Y S Lee, Author of Young Adult, Historical and Mystery Novels

I went for a walk last night and saw this snail. It was 3 metres from the spot where I’d last seen it, about 10 hours earlier. I felt a flash of camaraderie for this snail, because I’ve been kind of bogged down lately. I’ve had sick kids, a sick partner, a wicked virus followed by a sinus infection, and a fair amount of unnecessary drama going on. And I looked at the snail and the 3 metres of sidewalk it had covered since noon and sighed and thought, hey! it’s me.

And then I reached the lake:

This is part of a waterfront path along Lake Ontario and it’s far more calming than a massage. Especially at dusk. I walked on, feeling less like a snail.

I went to check on the stone sculptures. For about a year, now, someone has been building with stones along the edge of the path. It’s not uncommon to see an inukshuk or two along the way, but the stone sculptor is different: her work tends to be abstract, and it’s generally very restrained. Her sculptures get tumbled by the wind, or fall back into the lake, and then a couple of weeks later she’s back. For a while, there were about 30 sculptures along the path, and part of going for a walk was the fun of seeing what she’d done. Also, people tend to leave the sculptures as they find them.

Tonight, however, I found this:

I’m in two minds about the whole thing. I think the original sculpture – the arch on the left, inside the circle of stones – was terrific on its own. The other stuff seems excessive, overdecorated, fussy. I definitely don’t think it’s by the same person. But all the same, it was inspiring to see someone interacting with the original work, trying to augment it, changing it. Because that’s what we all do, right?

Maybe I’m not a snail, after all.

Hello, friends. I have a confession to make: I’ve always been quite a prima donna when it comes to writing time. When I was childless, I needed three-hour blocks of uninterrupted writing time, minimum, to feel that I was making progress on a manuscript. When we had a baby, that shrank to two hours – still a lot to ask, but with the support of my superstar spouse, we made that happen.

And now we have 2 children. The elder goes to preschool, part-time. The (new) baby is never more than a few metres from me, day and night. Basically, the I-must-have-privacy-and-silence-and-a-warmup-ritual-that-involves-freshly-ground-french-pressed-coffee thing is, um, not working out.

Instead, I’m learning to write like thousands (tens of thousands? gazillions? pity no one measures these things) of women have before me: in unpredictable increments that sometimes pop up when I least expect them. For example, last week I dropped off our son at preschool and the baby fell asleep in the car on the way home. I sprinted into the house, grabbed my laptop, hopped into the passenger seat, and wrote until she woke up. The tally? 800 words in 45 minutes. Yes, I’m still feeling mighty smug about that one.

Obviously, that’s a best-case scenario and it certainly doesn’t happen every time I open the laptop. I still have writing sessions where I fiddle with a single paragraph for 20 minutes, or worse yet, check email obsessively and write half a (bad) sentence. But I’m learning.

The other thing that’s changing is when I write. Now, a few evenings a week after the kids are asleep, I ignore the rest of my life (the dishes, the half-read novel, my lovely husband) and focus. I usually log in to Twitter and propose a writing sprint to anyone who’s kicking around. And off I go.

It’s messy and inconvenient and fundamentally at odds with my circadian rhythm (I’m one of those people who likes to go to bed at 10), but it’s working. Mostly. And whenever I feel particularly low about my word count, I think about one of my favourite Victorian novelists, Wilkie Collins, who was a consummate procrastinator.

When Collins was in the middle of a serial novel (a novel published in a magazine in many instalments), he would turn up at the offices of the magazine on the day of the printer’s deadline. There, he would finally sit down and write. As he finished each page, someone would run that sheet of paper down to the printer’s offices, where they would typeset it and finally print it.

It makes me feel queasy just thinking about it.

How do you write? Are you a Collins-esque procrastinator, or a marvel of efficiency?