resolved to write in the early mornings. Initially he tried to get up at 3:30 A.M., but “that didn’t work too well” so he revised it to 4:30. “And I liked it, I liked the feeling of getting up really early,” he says. “The mind is newly cleansed but it’s also befuddled and you’re still just plain sleepy. I found that I wrote differently then.” Baker liked the early-morning feeling so much that he has stuck with this schedule ever since—and, more recently, has developed a strategy to squeeze two mornings out of one day. He says, “A typical day for me would be that I would get up around four,
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