Friday, July 13th

The Daily Report

So, yesterday I cleared 4,000 words. Just to resume tracking that now that I'm rolling again.

I changed phones recently. I'd been using a timer app on my previous phone to help my writing sessions, with the unintended consequence of a fairly Pavlovian dependency on it. The OS update that made the timer app not function when the phone's screen was off started to shake me out of that, but it was changing phones entirely that broke me of it. Now I'm using a combination of my new phone, an actual timer, and an online alarm app that lets me queue up multiple alarms in a row, which is very helpful in terms of keeping me going for an hour or more... I can just set a series of alarms at 10 and 20 minute intervals (I do 20 minutes on, 10 off).

Once I get going, it's easier when I can just sit back and obey the timer... when I have to be in charge of the timer it undermines the illusion. I know my phone's clock app can do multiple alarms, but changing four or five alarm times on the phone is a lot more cumbersome compared to doing it on the computer.

The flash writing is going really well. I'm finding a key to not tripping up is flexibility. My normal flash writing procedure is to start with a seed that's just a single word or concept. My word for yesterday was "whips". But the story that popped into my head had nothing to do with whips... my brain went from "whips" to "handcuffs", and the handcuffs were not in the context where they'd be juxtaposed with whips.

So? The story's there. I could have ignored it and tried to cudgel my brains into writing a story about whips, but instead I wrote the one that was there.

The State of the Me

Feeling pretty good.

Plans For Today

I've been doing some novella writing so far. Day one of MU writing cycle: thinking about next chapter, target of 500 words. I don't try to push early in the cycle but I'm going to overshoot if possible, since the major writing days are going to fall on the weekend here. Though getting back into the "Okay, I can just sit down and write" place means that it might only take an hour or so.

Wrap Up

So, today's total is: 7,500 words. Yes, I love the fact that after I resigned myself to the idea that summer would always be my slow season I seem to have found my stride. It's nice to have dramatic irony working in my favor for once. Sleep and temperature control (which affects sleep, but also stands as its own factor when I'm awake) seem to be big things for fostering the creative mindset in myself.

I think the others are:

• Positioning. Ideally, I need somewhere that I can sit/lie back and have my legs stretched out in front of me. Surprisingly, temperature is a factor here. If it's hot, I need to have my laptop up on something instead of on my lapdesk, which means sitting up more.
  
• Solitude. I've become better at writing when people are around/in the room, but I do it better the more alone I am/feel.
  
• Auditory environment. Having the right music/sounds is ideal. Failing that, not having loud noises in the environment.
  

Tomorrow I'm going to post the non-combat portion of the AWW test rules. I thought I might have the combat rules finished today, but my mind was just more fiction-oriented than rule-oriented. It happens.

The document I'm talking about is not part of the actual game book. It's not "how to run the game". It's simply the bare mechanics of actual gameplay, for the benefit of playtesters. I would appreciate feedback from the point of view of people with experience with roleplaying games on the subject of whether the mechanics make sense to them as written... and where they don't, what the confusion is. I'll repeat this when I post them, but I want to stress what I'm looking for because my needs are fairly specific here.