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Waking up is hard for me. I’m not one of those who bounds out of bed as dawn breaks, a writer who gets 1000 words done before 7am (do they really exist? I’m scared they do). I wake slowly, and, when I remember, put a call out to the Universe, whoever is there, to “surprise and delight me” today. It very often does happen - although whether it is just that I notice smaller things and allow myself to be surprised and delighted or what, who knows? Worth trying though. (The first morning I did it, I got the news that my short story collection, The White Road and Other Stories, had been commended by the Orange Award for New Writers. Surprise? Heart-stopping shock, more like.)

I try not to turn the computer on before having my tea, but mostly fail. And then - as I’ve learned in the last few weeks as I have been thinking about whether I have a routine - there seem to be a number of things I need to check before I can get on with anything writing-related.

I should say first that I don’t have a regular writing space. We currently live (or lived, depending on when this is published; we are moving in 3 weeks), in a very open plan apartment, with few doors, and my partner, James, also works from home. When I was a journalist, I used to have my study in a gallery room built above his study, with NO DOOR. We would shout up and down. It was ok, because I didn’t really need to appease any Muses to write articles.

Then, when I gave up journalism to write fiction full time, 2 1/2 years ago, I slowly, slowly realised: this won’t work. I tried working in the bedroom, which has a door, but sitting in bed with a laptop, it’s just not me. I started getting very, very frustrated. I tried to gently persuade him to go out - but that option has limited availability.  We looked into the possibility of a shed in the garden - writers and sheds, marriage made in heaven - but here in Israel, sheds are few and far between, we would have needed planning permission etc..etc…

So, in the end, several months ago, I moved my desk into the cellar. Damp: a little. Dark: has electric light. Quiet: yes, mostly. And the main advantage: totally separate from the house! And slightly cooler in Jerusalem’s scorching summer temperatures. But we have now decided to move countries, we are relocating to Bristol, UK, at the end of August, the cellar is filling up with “stuff”, so once again I am homeless.

I can work in cafes. I can work very well and am writing this in one now. I like white noise, music and conversation (especially if it’s not in the same language as the one I am writing in - we will see what happens in Bristol). Actually, I believe, serves to help me focus.

Anyhow, wherever I am, I need to check the following things before I start:

• email
• The Amazon UK ranking of my book
• The Amazon US ranking of my book
• The sitemeter stats page for my book, my personal website and my blog
• My book’s page on Gardners, the UK book distributors, to see if the number has gone down
• Facebook Inbox
• My Facebook Wordscraper;  Lexulous and Scrabble games (more on that later)
• My Zoetrope online writing groups
• The WriteWords calls for submissions and jobs page
• email (again, it’s been a while)
• The Bookarazzi “bloggers with book deals” forum
• My blog, to look at the Blog Roll of blogs I follow and see if anyone’s posted a new blog post
• Duotrope’s What’s New page, just to check that the submissions I have sent out are still in the “haven’t been rejected yet even though they are sending out rejections” state.

I have just read over that list and think perhaps I am insane. It’s a kind of compulsion. Am I alone in this?

Ok, how do I start writing? Well, firstly I will say that right now I am writing short stories, flash fiction and poetry. All of those have in common: brevity. I am not working on a long-term project, something that requires many many hours of work on one thing. No novels. It has been a while since I worked on a long short story (for me, over 2000 words) that required weeks or months of revision etc.. Mostly what I write I write quickly and it comes out in one go. But to do that I have a method.

First, I gather myself some prompts: I trawl online lit mags or even books of poetry and I “borrow” a few words or a phrase from 6 or 7 different poems. I love poems because poets juxtapose words so wonderfully and wierdly, which gets my brain whirring.

Then I make sure I have at least one Fast Wordscraper or Lexulous (Facebook scrabble-type games) going, and this seems to have become a critical part of my writing routine. You may think that playing one of these games while writing is a distraction, but I am here to tell you it isn’t: it helps. I start writing a flash story, using the set of prompts I have found, beginning with one word or phrase, seeing where that takes me, and then, whenever I need to, I grab another prompt and put it in. Something about using prompts puts me in that kind of dream-like zone where i am not thinking logically about what I am writing, I am letting it flow. And when I get to a stopping point where, if I carried on, it would be the logical mind and not the creative, I go to Wordscraper, play my turn, distracting my logical mind while the creative keeps whirring. And then I go back to the story.

As I say: this works for me. I blogged about it here, http://titaniawrites.blogspot.com/2008/07/focus-insight-and-creativity-or-how-i.html, referencing an article in the New Yorker: “Concentration, it seems, comes with the hidden cost of diminished creativity.” In other words, it is often best to go off and do something else when you’re stuck, instead of staring and staring at what you are working on.

This whole process, writing a flash story of around 500 words, takes approx 30 minutes, but as you can see there was quite a build up. When I’ve written it, I feel cleansed, I feel sane, I feel great. And then I get on with any longer short stories I am working on, revising and editing, or someone else’s story that I need to critique, and all that other writing-related work: sending in submissions, checking up on submissions, blogging about my writing life etc. Several hours pass, and then I realise I had better eat! And I leave my cellar and go back up into the world again.