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Tuesday, May 1st
May. 1st, 2012 07:18 amThe State of the Me
I'm keeping this section first as the insomnia continues. Last night I slept from about 1 in the morning until about 6 in the morning, waking up once in the middle. Not great, but an improvement.
The Daily Report
Things really are looking up. A while back I started keeping an actual, honest-to-goodness instructional book for myself. It doesn't have much in it yet, because I started it at a point where I'd lost hold of a lot of the things that work for me, that make me work. It's important because when things start to go poorly, or when I start to encounter blocks, or there's a disruption to my life... I have a really strong tendency to stop doing the things that are helpful to me, which turns a gutter into a ravine.
The days when I end up with far fewer than three thousand words all tend to have things in common. You can bet I wasn't speaking aloud as I wrote on those days. I might not have been timing myself, or sticking to the timer. I might not have had my headphones on while I was writing.
These aren't just psychological rituals of the "don't wash the lucky socks" variety. There is some small Pavlovian element at play, to judge by what happens when my preferred timer is unavailable, but mostly they're the things that help me immerse myself in my work, get a good momentum going and a good flow.
On my first bad day in a stretch of bad days, failing to observe the rituals probably wasn't the only or main problem. But something will have happened on that day to break my adherence.
(In retrospect, I'm realizing that this is a big part of why I'm too inhibited to write well around my parents... I don't have it in me to sit there speaking aloud to myself in their presence. If I attempt to work the next time I visit them, I'll have to do it in my room or out of doors.)
Anyway, "speak aloud while writing" is the sort of thing that in the past I've tended to re-discover each and every time that I started a good stretch. I recall that when I used to have a laptop with a larger screen, I kept sticky notes around the edges that had these sort of tips on them. Now I've got a document in Google Docs. I think I might have to sticky tab it or something to make sure that it comes up when I open Chrome in the morning.
Plans For Today
Today is a "finish and post MU chapter" day, so that's priority number one. Since I'm awake I'm going to try to get it finished early in the afternoon and then let it lie fallow until it's closer to normal posting time, in case there's some way it can be improved.
I'm keeping this section first as the insomnia continues. Last night I slept from about 1 in the morning until about 6 in the morning, waking up once in the middle. Not great, but an improvement.
The Daily Report
Things really are looking up. A while back I started keeping an actual, honest-to-goodness instructional book for myself. It doesn't have much in it yet, because I started it at a point where I'd lost hold of a lot of the things that work for me, that make me work. It's important because when things start to go poorly, or when I start to encounter blocks, or there's a disruption to my life... I have a really strong tendency to stop doing the things that are helpful to me, which turns a gutter into a ravine.
The days when I end up with far fewer than three thousand words all tend to have things in common. You can bet I wasn't speaking aloud as I wrote on those days. I might not have been timing myself, or sticking to the timer. I might not have had my headphones on while I was writing.
These aren't just psychological rituals of the "don't wash the lucky socks" variety. There is some small Pavlovian element at play, to judge by what happens when my preferred timer is unavailable, but mostly they're the things that help me immerse myself in my work, get a good momentum going and a good flow.
On my first bad day in a stretch of bad days, failing to observe the rituals probably wasn't the only or main problem. But something will have happened on that day to break my adherence.
(In retrospect, I'm realizing that this is a big part of why I'm too inhibited to write well around my parents... I don't have it in me to sit there speaking aloud to myself in their presence. If I attempt to work the next time I visit them, I'll have to do it in my room or out of doors.)
Anyway, "speak aloud while writing" is the sort of thing that in the past I've tended to re-discover each and every time that I started a good stretch. I recall that when I used to have a laptop with a larger screen, I kept sticky notes around the edges that had these sort of tips on them. Now I've got a document in Google Docs. I think I might have to sticky tab it or something to make sure that it comes up when I open Chrome in the morning.
Plans For Today
Today is a "finish and post MU chapter" day, so that's priority number one. Since I'm awake I'm going to try to get it finished early in the afternoon and then let it lie fallow until it's closer to normal posting time, in case there's some way it can be improved.