You need this writing advice from M. Tweaks, who models disorienting and agonizing conditions for an ideal state of composition as suggested by globetrotting novelist John Burdett:

I am writing today's entry from our basement. It is dark down here; in fact, I can barely see the keyboard. My padded chair has been replaced with a hard, unstable stool. Instead of black tea with milk I am drinking Mountain Dew from a dirty glass. I haven't showered for days. My skin itches. I am listening to the radio -- the best of the 80s, 90s, and today. My pants are a size too small. I have been subsisting entirely off of bologna and Cheeze-Its. Whenever I worry that I might be getting too comfortable I poke myself in the leg with a tack I keep nearby just for this purpose. I think it's working. It's hard to tell because I'm not wearing my glasses (helps with disorientation) so I can't actually read what I've written so far. But I'm willing to bet it's pretty darn good.

Which brings me to the stern yet loving letter written by Thomas Jefferson to his daughter in 1790, which I saw quoted in the Seattle Museum's supercool exhibit of fancy samplers by industrious 6- to 12-year-olds in the 18th century (yes, yes, there were also rockin' modernists, glass sculptures, fascinating multimedia stuff by and about native Salish people, Renaissance devotional paintings, the Hammering Man, etc.). I also had to take out a contact for a little while and looked at the Impresssionists with the blurry eye to see what it was like (blurry). Here's the letter:

How are you occupied? Write me a letter... and answer me all these questions... How many pages a day you read in Don Quixot? How far are you advanced in him? Whether you repeat a Grammar lesson every day? What else you read? How many hours a day you sew? Whether you have an opportunity of continuing your music? Whether you know how to make a pudding yet, to cut out a beef stake [sic], to sow spinach, or to set a hen?

Well, what are you waiting for? I'm hastening back to Don Quixot and hen-setting myself now that I'm done with my flickr Russia pix. Idle hands are the Devil's workshop.