Wow. A startlingly productive day. This is a good Friday afternoon feeling. Just in time to let go for the weekend, feeling pretty good about the past week....

It's been the first week back to normal work (as opposed to the frantic, pre-conference paper-hacking of last week), and it's gone much, much better than I'd feared. I was afraid I'd have a hard time getting my fiction written once I was back in the midst of my thesis work; I was afraid, at the same time, that I wouldn't be able to get myself back into the routine of stay-at-home academic work, and wouldn't get anything done at all.

It's Friday now, and in the past three days (since getting back from Oxford), I've written at least three and a half pages of fiction per day (which is good for me--I'm not a very fast writer), and I'm halfway through rewriting my academic article ("Unveiling the Other: Revelations of Otherness in Haydn's Armida"). I'm even pretty happy with the new sections I managed to write for it yesterday in the midst of all that Brain Meltage.

So that's it, really. Not a very exciting journal entry, but I just wanted to establish a record for myself. This early morning writing routine really does seem to work--not only for being productive in my fiction writing (which is what I'd hoped for), but also in taking away the core of resentment I used to feel during the daytime, when I was supposed to be focusing on my academic work, because what I really wanted was to get some fiction writing done... Now, by 9 am, I have. It's amazing how much easier that makes it to get the other job done, afterwards.

And someday Nika will stop acting like we are turning into Evil Overlords by waking her up at 6 am (and kidnapping her outside for her morning walk when she keeps trying to sneak away from us, back into the bedroom to sleep)!