When I worked in Minneapolis, I used to be able to hide off in a conference room on my lunch hour and get some writing in. Usually, I didn't accomplish that much, but even a page helps and even more importantly, it had my brain swirling and mulling and working problems out. I'd usually get home, revise the page or so I wrote at work and then get a few more pages in. It was a vital part of my writing routine and something I lost with the move to Atlanta.
Unfortunately, the Tech Ops building down here is huge, and with a lot more people, space is hard to come by. Spare conference rooms even during lunch? Not often.
I reached a conclusion a few weeks ago, though. Even if I can't do actual story writing during lunch, maybe I can work on notes or plotting out ideas for scenes. Anything to get my brain in the story and get it working on the book.
Day one was today. It started out really well. I went through sheets of questions about the book and characters. I even came up with a nice piece of character torture that I hadn't come up with already.
I was excited. This idea of mine was scathingly brilliant if it's going to lead to ideas that will push my heroine into a tougher position. :-) Hey, I only torture them because they deserve it. They all torture me. Endlessly. And as I'm thinking about this a little harder, someone walked in our cube to talk to one of the guys. (We sit in four-person pods.) The engineer had a quick question. Good, I thought, he won't interrupt me long.
After working with engineers as long as I have, I should know better. He parked himself there through the rest of my lunch and beyond. And right as he left, someone else came in the cube. Not that it mattered by then anyway. Lunch was over.
I'm calling this plan a qualified success. As long as there is constant traffic in my pod, I guess a few minutes of deep thought is about all I'll be able to get. Kind of a bummer, but I'll try again tomorrow.
