Friday, February 10th

THE DAILY REPORT

The new lappy has arrived, been christened "Bluebelle", and had its memory upgrade installed, and I've been getting used to using it. The keyboard is a great size, but some of the right hand keys (shift and enter in particular) are a bit unconventionally short, which made me miss them a bunch of times while I was getting used to it. I adjusted pretty quickly, though.

Today I'm going to dedicate my efforts towards getting comfortable enough with it to write on it, which I'm going to do by writing a bunch on it. So, basically, free writing day.

STATE OF THE ME

Pretty good.

PLANS FOR THE DAY

Run Bluebelle in.

Mid-afternoon report.

So, I'm taking to the new laptop mostly like a duck to water. I've been writing solidly for the past three hours and I have three thousand words, entirely in the form of prose for my airship erotica The Pleasure Craft Corsair. I didn't set out to do that in particular today, but that's the direction the words are flowing in. It seems to be heading in the direction of being a harem story of sorts, which does kind of fit with the name. I have a sort of ten or eleven chapter structure in mind for it, with three sections of three chapters each and a coda, plus possibly a separate introduction. That will all in all make it about 50,000 words, making it a novel by NaNo standards.

As fruitful as this has been I'm going to try to turn my mind in some other directions for the rest of the evening, though. TPPC is going to take time to finish and I'd like to give some love to some things that have already been waiting longer.

Wrap.

So, the end of the day result is about ~3,600 words. Might have been higher if I'd spent more time writing in established stories, but in the second half of the afternoon I wanted to look at one of the to-be-revived short stories in progress (in this case, "The Stars My Devastation") and then work on flash fiction. Flash fic is less efficient than writing longer pieces, because every time I start something there's the initial hump of inertia to overcome.

I think "Stars" is something I can finish this month, but it's going to need some reflecting. I stopped writing it because I had an ending for the story but no clear path to it, and time away from the story hasn't really made things clearer. Short breaks can be useful, but not months or years. Still, it's ~7,000 words of decent prose and there is an ending in sight, so I think the thing to do is sit down next and start writing and see where it goes. If it takes me two or three tries to get things moving in the right direction, that'll still get it finished faster than waiting to see if it all comes together in my head.

The great thing about the 20/10 writing method is that when I'm on a roll I can go three sprints in a row instead of resting and basically get 50% more done in an hour. Doing it all the time would be a great way to burn out, but sometimes it costs more to stop than to keep going.

I didn't take the opportunity to keep my lead on Tales of MU at two chapters in advance or build on it this week... Wednesday kind of threw me off my stride. But I'm not too worried, because I've got a formula for getting ahead now. And without even trying I'm still a chapter ahead. You know, I think that should be the goal: always be ahead. More ahead if I need to (which I will need to at the end of this month), but just keep ahead of the game otherwise. One chapter, two, three... that's details.