Thursday, January 5th

THE DAILY REPORT

So, yesterday I left myself a resolution on my tasks for the day to start writing before noon because that's often a problem for me.

Understand, I don't think there's any kind of moral value to being working productively at certain hours versus other hours, and I know there isn't a practical value to chaining myself to my desk for eight hours a day and making myself push keys until words appear.

But there is a practical value to being able to start writing at an earlier hour (for instance, because things are happening at later hours), and I want to cultivate that ability, which means cultivating a habit. So I got some free writing done this morning, and it went pretty well.

Right now I'm just stretching my muscles with the free writing thing and not pushing it in a particular direction, just letting the muse move me in whatever direction feels the most natural (i.e., more fetish porn), but the more I do this, the easier it gets for me to work on my other projects. The ability to just sit down and write is both a gift to be appreciated and a craft to be cultivated.

STATE OF THE ME

Sleep sucked last night. The night before was pretty bad, last night was terrible.

DREAMS FROM LAST NIGHT

I was Spider-man, pitching ideas to the producers of the Broadway musical about my life. They didn't use any of my suggested lines because they didn't fit their vision of the character. I don't consider this a weird dream because it is exactly what would happen to Spider-man in that situation, except they would then issue a C&D order to him because they'd trademarked the Spider-man name and image.

PLANS FOR TODAY

Between the lack of sleep and the fact that I haven't taken a "me" day (not counting writing) since The Houseguest Situation ended, I'm going to be taking it easy-ish today. By which I mean I'm not setting specific goals for what I'm going to write or anything to finish. Just three hours of no-stress writing, and if I feel like it a fourth. (I'm not committing to four, because it's possible to burn out on no-stress writing.)

Tasks For January 5th

• One hour of writing in the morning.
  
• One Two Three (Four?) Hours of free writing.
  
• End of day inventory of Stuff That Got Done and word count.

End of day inventory.

So, I had four hours of writing, all told, and 6,000 words between them. That's 1,700 words in the form of another (harder) vore story, 3,000 words to begin a rather grimly sadomasochistic story, and 1,300 words of a new short story or novelette that I am very interested in.

The spark that struck it was a discussion of the power dynamics in Beauty and the Beast... it's not in any way a retelling of that story, and indeed I don't think anybody would see a connection between them if they didn't have it in mind when they were reading it. It's a roamnce between a prince who is an absolute monarch and a pro-democracy instigator. The name of the story is "By Half Measures".

Despite what I said at the start of the day, I kind of expected/intended to steer my afternoon writing towards Tales of MU, but I'm glad I relaxed and just followed the muse... in terms of word count, this was a pretty dang productive day. And while I don't see commercial prospects for a lot of the output, I can see myself doing quite well with the finished version of "By Half Measures".