It’s 6:00 on a Saturday morning. Are you awake?

It’s Saturday morning. I am sitting at my computer, writing. It’s 6:00 AM. I have awake for more than an hour. The dog has been walked.  The dishwasher has been  emptied. I have been pounding away on the keyboard for quite a while.

Currently, I am reading and responding to work emails that I did not have time for the day before.

A direct message arrives from my editor via Twitter. She’s expressing a smidgen of excitement over recent developments related to my next book.

It’s 6:14 AM on a Saturday.

Ten minutes later I receive a text message from my friend, Jeff. He is also responding to work emails and has a work-related question for me.

It’s 6:25 AM on a Saturday.

The fact that all three of us are already awake and working before 6:30 AM on a Saturday morning is surprising.

Except I am not surprised.

There is a small, perhaps infinitesimal, segment of the population for whom this is the norm. When you discover one of these people, you don’t soon forget who they are.

These are the people who make you feel a little more normal and a little less lonely when everyone else in your house is asleep.

What I find the most fascinating is that my editor and my friend were so certain that I would be awake that they did not have any reservations about sending me messages this early in the morning.

Messages that might have awakened me had I been sleeping.

But they knew I would be awake. In fact, Jeff has texted and called me in the wee hours of the morning on many occasion, knowing full well that he would not be waking me up.

The hours before 7:00 and even 8:00 on a weekend morning can be a productive but a lonely time for me.

It’s so nice to know that I am not the only one making use of these solitary, dark hours of the day.