Open your computer.
Spend twenty-five minutes arranging your books by color to create an Ombre bookshelf.
Search office closet for electric pencil sharpener so you can do line edits in pencil.
Compare Amazon user reviews for the two highest-rated pencil sharpeners. Add the cheaper one to your cart to buy it later. Maybe.
Write four-and-a-half sentences.
Paste sentences into an online reader and listen to them with a Spanish accent. Then a Russian accent. Then an English accent.
Be annoyed that robots can’t pronounce “he’d” on any continent.
Check your Submittable.
Stand and stretch. Feel accomplished because you can still touch your toes. Decide you don’t need to go back to the gym after all.
Celebrate with a cheese stick. Enjoy it the proper way, in thin salty threads as directed by the Polly O String cheese commercials from the ’90s.
YouTube “Polly O String Cheese commercials from the ’90s,” and watch them all. Wonder what Ricki Lake is doing these days.
Check your Submittable.
Decide your Ally character should be blonde instead of brunette, spend an hour adding to your new Novel_shaDes of bLond Pinterest board.
Take a writing break and read that George Saunders story your friend sent for inspiration.
Decide you will never, ever write anything one-one-millionth as good.
Text your friend she is an asshole for sending that George Saunders story.
Take to your bed in despair.
Consider suffocating yourself with a pillow then get distracted by the dirty scalp smell on your pillowcase. Struggle to remember when you last changed your sheets.
Have an epiphany that the scene you’re slogging through would be more interesting if it were set in a laundromat.
Spend forty minutes reviewing Google images of Midwestern laundromats.
Fall in love with laundromat bars.
Wish you could go to a laundromat bar.
Wish you could own a laundromat bar.
Re-write entire scene in a laundromat bar. Get stuck trying to decide if Ally would use name-brand or store-brand detergent.
Check your word count for the day.
Cry a little.
Check your Submittable.
Make coffee.
Spill coffee.
Clean up coffee.
Rifle through your drawers for the notebook you were using a few years ago when you wrote a perfect sentence about cooking fish. Cooking fish makes clothes smell, thus requiring laundering.
Get breathless that your laundromat bar could be a home for this killed darling!
Find your high school journal instead of your notebook. Wonder why you still have it.
Spend an hour reading lame poems, Christian Slater quotes from Pump Up the Volume, and a detailed account of Mike’s erection against your leg while dancing to “More than Words” at the semi-formal.
Remember why you still have journal. Don’t remember who Mike is.
Consider masturbating but don’t because your word count doesn’t deserve it.
Check your Submittable.
Ignore your mother’s call, text her you can’t talk because you are writing.
Study Roxane Gay’s 2012 website via waybackmachine.org for clues.
Find none.
Stand at fridge and squirt whipped cream in your mouth. Feel okay with this choice because it is whipped cream made with almond milk. #healthy
Realize your laundromat bar scene needs a hot guy with sleeve tattoos. Remember a girl from high school married a hot guy with sleeve tattoos.
Stalk her Facebook profile for inspiration photos of a hot guy with sleeve tattoos.
Regain consciousness 45 minutes later watching video of an Australian lady giving birth in a car while her husband keeps saying they don’t have leather seats.
Try to remember why you got on Facebook in the first place. Wipe drool from corner of mouth.
Curse Mark Zuckerburg for ushering in the end of civilization.
Think about how you should tweet more. All the agents are on Twitter.
Remember you need to build up your online brand. Remember you need to launch an online brand. Remember you need to google, “What is an online brand?”
Immediately get overwhelmed.
Hate yourself.
Go floss while mind-writing a brilliant commentary on the negative impact social media has on happiness and mental health and writers.
Check your Submittable.
Let dog out to pee.
Realize the big dipper and little dipper are evidence of life on other planets, that they are obviously galactic communities constructed in the shape of a deity who looks like a soup ladle.
Decide you will write a flash piece about this alien nation.
Check Duotrope for places you could submit an alien story. Consider adding a sasquatch. Sasquatches are on trend.
Check your Submittable.
Put on a pair of socks with less annoying seams.
Shake your head back and forth really fast while saying “write write write write write.”
Write one shitty paragraph.
Check your Submittable.
Close your computer.
Watch Netflix while checking your Submittable.
Go to bed.
Repeat.