My newest Shiny New Idea is really taking off. I seem to spend about half an hour in bed every morning after waking up, just thinking and processing all the ideas that are coming at me furiously. So far, I have an opening scene, a good sense of the two main characters, and lots of background for the world and the setup for the current situation.

I’m still devoting most of my working time to the proofreading I need to do, but having something more creative to work on helps keep me from burning out from doing the tedious work. The brainstorming and idea generating is pure creativity. I’m not worrying about putting things into words or pacing or plotting. I’m just playing what if. It’s like when I was a kid running around the neighborhood with my friends, declaring what characters we were and what we were doing as we did a sort of extended improv. Or acting out stories with my dolls or those little Fisher Price people. It’s daydreaming, only I write down the good stuff I come up with. This is my favorite part of the writing process, and it’s a good kind of work to do alongside something more tedious and less creative because it balances it all out.

The trick is getting out of bed, since that time between waking up and actually getting up seems to be the maximum creative time. Some of it is thinking about and processing things that came to me during the night, but then as I’m more conscious I start building on those ideas, and the more I think about it, the more I come up with. I had somewhere to be this morning, and I woke up well before my alarm, but that was when my brain kicked into high gear and I was afraid to get up until I’d processed all the thoughts and ideas well enough that I wouldn’t lose them as soon as I got up. I ended up lying there for about half an hour after I woke up, then I had to hurry and get ready to be at a morning meeting.

On the way back from the meeting, I stopped by the library to pick up some books for researching this idea. But first I need to do some proofreading. The new idea isn’t anywhere near ready to be written. I’ve learned from long experience that the longer I let an idea marinate, the better the book ends up being.