Tuesday, December 6th

THE DAILY REPORT

Happy Saint Nicholas Day!

So, I'm going to make it a regular thing to plan out my week on Monday or Tuesday... Monday is my housemate's day off which makes it kind of unpredictable as far as working goes. Sometimes stuff's going on here that makes it hard to get things done, sometimes I have an opportunity to run necessary or useful errands that I can't do later in the week, etc.

But I should be able to at least do a few small things, or one medium thing, and make a plan for the rest of the week.

Also, task lists are coming back. Task lists are useful, but because I don't think in bullet points they keep drifting back into rambling descriptions of my plans. So I'm separating them out... my daily posts will include a discussion of plans when appropriate, and separately I'll have a tasks lists post.

STATE OF THE ME

Moderate insomnia last night, followed by some decent sleep.

DREAMS FROM LAST NIGHT

None notable.

PLANS

Plan For The Week, Non-Writing

So, as part of my routine building and life improvement, I'm going to be engaging in a program of what my new favorite blogger calls "habitat unfucking". I'm going to spend five minutes on a timer cleaning up my living space today. 10 minutes tomorrow. Thursday, it's going to be twenty minutes. Friday, it's going to be an hour split up into twenty minutes on the clock, ten minutes off. And then that's going to be my daily clean-up routine. One hour a day. When there's not that much to do in my immediate living space, I'll devote the same time to somewhere else.

The hour a day that this gives me of structured time that's not on the computer will also help me creatively. During the part of the week where I'm building up to that, I'm going to be doing my time as part of an enforced hour of AFK.

Plan For The Week, Writing

Instead of alternating an hour on and an hour off, I'm going to be spending an hour preparing to write every day (AFK, doing nothing but listening to music and thinking) and then write using the 20/10 method (20 minutes on, 10 minutes off) for a minimum of two a day, every day.

Now, that is only 80 minutes of actual writing, but this is my foundation, not my roof. When the words aren't coming, this will either be the thing that jumpstarts them or my way of scraping out a thousand words or so anyway. When the words are flowing, this will let me get a really good start and then I can spend time writing/revising at a more leisurely pace.

Weekends will have a one hour minimum. Monday... I'll see how Mondays go.

The point of putting these hours on the schedule is to give myself a writing schedule that has hard numbers like my production schedule. It wouldn't work to try to conform to an absolute strict schedule about hours and number of words, but it doesn't work to not have any.

And as a final note on these hours: I'm not tying them to any particular thing. It can be an hour of writing flash, an hour of writing Tales of MU, an hour of writing Riley... in fact, since my job for those 20 minute intervals is to just write, I'll switch to something different if I get stuck.

This is an experiment, so any and all of this are subject to change based on results.

Plans For Today

I have an Other Tales and a FIM on the schedule for today. I do not have a lot of margin of error for either one. If I need to, I'll push the OT back to tomorrow, which is when I think a lot of people will be looking for it anyway. The schedule I have posted on the website will I think ultimately be the best/easiest one, but I need to smooth out the end of the month before crowding up the first week of the month.

Tasks for December 6th, 2011

• One hour breathing/centering/composing.
  
• Three hours writing (20/10) (One Two Three)
  
  • One flash story. Here!
    
  • Write or begin an OT story.
  
  
• Five minutes cleaning/one hour AFK.
  

A postscript on the day.

So, I had a few moments today when I was looking at how little I had done vs. how much I had on the calendar and felt... not like giving up, exactly, because I never give up. But there's a point past which I look at a thing and no longer feel motivated to give it my best shot. Like, if something is merely challenging, I rise to the challenge. But it reaches a point of overwhelming, and I'm overwhelmed by it. Cursed by tautology!

The 20/10 method helped a lot, because when my start timer went off, I started. It's the same kind of visceral emotional boost that Write Or Die gave me, but it's not tied to a specific program... my problem with WoD was that it crashed too often for my liking and that it did not autosave. My phone makes it easier to 20/10, but other than that it's not tied to any particular program or piece of hardware.

Once I got going I had a moment where I contemplated finishing the OT story I'm writing (one of the long-promised pieces, "The Scowling of the Shire"... AKA, how Two and Hazel spent their summer holiday), but I decided that in this case I should pursue polish over punctuality. What I wrote today was a lot of rapid fire dialogue... "rapid fire" here describing how I wrote it, not necessarily the natural pacing of the dialogue in the story. It needs more description, it needs more emoting/characterization. And while I could just have a 2,000 word story that ends on a pithy line of dialogue, I'm more interested in having something like a resolution.

So I decided to hold it over for a day. This is the sort of thing that I started doing when I introduced the multi-day writing cycle. It's something that I haven't been able to consistently do with the OT stories at all, and haven't done lately with the main chapters. Today's a good day to start. I'm going to earmark this story for finishing in the morning, and get started on the regular chapter for the 8th in the afternoon. Two days to actually write a chapter isn't where I want to be, but it's more than I've been using.

I'm laying finishing this story out as my task for tomorrow morning under the theory that this (having a specific thing... something not difficult but definitely and clearly work) will help me jumpstart my day. It's dang hard tto get up in the morning and start writing a story, but finishing it after having spent so many odd moments throughout the night thinking about what it needs? That's a different story.

Also, tomorrow, I need to work on having a fall back thing already open to ctrl-tab to when I get stuck on what I'm working on. I lost some momentum scrambling on that.