What I've learned about me

So here's the deal. This is stuff that should have been very apparent to me years ago. After all, how old am I? But sometimes I just have to get to the "quit fighting yourself" stage and just give in. So what do I know?

• I write better in the early morning and late at night. Or at least when the house is quiet.
• I can't write at all if the kids are within ear shot. They are just too dog gone distracting.
• That means summer is very hard for me.
• I can work on publicity stuff when the kids are around, but I have to be very careful or I'll write emails full of nonsense, like "Mom! Mackinley just got water all over the floor!"
• I write more quickly when I have a clear idea what I want to accomplish in a scene, but that doesn't mean the scene will come out better than if I don't know.
• I'm easily distracted by the Internet.
• I love talking (email) to people even if I don't know them.
• I'm useless in the mid-afternoon so I might as well stop beating myself up about the "research" I do before I have to make dinner. Especially the research I do with my eyes closed.
• While having a sound track helps me get back into the mood of a wip, leaving it on while I'm writing is a mistake. What kind of mistake, you ask? Somehow readers don't really "get" why lyrics pop into the middle of a paragraph.
• I use too many exclamation points!!!
• Reading a novel that's too removed from what I write while I'm writing messes up my voice.

What all of this means is I'm going to have to work from midnight to 5 am, sleep from 5 to 8 (AM) struggle through my day taking the kids to swimming and what not and then sleep from 9 pm to midnight.

Something else I've learned about myself: that schedule is never gonna work for me.