Before July 2, 2000, I could sleep. Any place. Any time. Sleeping late on the weekends was something I looked forward to all week. I’m talking marathon snoozes of ten, eleven maybe even twelve hours.

And naps. Ten minutes or four hours, give me an opportunity, I milked it for every second available.

Then some idiot (we never found out who, it was a hit-and-run) exited the freeway and forgot to apply his brakes as he came to the red light where my husband and I were stopped, waiting for the green. Fortunately, we both walked away with only back-strain and whiplash.

Now, I know this makes no sense, and I’ve long since given up trying to find a medical correlation, but that wreck changed my ability to sleep. Unaided, I haven’t slept more than two hours in a stretch, since that day.

While it may sound like I’m complaining, I have to tell you that this did wonderful things for my writing. If I couldn’t sleep, I might as well be at the keyboard telling stories, right?

My most productive writing time became the quiet, pre-dawn hours. I also got in a couple of hours between ten and two.

Then one day, my doctor wrote me a prescription for a sleeping pill; Ambien®-- non-habit forming and it works.

Suddenly, I was sleeping again. My writing came to a grinding halt.

I was totally out of the habit of writing during daylight hours.

Habits are funny things. I’m told it takes three months of doing something everyday to form a new habit. Ninety days to create a pathway in the brain, that connects some little dot with some other little dot, that will eventually cause a specific behavior to become routine.

That tenuous pathway, if maintained, will eventually produce a rut. To create a new habit, you usually have to over-ride an existing rut. That is, you have to replace an existing behavior with something new. And that is HARD!

Ruts are good things. They become ruts because they are comfortable. Familiar. Routine. Easy.

So here’s my thought – if I force myself to write, every day for ninety days – then I’ve formed a new habit. Habits create ruts. Ruts are comfortable. Familiar. Routine. Easy.

So, the logical conclusion is that if I just do it for ninety days in a row, writing will become easy. Right?

I’ll let you know in eighty-nine days.

Terri Richison is pursuing her love of writing and dream of publishing. She writes romantic suspense and is happily married to her high school sweetheart, who happens to be her own special hero.

Copyright © 2005 Terri Richison. All rights reserved. Used with permission.