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Jan. 6th, 2011 03:07 amThis is the second Wednesday in a row (it's still Wednesday to my body calendar, as I haven't gone to bed yet) where I've felt absolutely run down and out of gas when it came time to put the pedal to the metal, to use a somewhat confused car metaphor.
And when I think back on when I was originally trying to keep to a five day work schedule, I had the whole "Thursday is my archnemesis." thing that was going on. What actually happened there is that early in the week I'd be getting the work done pretty early on, sometimes by midnight of the day it was supposed to go up, and then by Thursday I'd be feeling pretty burned out.
I'm not consigning Wednesday to a midweek weekend just yet, but I'm keeping my eye on the pattern. When I started refining my work habits, I had an eye towards nailing down a five day work schedule so that I'd feel justified asking for money and people would feel justified paying me... but this is a salaried gig, not an hourly one.
If I can turn out a story that people want to read, that's a good thing, no matter which hours of what days I'm doing the actual physical work of hitting keys on.
If I can manage it so that people know that if they come back on this day and this day and this day, there'll be something new to read, that's even better... and it still doesn't matter when I'm doing the writing or how long it takes me.
This is another example of an idea I started with that I need to let go of: what it means to be a "full-time writer". I didn't trade one forty hour job for another. I traded a job for a vocation, I traded work for craft, one life for another.
It's also an example of the sort of internalized criticism I need to make myself impervious to. The people who find evidence that I'm not chained to a keyboard for 8 hours a day cranking out the next installment of their litcrack of choice and declare that I'm not taking my job seriously and can't expect to make any money aren't likely to be the sort of people who'd give money in appreciation of something they can consume for free anyway.
Bleh. You know what? I just realized something... this is a perfect an example of how deeply seated those ideas are in my brain: when I started off on the plan that's culminated in my renewed productivity, the idea was a 5 day production schedule with one "dead day" built in, because I knew from experience that my body and brain can't always be relied on to come to terms and both show up to work.
I knew that there would be days when I would just stare at the screen and the words wouldn't come at allAND THESE ARE THE DAYS THAT NEVER END</MEATLOAF> and I planned for them... and yet that didn't even pop into my head. I didn't even stop and realize that I'd planned for this when I was considering the implications of an off day and whether I was "justified" in giving up on it.
Justiwhat? I posted a chapter on Monday and Wednesday, just like I said I would, and I have twice as much time to do it again on Friday as I used for either of those chapters. The one I just put up is honestly... well, I'm not going to say it's the best thing I've written in a while because I don't know if I could make that sort of comparison. But it's different. I'm proud of it. It's everything I loved about writing MU during the best times of the last three years. It's got linguistic play, it's got social issues, it's got teenage drama, it's got world background, it's got fantasy-equivalent-of-real-world-phenomenon, it's got Harry Potter and D&D/gaming references, and it hangs together as a coherent story without (IMALTHO) any of those elements overwhelming it.
I've written things that are better in some technical sense or that have a bit more poetry about them, but it's an example of what I want to be doing with MU, in general. What I set out to do. It's me being the best at what I do best.
So, anyway, to wrap up this post before it becomes too rambly or self-justifying, I'm coining a nice little mnemonic device for my planned work schedule and I'm going to post about it here as a reminder to myself so I don't do the same thing next.
We'll call it the 5-4-3 Plan.
I plan on having 5 workdays a week, Monday through Friday.
I plan on actually doing substantial writing on 4 of those five days.
I plan on having a chapter to publish 3 days a week.
See how there are two different levels of "safety" built into a single week? Given that on a relatively normal day I can produce a chapter, I can still maintain the ultimate plan... three chapters a week... with a failure on both of the preceding ones. And if I succeed on them? Then I'm building up a cushion against the future.
So, anyway... that's it for tonight. I'm trying to decide if I should go take a hot bath to soak my legs, go tobed floor, or do more idle things with the computer. If I stay at my computer, there may be some more random blog posts or Facebook statuses, but I'm not writing anything of consequence tonight.
And when I think back on when I was originally trying to keep to a five day work schedule, I had the whole "Thursday is my archnemesis." thing that was going on. What actually happened there is that early in the week I'd be getting the work done pretty early on, sometimes by midnight of the day it was supposed to go up, and then by Thursday I'd be feeling pretty burned out.
I'm not consigning Wednesday to a midweek weekend just yet, but I'm keeping my eye on the pattern. When I started refining my work habits, I had an eye towards nailing down a five day work schedule so that I'd feel justified asking for money and people would feel justified paying me... but this is a salaried gig, not an hourly one.
If I can turn out a story that people want to read, that's a good thing, no matter which hours of what days I'm doing the actual physical work of hitting keys on.
If I can manage it so that people know that if they come back on this day and this day and this day, there'll be something new to read, that's even better... and it still doesn't matter when I'm doing the writing or how long it takes me.
This is another example of an idea I started with that I need to let go of: what it means to be a "full-time writer". I didn't trade one forty hour job for another. I traded a job for a vocation, I traded work for craft, one life for another.
It's also an example of the sort of internalized criticism I need to make myself impervious to. The people who find evidence that I'm not chained to a keyboard for 8 hours a day cranking out the next installment of their litcrack of choice and declare that I'm not taking my job seriously and can't expect to make any money aren't likely to be the sort of people who'd give money in appreciation of something they can consume for free anyway.
Bleh. You know what? I just realized something... this is a perfect an example of how deeply seated those ideas are in my brain: when I started off on the plan that's culminated in my renewed productivity, the idea was a 5 day production schedule with one "dead day" built in, because I knew from experience that my body and brain can't always be relied on to come to terms and both show up to work.
I knew that there would be days when I would just stare at the screen and the words wouldn't come at all
Justiwhat? I posted a chapter on Monday and Wednesday, just like I said I would, and I have twice as much time to do it again on Friday as I used for either of those chapters. The one I just put up is honestly... well, I'm not going to say it's the best thing I've written in a while because I don't know if I could make that sort of comparison. But it's different. I'm proud of it. It's everything I loved about writing MU during the best times of the last three years. It's got linguistic play, it's got social issues, it's got teenage drama, it's got world background, it's got fantasy-equivalent-of-real-world-phenomenon, it's got Harry Potter and D&D/gaming references, and it hangs together as a coherent story without (IMALTHO) any of those elements overwhelming it.
I've written things that are better in some technical sense or that have a bit more poetry about them, but it's an example of what I want to be doing with MU, in general. What I set out to do. It's me being the best at what I do best.
So, anyway, to wrap up this post before it becomes too rambly or self-justifying, I'm coining a nice little mnemonic device for my planned work schedule and I'm going to post about it here as a reminder to myself so I don't do the same thing next.
We'll call it the 5-4-3 Plan.
I plan on having 5 workdays a week, Monday through Friday.
I plan on actually doing substantial writing on 4 of those five days.
I plan on having a chapter to publish 3 days a week.
See how there are two different levels of "safety" built into a single week? Given that on a relatively normal day I can produce a chapter, I can still maintain the ultimate plan... three chapters a week... with a failure on both of the preceding ones. And if I succeed on them? Then I'm building up a cushion against the future.
So, anyway... that's it for tonight. I'm trying to decide if I should go take a hot bath to soak my legs, go to