In three weeks I’ll be finished with classes, and then I’ll have about two months off before a summer course I’m teaching starts. In the interim, I’ll be diligently attacking my work-in-progress, becoming the full-time writer I lust to be all year. Now, there’s a couple ways I can approach this. I could stay home and work from my own office, or I can pack up my laptop and head to the library or one of the many local coffee bistros. But leaving home would require assembling myself enough to face that public, and isn’t the whole allure of working from home the fact you can do it in your pajamas? (Though I rarely do it in full make-up, ribboned pigtails, and clingy Union Suit as Miss Bibliophile above. Then again, she must make a habit of not straying very far from that beanbag, as it appears she has an extra apple for nourishment and that bowl it’s sitting in looks suspiciously like what they slide under your bed-ridden self in a nursing home.)  Not that working in your pjs doesn’t have its charms.

It’s nice to be able to shuffle from bed to desk, sipping your morning coffee (or tea in my case) while you contemplate your next plot point en déshabillé. There’s a certain freedom in shutting out the outside world so you can fully enter your own, focusing only on the story thus allowing its characters and setting become all the more real. If you approach it with enough preparation, making large-pot food such as soup, chili, and stew, buying enough food you can eat with one hand such as fruit, string cheese, and anything in a bag, and making sure your sig other and family members are well-warned that this book-writing gig is definitely a thing and you mean BUSINESS, then you may be able to pull it off. But you and they, must be fully vested and on board, because you don’t want them giving you the stink eye when you amble into the kitchen at three PM wearing sleep shorts and a t-shirt sans Maidenform, still flushed from that just-finished ass-kicking scene. Or if it’s way past dinner and you suddenly realize that Pop-Tart you just ate was your lunch,  and the reason the cat is kneading her claws into your leg is not because she loves you, but because you last fed her twelve hours ago. And that’s only because your bedtime has lately been coming with the sunrise, perfecting the art of sleeping upright and fuck-all to “so-called” circadian rhythms.  Truth is, it’s a bitch to admit you’re only the axis to your virtual world, and people can get a bit tetchy if you spend two weeks in your pjs and only leave your office to forage. So what’s the flip side?

Wake up at 6 AM, shower, dress, eat, and be at your desk by seven. Treat it like the job it is, with stretch and coffee breaks, a regular lunch, a walk in the afternoon or early morning to clear your head enough to reflect and reorganize, and with a quitting time reasonable enough to get a good night’s sleep. I’ve done it both ways, as both have their own unique advantages. At times I’ve needed the liberty to work free-form, and at other times I’ve needed the structure to focus. The thing is you have to do what works for you, and if your way isn’t, then perhaps you have to explore an opposite method to know why.

What do you think?

*Don’t get me wrong, in my humble opinion, pajamas work for me. On the other hand…