Kate Gray

The first time was in high school. While having been a reader (avid, perhaps excessively so) through all the preceding years, writing was not on my radar before then. It might have been junior or senior year when two teachers began to encourage my writing, and I produced a "How To" story for an assignment. It took on a life of its own, really.
It was an alien learning about human first aid/triage methodologies, and in order to make this seem very foreign to the creature, I decided that it was an arachnid species. I can still remember creating the world around the alien, with all the webs, how spidery beings are so very different from us, and how it would influence the learning process.
I thought it was a lark, but my teacher was surprisingly bowled over by what I'd done. She pushed me to write more, and better, and I'm very grateful to her.

I have two boys who are now in school all day. Before, when there were half days of pre-k and kindergarten, I couldn't sit still long enough to string together any intelligent thoughts. Our routine is pretty set now, and once they're both on the bus, either it's a running morning (every other day), or I sit down with breakfast, and get my brain loose.
I'm very ADD with my focus, and so I have to write at least a vague outline to keep going in a good direction (that would be forward!). Another mental trick I have to play is to write for 55 minutes, and then get up and do something else for 5, whether it's pull-ups, squats, or run to the WC. Since I would get lost in research, too, unless it's a quick, "tell me the answer to this question" or a synonym lookup, footnoting research needs is key. Of course, I've also learned to be pretty explicit in footnoting, because I've gone back at times and had no idea what I was thinking about with a "check supernova types" basic note.
Once done with a first draft, I leave it for a day or so, start looking for cover imagery, then go back and start the hard proofing - close reading - and the last proof ends up being flow/mistakes, etc.