I write while my wife sleeps, as there is little use in saying "I will be your's" when she can't see me. Does an I-phone stick its finger up at its owner, while occupied with its own independent wanderings? Maybe that's what an update is.
I (read: try) to wake early, early enough that my wife doesn't want to be up and neither to do I, but if rise she probably won't. When I draft, its on the computer or on paper. I like them both well enough, and a plain MS Word doc is as fine as plain Walmart paper.
I usually hesitate, shy a shrewd, until I start slamming shit on the page. Dad says "Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see what fills up faster" with a vast smile, so maybe if I shit enough I'll get my wish.
Things are so misspelled in the draft that grammarians would find each draft to be theyre doom. But I type. I stick pointless loops and curves in the plot, knowing I can do surgery later. I always try to exercise the same ammount of time as I write: 1 hour.
If I am revising, its on print out. I sit on the exercise bike, pedaling while I grown and stitch my brow and read the awkward sentences. I look at POV first, then Characters, then Plot, then the setting, then my descriptions and dialogue, then the theme. I'm building something, building an engine and if it doesn't work, I fix it. Not like fixing something until it does the one thing you wanted, but fixing it until its clean, and works like it was a beloved tractor, or a solid laptop.
I communicate and ask for the input of my friends. They are not editors, they are readers. Editors want to please readers as much as you do, so at least make your best friend happy with the story.
I communicate and ask input from my editors, mostly by sending them my latest revision (the final draft is a unicorn, a "tastiest burger ever", a perfect spouse, a frictionless plane), and waiting for their always polite no. Rejection doesn't hurt; you must know this, its another brick on the road. One rejection tells me nothing. Ten tells me to take another look, to find what i missed. People that reject stories are never wrong: there is always something that hurt their experience that you can consider changing. If your wife told you "this orange juice tastes bad" would you say, "It doesn't taste bad. You couldn't interpret your taste buds if it would pardon your grandma's death sentence?" Maybe you would, but I don't.
If I find the bug, and still like it, I keep it and look for something worse. If I find nothing, I send it some more. If I find something bad, I ask my friends again. If I they can't the problem, I take it out and then see. It can be a sentence, a character, a word, a theme, a plot, a chair or a color.
I write everyday, because the time will pass anyway, because I feel like it, because I need an excuse to exercise.
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