Thursday, January 9th

The Daily Report

I went to bed fairly early last night and slept really well, with the net effect that I'm wide awake at five in the morning. This could end up working out fairly well, though, because we're going out this afternoon to celebrate no longer being imprisoned in a wall of cold air.

I'm really happy with the way this week's chapter of Tales of MU came out. It's not the first chapter to go up since I revived the formal four day writing process, but it's the first one that really strictly followed the form, and I think it shows. Why is this one the one that clicked? Partly it's because habits take a while to form, but I think a big part is that I posted each day's draft on my Patreon feed. When my work's not visible to anyone but me until it actually goes up, there's always the knowledge in the back of my head as I'm writing it that there's more time, that the only deadline that's not negotiable is the last one, and that's two or three days away. The gentle pressure of the deadline is diffused.

When I'm showing my results each day... well, it's not so much that it keeps me honest, because it's not a question of honesty but of focus and motivation. It keeps me focused.

The result is one of the more polished chapters to go up recently, and one that I'm very happy with. I had some specific goals for it, and I feel like I hit them pretty squarely. It's not a perfect chapter... I feel like if I took enough time, I could make the opening flow a little better, but I don't think any piece of writing ever reaches the point where it's completely past improving. At a certain point, you have to make a judgment call about time spent versus results.

The State of the Me

I kind of expect to be tired tonight, but I'm doing alright for the moment.

Plans For Today

I think starting tomorrow or next week I'm going to actually start posting my day's schedule as a set of three blocks, but today's going to be a little weird and hard to predict because of the odd start and the interruption later.

I've got another book to PDF, which will leave me with only one more to do and then I'll be very close to having all my stories in all formats.

We're back to day 1 of the MU cycle, which is when I start conceiving the next chapter, though I'm ahead of the game here a little in terms of understanding near-future events in the story. I think it's going to be a conception/reflection day in general, just basically brainstorming in multiple directions. I'll be re-reading The One Called Wander for the third time through this month to help me get the story internalized in my mind the way it was when I was first writing it, so I can knock out the conclusion of the arc. I'm looking forward to that.

I can't remember if I specifically mentioned this before or not...

...but one of my goals for January is to finish the third MU Omnibus. I'm about halfway finished now, by my rough estimation. I'm not entirely sure if I'm going to keep the boundary between book 8 and 9 where it is right now. Part of that is going to depend on where I find the end point for book 9. At the rate that it's been going, the entire first volume is going to end up filling six omnibuses. Given that it represents about five years of my life's work, I suppose that's about right.

Before the move, I sometimes tried to create a pattern of one MU e-book a month, alternating Omnibus and annotated individual one. That never lasted very long because I wasn't spending much more than two months in one place. Now that I'm in a stable situation, I'm examining the idea. I think the weak point in it is the individual books. It's fairly easy for me to predict roughly how long it will take to compile a big chunk of chapters. It's less easy for me to say how long it will take to provide commentary for a certain number of chapters. Some chapters are harder than others. Some things are harder to face up to or put into words.

Also, transcribing and re-formatting chapters is something that I can do in small chunks. It's not like trying to write a tiny bit of a story every day. Flow is immediate. There's no time lost to creative engagement. Writing commentary is very much creative work. Trying to do one chapter of commentary a day five days a week is a lot more like trying to write a story in half hour a day, in terms of results.

So I think what I'm going to do is rather than switching off between the Omnibus and the commentary, I'll continue to do one Omnibus a month at least until volume 1 is available in its entirety.

I'm not putting off the commentary-writing until Omnibus VI comes out, though. I'm just not going to be treating it like it's the same type of work that compiling the Omnibus is, just because the end product (a MU e-book) is similar. Instead, I'm going to treat it as creative work, and like my other writing projects, I'll do it as I can give it due time and attention.