Wednesday, July 9th

The Daily Report

I definitely made the mistake in the months leading up to and immediately following the move of expecting the positive changes for my work to come all at once, or at least fairly quickly. Later on, I made the mistake of assuming that because they didn't, I'd severely overestimated the impact.

One positive change I'm noticing now is how much stronger my sense of equilibrium is, how much better I am at rolling with things. As I mentioned on this blog when I started doing multiple updates a week, the circumstances weren't great. I wasn't getting full work days in most days. Okay, on Monday, I lost an entire draft of a story and I couldn't come back from that by the end of the day. But yesterday, the power went out as I was coming into the home stretch and I still recovered well enough to post the chapter on time.

Last night before bed I recorded a little something as part of breaking in my new phone. That was written on my phone and then recorded minutes later. It's also the first thing I wrote on my phone that wasn't pre-planned out and I didn't have to make an effort to get going on, which is a good sign of progress... both The One Called Wander and Harper's Folly were largely written on my last phone, specifically because I could pull it out at odd moments and just start going. Restarting both of them is going to be a bit more complicated because of the gap, but I do plan on restarting them both soon. I have some logistical difficulties in both cases, but sorting them out gives me more time to settle in with my phone.

I found myself swiping more than I'd expected when I wrote the piece above. I used swipe extensively when I had my "filler" phone that I got between losing my Palm Pre and getting my Pantech and was never comfortable with it, but I think that might have something to do with the size of the screen. I'm sure I'll never be as fast with the touch keyboard as I am with a fast one, but I think I can go quickly enough to get a decent flow going.

The State of the Me

Doing okay. A little slow to wake up this morning.

Plans For Today

It's the between chapters day, and I think I'm going to basically make it a breathing day... not a day off, but a day that I stop and catch my breath. No goals, just turn myself loose and see what happens.

Here's what I've done so far today.

I've re-uploaded the audio thingy I linked to earlier, after realizing that it was not easily listenable to without headphones. The new URL is http://www.patreon.com/creation?hid=680980 , if you tried earlier and couldn't listen to it.

I also transcribed an entire book for Omnibus IV. This puts me roughly halfway through the compilation process for the book, and I was a quarter of the way through this morning. Compilation is not so much a matter of taking time as taking focus. Sometimes I find the flow and will just do twenty or thirty in a row, but today I found a new "trick" to focus when I'm not in that zone.

I play a browser clicky game called Flight Rising, and one of the daily maintenance tasks is petting your dragon's familiars, of which I have more than 50. It's easy, it's rewarding in game, but it's the same kind of repetitive as compiling chapters and after a while it doesn't feel like a reward.

So my trick is, I copy and categorize a chapter, then I switch tabs and click on the dragon game. Instead of two repetitive tasks, I had one, with a reward. I got through what I'd expected to be a week-long process in about an hour this way.

And yes, it would be faster to automate the process of compilation, but there's housekeeping I have to do on the older chapters anyway (especially the ones that weren't categorized into books the first time around), and even though I'm not doing any substantial editing for the Omnibus, it's still helpful for me to get a shape of the books as I'm putting them together.

I just temporarily hid some of the posts on the Harper's Folly blog...

...particularly all the ones after Harper comes back, the ones after Eva's initial posts trying to get Harper's attention. This is preparatory to the slight retcon I'm going to use in order to resume the story, which will be sometime next week. I'm going to be adjusting the dates and in some cases (in minor ways, to reflect the longer gap) the content of those posts when the story resumes.