In the morning while the kids are getting ready for school is usually when I write these posts. This is convenient on one hand because it’s a finite amount of time that I have to gather my thoughts and put them into the site. On the other hand, this practice doesn’t really lend itself to creating the longer, researched, and therefore, useful posts that I’d really like to on occasion. Worse, it’s only an hour or two into my waking day, and hasn’t given me much time to think about what I’m going to write.
I do keep a list of things that I’d like to write about. Most of these things I feel are deserving of a little more time than what I have in the morning, which is why this list remains so long. I’ve got a post building in my head about the Fitbit tracker that I’d really get out, for example. But in the morning, my best ideas for short form writing seem to come to me in the shower, which has its own unique set of problems.
It seems like any ideas that I come up with in the shower leave my head when I leave the water. I know I have some worthwhile ideas there, because when I’m able to remember them, they turn out pretty good. But for the most part, something happens while I’m getting ready for the day that puts all of those ideas out of my mind before I make it downstairs to write.
What I think I need, at its most primitive, is a grease pencil. Something that works in the water that I can write down all of these ideas, instead of drawing them in the steam on the shower door to have them fade away afterwards. And even beter idea would be something that could capture these ideas digitally and send them to a computer for later indexing. Maybe it would even be worthwhile to record voice, since - dare I admit - I have come up with a good many original musical compositions in the shower that could be expanded on at the piano bench.
I think what I fear most about all this is that I’d get some recording instrument to use, and then I’d not have any ideas there anymore. Or perhaps worse than that, I’d realize that all of the great ideas I was having in the shower really were only good in the shower, and not viable in the light of day. But there’s only one way to find out, and I can always remove it if the fantasy turns out to be better than the reality.
