I wrote this book at 5am.
In the past I had trouble writing in the early morning. Everything I wrote came out groggy. But then my kids started staying up later, and my wife got addicted to The Real Housewives, and we live in a small apartment and there was no tower or writing hut to escape to… so early morning it had to be.
I solved the groggy problem in an unappetizing but effective way. I got up at 5:00am, sometimes using those vibrating alarms for deaf people so I wouldn’t wake up my wife.
I would go to kitchen in the dark and open a container of instant coffee, pour half an inch of it into a shot glass, fill the remainder of the glass with water; swirl it, and down it. By the time my computer had booted, so had my metabolism.
This was every bit as disgusting as it sounds. But it enabled me to clock an hour and forty-five minutes of writing every day before work.