What writers do in the summer

When I told my dad, a writer and retired teacher, that I wanted to be a teacher, he did not recommend it. He knew I wanted to be a published author, and he warned, "I always said I would write in the summers and I never did. You think you'll be able to write, but you won't."

Fast forward probably about seven years. The 2023-2024 school year was my best writing streak yet. Before this year, it had been a while since I had done a lot of writing in any season. Now I've been on summer break for almost a week, and my streak has evaporated. This morning I finally sent my first query of summer break. I tried to move to a writing project afterwards and found myself totally blank—and it was only 9 am. I knew then that I needed to get the heck out of my house.

During the school year, a weekday goes like this: wake up at 5 am to get ready for the day, write and/or query from 6 to 6:30 am, go to work, handle 5000000 crises, get home at 3 pm, watch tv until I fall asleep. That 30 minutes every morning has added up to an incredible amount of work, and I am very proud of myself for it.

Now a weekday goes like this: get up at 7 to make coffee, play all the NYT puzzles at 7:30, practice French and Italian on Duolingo at 7:35, read all the headlines in the Inquirer and 2-3 full articles at 7:40, and ta-da it's 8 am and I'm bored.

My point is, I learned two things this morning:

1. Routine is everything. Absolutely everything.

2. I don't need time to write. I need people to write about. Or write within, amongst, around. I can't write if I've only interacted with one person for the last 4 days. (Especially if it's the one person I live with—whom I adore deeply obviously but he's a very...irregular person, which doesn't help me write about people in general.) I need to see multiple humans per day to fill my brain with situations and dialogue and life, the heartbeat of fiction.

So now I'm in a study room in a bookstore, and sitting across from me is a girl completely knocked out facedown on her laptop, and I feel the heartbeat again.

I guess I know what to do tomorrow at 5 am.