Listening to music and imagining complex scenarios about your characters. Pretty sure I do this on the daily 
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Ooh! I had a moment this afternoon! Having a Friday Happy Hour drink with colleagues who take turns describing past romances is like developing back story on characters.
Who knew almost 70 year old algebra teacher Erica nearly divorced her husband a few years ago after a tryst with Juan, the Spanish exchange student she loved in college?
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Folding a new stack of loose leaf in half (which I get to do again soon!). I use it to outline chapters.
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Looking for quotes that fit the characters. For example, this one (for the villain) by Dorothy Parker:
‘Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.’
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Go Erica! Woah – so did Juan just show up, 50 ish years later?
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I’m like Jo, planning can feel like writing for me because I go through what I have written and see if something shakes loose. As my mind follows different threads it can be a rabbit hole thing of research or day dreaming… and then later forgetting some of the ideas:angry:
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I agree with a lot of these. Reading in the genre, research, and character sketches, notes to myself on what I want to include, random discoveries I com across now that I’m writing about a certain topic, thinking about writing 
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He was a widower and ended up living only a county away! I am still unsure of the cryptic details, but it did not seem that the ties were completely severed… scandalous for my backwoods area where most people never cross out of Virginia.
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I am constantly writing in my head. If I am on a long drive or just on my own somewhere, I am constantly running my writing through my head. So, even if I am not actually writing; I feel that I am still productive.
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For my fanfic pieces I love listening to music and constructing scenes around the songs. Been doing that since I was 12. Never gets old.
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Household chores like varnishing a floor, painting a wall or doing grandma-in-laws’ garden; right-brain does the manual labour while left-brain gets to wander and suddenly throws up all these scene and character ideas.
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I just purchased Plottr, so playing around with that is helping me sequence my current WIP without technically writing any of it.
But I also have to agree with @rtcatling; walking my dog - especially the long walks through the nearby forest - leaves my brain free to write my book in my head (even down to the level of dialogue!)
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Having coffee with a writing buddy … or afternoon tea! How I miss it.
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I love having run a pen out of ink. Just had to swap pens. 
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I love music, too. I have certain pieces/albums for the stories I write.
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Ya gotta love Dorothy. She’s so deliciously wicked.
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I finally decided last month that it was time for me to make the big move to writing/doing writerly things full time, and while I finish out my time at my day job, making breakfast for myself on days off has been super relaxing for me for some reason.
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That’s fantastic!
Can you tell us a little more about this process / decision?
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Sure.
Honestly, I’ve been thinking about it for three or four years, but it just wasn’t the right time to leave my day job. Now, I’ve gotten a lot more writing experience, and we’re financially in a really good place. My husband has always told me he wouldn’t stop me from pursuing writing full time, so there was no barrier there. I just didn’t feel right about it yet.
I’ve been really working on establishing a sustainable writing schedule for a while, and when I took vacation time toward the beginning of April, I tweaked that writing schedule a bit more. And it worked really well after I made my adjustments. I wrote all through that vacation. Didn’t think much of it until I went back to work.
The first day back, I missed writing, home, my characters–everything about the writing life and being able to be home, etc.–that I just sat in my car at lunch and cried because I couldn’t be with who and what I love.
That was the deciding moment for me.
It was time to go.
The instant I decided to do it, I felt freer than I have since before college.
I’m leaving my day job November 1st–which, ironically enough is National Author’s Day. 
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That’s such a great story in itself. Maybe the stuff of memoirs for other writers out there. (Sorry about the almost 2 month delay in responding.)
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