This was prompted by me growling at him (so much for writing making me a better person...) the other morning when he woke up a little early and started asking me all sorts of questions -- that I was sitting in the Stickley Chair with a manuscript and staring at a screen didn't seem to communicate to him that I was in another world fine-tuning some staging.
I don't know if this is true for other writers, but when I'm that focused, it feels like I'm being physically yanked out of the world my characters are in and back into a pre-dawn living-room. It breaks my rhythm and it's irritating. I retreated to the Writing Closet, the doors of which were assailed a few minutes later with a request for technical assistance printing a job that should have been done the previous evening.
I felt annoyed at the apparently manufactured interruptions and also guilty for snapping at the child, which by now had pulled me completely out of the story and the rhytm of writing.
During our afternoon discussion, The Child accused me of writing eighty percent of the day. Ha! I told him I was sorry that was his perception, but if that were true, I'd be writing at least eighteen hours every day. The reality is that on a good writing week, I get in fourteen to sixteen hours a week; but it's much more likely to come up to eight.
An item-by-item of my weekly agenda didn't convince him, and we reverted to the old-style "uh-huh!/nuh-uh!" school of debate. Sigh.
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