 3.5 novels at work, managing a two-city banking regulatory law firm; I'd get in early, start writing, hand stuff off to my secretary (whose mama is a famous and worldclass poet, so she understood), get a shitload of real work done, and just write as it hit. I wrote very little of it at home, but when I did, parenting wasn't an issue.

And never an outline. I have a huge respect for people who can put dots on a page and then connect them, but I'm the same woman who did a painting which hangs in my kitchen. Started out as a pretty landscape, seeing if I could do it with wet on wet. The original idea was mountain and treetops, an exercise in perspective. The finished product has the trees and the mountain, but jutting out of the middle is a stone monolith with a steaming mug atop it. The painting is called "Java of the Gods."

Me and preplanned? Tricky. Very very tricky.

I do think that if one is scattered and random by nature, not a reliable self-starter and natural procrastinator, getting one's backside into the desk chair for a certain period of time each day is a good way to be handy should the muse wander by. I'd use the time to edit, or clean out files, look over the previous day's work, pay bills, anything to keep me in the chair for two hours, minimum. Usually something would happen. It would often be haring off down a false scent, but sometimes it turned into four to six hours of intense writing, much of which was keeper quality.

I had an ending in mind when I started, and a number of events that had to happen along the way. I got blocked, and the only thing that got me past it was writing out points that had to occur, in order, to get from one major plot point to the next. What had been blocking me was a jumbled order, so in this instance, an outline actually helped. But connecting the dots was the adventure for me, because the dots were very widely spaced, and everything that happened in between them was the writing part, the fun part, where unexpected things happened and my characters developed their own personalities and managed to surprise me by becoming more than the one-dimensional character sketches I'd started out with.

Hewing to a detailed outline would never have been possible, but I needed some direction down in the jungly valley when I couldn't see which way to go.

I do think that if one is scattered and random by nature, not a reliable self-starter and natural procrastinator, getting one's backside into the desk chair for a certain period of time each day is a good way to be handy should the muse wander by.

Totally. I'm just outside that box, and I'm very much in the minority, if the writers I know are at all representative. I just sit and write. My stops have never been for blocks; they've generally been for research, or reconsidering a character's headspace, or something like that.

And direction is very much our friend.

Deb, that dom thing? Not just a fantasy, is it?

erika, honey, I'm not a dom.

But I do live in SF. We residents tend to think in particular ways.

Hell, this is the only town I'm aware of that has a B&D-themed bed and breakfast that advertises publicly.

Okay, here's something that's not NaNoWriMo-related.

I'm currently reading Natalie Goldberg's Wild Mind, about writing, and the writing life. Short little chapters -- most 2 pages -- and writing prompts/suggestions.

One was the idea to write about "home," but without talking about buildings (houses/apartments/dorms), cities, states, countries, etc. Not a "where-I-live" sense of "home."

t edit She's very big on the idea of timed writings -- go, write for 10 minutes, just keep writing, don't stop and edit yourself, etc.

I'm going to write about that today, and I like the prompt so much that I thought I'd throw it out there for other people. I haven't decided if I'm going to do it as a timed writing (i.e., 10 minutes, 15 minutes and then stop) or just write until I've exhausted the topic.

And if anyone writes on it, I'd love to see the results (or snippets therof) posted here, if anyone is willing.

I know that...it was an unfortunate attempt at humor that started with carrots and sticks and morphed to whips and chains. Or something. Which reminds me, most of my revisions happen because I'm going along and remember "They don't live in your brain, you idiot. If you want them to see what you see, you have to write it in."(I'm nothing if not gentle with myself.)OK, Tep, I'll give it a shot. My brain is very distracted today...ooh shiny, but maybe later. interesting topic.

Home ------ There wasn't one house where I grew up...more like about fifteen. All within the same town(which despite that is not "My Hometown" in the Springsteen sense) It's more like a place where I'm a freak who shakes her head at the sports-digging, Republican voting locals. I fit in at the local indie bookstore with the lefty slogans and authors I love. Sometimes, in those books, or on TV, I get one line that makes me say "My brother! My sister! Where have you been all my life?" But all the insult humor in the world won't really make you Jewish.(I've checked. There are Rules. It's a thing.) -more-

I'm not certain what's wanted, in this "home" piece.

We have geography here, of a flavour not really found anywhere else. The City has dimples in the architecture, knowing winks from behind irregular hilltops. If your car hit Pacific Heights, Divisadero Street, in just the right spot, without slowing down? You get airborne for a few moments, clutching the wheel and screaming, as the Bay comes up in your face as a dark variegated splash of blue. Then you realise, you're still a mile from it, and you calm down, but your car is now travelling downhill at a filthy angle, and you smell brake-pad lining as the car finally slows down.

There's food here, a lot of it; as of the mid-nineties, San Francisco had the highest concentration of restaurants per capita of any major city in America, and I have no reason to think that's changed. We're a city of foodies, all food, every food.

Twenty five years ago, I lived in a tiny flat in North Beach. On Saturday mornings, during a particular season, I would walk down to Fisherman's Wharf, early early early, and go bring fresh bread to the crab boats coming in. I'd go home with about ten pounds of fresh crab. Salad, louis, chowder, learning how to make crab cakes properly. Also, my flat was only a few blocks from Graffeo, on Columbus Avenue, and the smell of roasting coffee beans from their huge roastery was a kind of running perfume in my life, walking to work through North Beach, stopping at Cafe Trieste for espresso and hot pastry and poetry, playing pinball at Broadway Joe's on the way home.

This was home then, and I ran away from it. I love Florence, and Paris, and London. But in the end, it's always going to be San Francisco.