Blog, Interrupted

A bit of series news: I got the green light today from my editor on my proposal for Darkyn book six, now titled Swans Fall, which will feature Valentin Jaus from Private Demon as one of the protagonists. If all goes well, Swans Fall should be hitting the shelves about six months after Evermore is released in January 2008.

Something else happened to me today that delayed the blog entry I had planned to post. Nothing dire, just something unusual for me.

I was happily engulfed in one of the WIPs, running through mine shafts and further endangering the lives of approximately five thousand clueless, possibly doomed colonists, when an alarm I'd set on my clock radio went off. This is why I hate having clocks in my writing space, but now that the kids are out of school I have five luxurious, uninterrupted hours from 5 to 10 am in the morning to write. If I don't use an alarm, I lose all sense of time.

I was really into the story. Things were going so well, in fact, that when the alarm went off I reached out, groped, and hit the snooze button. When it beeped a second time, I got so annoyed that I yanked the clock radio's cord out of the electrical outlet, and went back to work. The kids are out of school; I could spend another thirty minutes writing.

Some time later my voice gave out (the downside of writing with VRS) and I had to stop working for a while. I looked to see what time it was because surely it had only been thirty minutes. No power, no time display. Plugging the clock radio back in only told me it might be noon, or midnight.

Uh-oh.

Downstairs, I discovered it was 1:15 pm. The kids were still asleep, the housework still had to be done, and the dog really, really needed to go outside. On the internet computer, there were e-mails from the agent and two editors, waiting for replies; plus a drawing to do and the blog to update and comments to be read. In the garden, the Mexican heather I had set out to plant was still sitting there, potted. We won't talk about weeds. Breakfast was history; lunch and dinner still had to be planned, things defrosted, nutrition calculated, picky eaters catered to. And someone with fur had been playing skee-ball with the TV remote on the coffee table again, and knocked off the writing magazines waiting to be skimmed.

I had done the supremely selfish thing of spending an entire morning writing. Wrecked my whole schedule. From the moment I'd woken up, I had not spent one minute being Mom, author, blogger, housewife, friend, client, gardener, or anyone else. For eight hours, I had been just a writer.

There should have been some guilt involved, but you know what? It felt great.

I took the dog out, woke the kids, rustled up some brunch for them and made myself a gigantic glass of peach tea. Then I sat on the porch, soaked up the sunshine, and enjoyed fifteen minutes of being just a tired, happy writer before I went back inside and got to work on all the other stuff in my life. And as of midnight, I had everything done but the laundry and the blog, hence this entry.

Tomorrow I will not hit the snooze button on the clock radio, or yank that cord out of the wall. I will catch up, and be responsible, and stay on schedule because that's what I usually do, and that's important. But for today, it was very nice to take a little vacation from that.

Do any of you writers out there ever do this kind of thing? How do you feel about stealing a couple of hours away from your daily life to write?