So...

[alexandraerin]

...I haven't done a lot of blogging I've meant to do, on various subjects, including the Tales of MU relaunch, A Wilder World, and things that are going on in my life and the world, and especially my work methods. There has been a lot going on in the House of Jack (which is actually an apartment), including some illness... not the life-threatening type but the type that makes it hard to go out and do things. I've been fighting a tickle in my throat and adjusting to a new reality involving my knees, and that's slowing me down some.

A reality that many people who live with chronic conditions soon come to learn is that pain is fatiguing and fatigue is painful. Pain in my knees plus the extra effort (mental as well as physical... I'm having to learn new ways to get myself up and down, and they're not yet internalized) I have to go to in order to avoid stressing them wears me down.

I've been doing some rather pointed experiments in how I divide my work time between the thought/planning phase and the writing phase to try to determine how I'm at my best. It seems like I get the very best results when my time is split about equally between the two, and I need to keep the two phases relatively close together. "One day planning, one day writing" doesn't work. Neither, for that matter, does spending the time right after I wake up planning. I come up with all kinds of great ideas, most of which I can't remember when I sit down to start writing and the rest don't actually make any sense once the fog clears.

And then there's the reality that there are days where the fog never lifts, where I can't make the words come together or if I do they aren't very good or they involve decisions that I wouldn't make on a better day that I'll be sort of stuck with after I post the chapter that contains them.

On the other hand, the times I did my plotting and planning and pondering directly before I started writing... well, two things happened. One is that the writing came faster and better than it often does. The other is that I grew eager to start writing while I was still within my allotted brainstorming time, and when I didn't let myself start writing until that arbitrary time had passed, it made it easier to stay focused once I did start writing. Because I wanted to so badly, because I was burning to write.

Eagerness. Enthusiasm. Energy. When I tell myself that I can't start writing until such and such a time but I spend the intervening time thinking about what I want to write, this is what I get. It's a little bit of clumsy emotional manipulation on my own part, but that's how I work. I'm going to be manipulated by my emotions anyway, so I might as well be the one pulling the levers.

So all of this is to say that I'm formulating how to structure my work day and my work week for maximum effectiveness. I'm never going to try to get 6-8 hours of the actual physical act of sitting down and writing out of an 8 hour day, as I did when I made writing my full-time profession in the first place. I'll do better with alternating one hour of planning and one hourish of writing. I say "hourish" because there are times when I can tell I'm running out of steam after 45-50 minutes and I'll be beating my head against the wall if I drag it out, and there are times when I still have plenty of momentum to carry me through to 80 or 90 minutes. The point of all this is to figure out what works and do it, not hold unyieldingly to arbitrary benchmarks.

And the other part of this is going to be having a five day work schedule for a four day production schedule. By this I mean I'm going to be working five days a week, but having only four days' worth of output posted every week. So if a bad brain day arrives one week, it won't hurt the posting schedule... and if it doesn't, I'll have one working day worth of cushion, for those weeks when I have two bad brain days. Or I'm sick. Or life happens, good or bad.

Now when I say "four days' worth of output posted every week", how much does that mean in terms of chapters/stories? Don't no. We'll have to see how it falls out... how much I can get done in an average work day using this sort of regimen. I'm making plans about how I'll be using my time, not predictions about what the results will be.

And I'll say that in retrospect, this is something I should have done years ago, when I first quit my day job and decided to make this my job. Instead of announcing a schedule right off the bat and trying to stick to it, I should have taken a few weeks to experiment and see what works in terms of a working day and a working week. I still would have run into problems because of my somewhat shaky real-world living situation at the time, but I'd recommend anybody who's going into content production (stories, comics, whatever) full-time do the same thing. Give yourself time to figure out what works, to figure out how you work. It'll happen anyway whether you allot time for it or not, but it might happen better or faster if you're making room for it.

Next week's going to be kind of hectic as it's the holidays and I'm traveling back to Nebraska, and I'm not quite done experimenting with the whole efficient time use thing, but I'm going to start transitioning towards it anyway. At this point I think the Tales of MU volume 2 "relaunch" is going to come in the second half of January (It's tempting to rush it to start the new year off with it, but I'm somewhat superstitious about beginning things on January 1st and I'd like to allow myself adequate space to wrap up the first volume, so far as it's going to be.), and my aim is to have a comfortable* working schedule when that launches.

(*As a tangent, I just want to highlight that word: comfortable. Whatever you're doing with your life, do not underestimate the value of comfort. Sometimes enduring discomfort to get something done is necessary, but if it's possible to make yourself comfortable you'll probably do the necessary thing faster and better. I tried doing this at a place in my life when I wasn't actually comfortable with where I lived and so many things that were going on around me apart from the work itself and I thought that the only effect of my discomfort would be "Well, sucks to be me." But it absolutely affected the work.

Sorry for the ongoing vagueness about my life, but there are some things I just don't feel like making open for public consumption.)

And finally, I think I'm going to start taking a cue from the great and powerful shadesong, who is a powerhouse of creativity in addition to doing amazing things I couldn't do at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center and do a sort of daily status post. Her status posts are the inspiration for my "state of the me" posts, but mine have been in an irregular basis and in an irregular and rambling form. I see the value of her keeping her daily post in a set format, including a brief self-assessment in terms of health and physical/mental condition. I have a poor sense of time and I'm pretty bad at spotting patterns in my life, but if I kept a record then I could look back and see how long something has been going on or how often something happens. And if this record is where you all can see it, someone else might spot the pattern before I do and say something.

"You know, you've had a throbbing pain in your head for three weeks now. It might be time to get that railroad spike removed."

A lot of times people ask me to make shout-outs or spotlights for particular people and causes and I make a note to make a blog post for it and then I don't have the time or energy or wherewithal to put together something I feel does it justice and so it never gets done. Slipping a single line into a daily status post might seem like less than the subject at hand (whatever it is) deserves, but it makes sure it's out there and done and might help prod me towards something larger later.

And a daily status post would give me a context in which I can share glimpses of what's happening in my life beyond things beyond my creative endeavors and things that interfere with them, which are the main things I seem to talk about. If one of my housemates is sick or something cute or funny or frustrating happened that doesn't merit a full blog post. Sort of a little newsletter, basically. I'm bad about talking about my life. I realize not everybody cares about these things, but on the other hand I know there are some people who watch my LJ not because they care so much about my writing schedule and progress but because they want to get a sense of me.

Also, the daily status post would be the best place to put a task list in order to make sure it gets done every day.

Since I upended my life completely last April-ish, I haven't updated the reminders in my Google Calendar to reflect the new realities of my day-to-day life, in large part because I haven't been sure where to begin. But this (a daily status post modeled after shadesong's, with modifications to fit my needs and my life) seems like a good first step. I can add more reminders as my new schedule shapes up.

And this seems like a good place to stop this ramble.