I've found a bit of a rhythm the works for me as far as writing goes. In the past I did all sorts of things, especially sitting in a coffee shop. Or the library! I haven't been to a library in over a year... 

But these days I sit at home with my coffee (BB-8 mug!) and read from a book on writing. Writing Down the Bones is a good one, which I just finished today. More about the writing life rather than how to write, exactly. No one really knows how to write, I think. I certainly don't! I find I have to relearn for each piece. Especially when you have an idea but no clear route to get there. It's kind of like being dropped off on a completely featureless plain and told to find your way home. You know where you want to get to, but not how to get there, necessarily. 

So I write longhand, kind of like a journal but not one that chronicles my life, just talks about what I'm working on. What I need, what I'm unclear on. Then I will take another notebook and do a quick prototype, as they say in board game design, just get something to the table, don't worry about how ugly it is. Can always fix it later if it's worth fixing. This current story I'm working on I think I did mourner five rough prototypes before I finally figured out my way forward. Once I have a pretty confident idea I'll write up a neater, more precise draft in yet another notebook, often switching between notebooks and writing notes and revising and adding stuff.  

Finally I'll open up a document on the laptop and start typing. By the time I get to the typing phase I'm pretty confident that I know how to finish and that it will be a good story, at least a story that I would want to read, which is the only metric I really know how to judge my writing by.

It's not the most efficient, but it works, and it is robust enough that a lot of quality control kind of happens in the process. I do miss the days when I would just open up a new blog post on this very blog and come up with a poem or whatever in like an hour. I have a story in 40 Below Volume 2 that I wrote in one sitting and it didn't require any editing afterwards. I have no idea how I did that! Writing is a complete mystery sometimes. No one really knows how to write and if they say they do, give them a hug (or a virtual socially distanced hug) because in an hour or a day or a week, they will be crying because they will realize they have no idea.