Guest Blog: Krystal Wade – My Perfect Writing Day

It’s a week of guest posts here at ‘Rant, with occasional music’. Appropriately enough (as I’m away at a writer’s retreat this week) we’re going to start with Krystal Wade’s ‘Perfect Writing Day’.

It was a dark and stormy night . . . .

Okay, so maybe my opening is a bit cliché, but bad weather brings out the best in me. Whether—yes, that pun was intended—it’s raining, snowing or just a generally gloomy day, it doesn’t matter as long as the sky is gray.

Hey! Where’d the kids go?

Aside from the current barometric pressure, I need peace. If my kids are home, peace is the last thing I’ll ever get. I love my sweet little monsters, but my laptop must have some magnetic connection to their need for me. The second I whip out my trusty Mac and fire up my book files, kid number 1, 2 or 3 finds a reason to cry, fight with their sibling or be insanely hungry to the point of wailing.

And while we’re talking kids . . . can we add the grown kid to that list? You know who I’m talking about—the husband. Love him, but if he’s around while I’m trying to write my guess is he’ll interrupt.

OMG, what’s that smell?

What on earth could that have to do with writing, you ask? I’m a neat freak. When I was younger, the vacuum lines all had to go in the same direction. Having kids has cured me of such insane rituals, but if I’m sitting in my writing chair and the house “is a disaster”, I cannot write without guilt. Sure I’ll try to hide behind the laptop, but every few minutes something will cause me to look up then get up and clean.

Sigh.

Cue music.

Once the weather is bad, the kids are gone and the house is clean, I’m pretty much golden to write . . . I’m not asking for too much, am I? However, I have one last requirement: music. It amplifies my creativity level—and explains why this post is so boring, I’m not listening to anything—and takes my imagination to places I cannot go on my own. There’s nothing better than listening to some classical piece of music and writing a whimsical story, only to experience a sudden genre switch and feel an urgent need to kill off all the characters.

Well, I guess that about wraps it up. In a nutshell I sound like a depressed, obsessive-compulsive agoraphobic who doesn’t like her kids and enjoys listening to music. But I swear I’m a fun person and my stories are exciting.

Besides, ninety percent of the time the weather doesn’t cooperate, my kids are always here, the house is rarely clean. The music is about the only thing I can count on.

Oh, and coffee. Don’t forget the coffee. Speaking of . . . .

Krystal’s blog can be found here: http://krystalwade.blogspot.com and on Twitter, she can be found here: https://twitter.com/#!/KrystalWade