Thursday, September 22nd
Sep. 22nd, 2011 09:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinNews For Today
Achievement Unlocked: Full Night's Sleep. Hence why I'm posting this at 9 in the morning and not 4 in the afternoon.
I realized yesterday that I basically put chapter 33 together a thousand words a day, which is the sort of thing that usually makes me feel like I'm sinking into a morass. It feels like I'm butting my head up against a serious writer's block, and that usually leads to actual writer's block as I stubbornly try to power through it. I regard a chapter taking more than two days to finish as a failure of creative powers and so I start looking for a faster groove, which means turning my back on the one that's actually carrying me forward. I flounder around in a panic and get less and less done with each passing day.
But as the great Thomas Aquinas is reported to have said, "Nobody panics when things go according to plan." This cycle works because it works with my psychology instead of against it. The psychological pressure involved in starting something, writing it, and finishing it are actually very different beasts and the cycle harnesses each of them in turn.
Today is day 2 of chapter 34's cycle. Yes, I did just finish chapter 33 yesterday, but there's a lot of flexibility inherent in this whole idea. Any chance that I get, I'm going to subsume the conceptual work for the next chapter in the previous chapter's cycle. I don't have any plan to shorten the cycle at this point, though, because having a day's buffer in it will help ensure I'm usually ahead of the game and make it easier for me to keep the schedule even when I don't.
One thing I hadn't worked out before is how to fit the OTs into the mix. I knew I basically wanted to do one a week, possibly on the weekends or possibly fixed to a calendar date. The question then becomes when to actually do the work on them. I have two thoughts here, and I'm going to try both of them.
One is to develop a seven day cycle for conceiving and writing them. Why so long? Because that way they never have to be my priority, but if I have benchmarks for particular days in the cycle then they won't fall by the wayside as things that aren't my priority tend to. It probably will almost never actually take seven days, but by giving myself that long I can adjust better when the main story is giving me fits, or when I'm busy with other things, and it takes longer to find the right start... side stories are often easier to write but sometimes harder to begin.
The other is to give them a four day cycle that fits somewhere into each week, starting on day 3 of a main writing cycle. This way I've got the light days on the side story at the same time as the heavy days on the main story, and vice versa.
Figuring out how to fit the side stories in is as a part of my new philosophy of work (which I've decided is more useful than a work ethic. Work ethics might be productive for some people, but I was raised Catholic so it ends up more like work morals, and guilt is not an efficient motivator).
I've also got a tentative (because I haven't been all the way through it even once yet) month long schedule for how to produce Kin & Distant Relations. These three things--Tales of MU, random Other Tales of MU, and the reader-selected ongoing side story--are going to be the only regularly produced stories that are on a set production cycle for the time being because they are my obligations.
But here's one of the keys of this whole cycle thing: this schedule leaves me with a lot of free time to write. More on that tomorrow.
State of the Me
I have a slight headache, but otherwise pretty good.
Plans For Today
I'm actually going to be writing on three different things today... well, two things in between taking stabs at beginning chapter 34, three things if Chapter 34 happens to be flowing a bit. And possibly only two things if it's flowing like water. The thing I'm definitely going to be writing on is a block of work on Kin & Distant Relations. The other is a bit of progress on Working Class Villain.
Achievement Unlocked: Full Night's Sleep. Hence why I'm posting this at 9 in the morning and not 4 in the afternoon.
I realized yesterday that I basically put chapter 33 together a thousand words a day, which is the sort of thing that usually makes me feel like I'm sinking into a morass. It feels like I'm butting my head up against a serious writer's block, and that usually leads to actual writer's block as I stubbornly try to power through it. I regard a chapter taking more than two days to finish as a failure of creative powers and so I start looking for a faster groove, which means turning my back on the one that's actually carrying me forward. I flounder around in a panic and get less and less done with each passing day.
But as the great Thomas Aquinas is reported to have said, "Nobody panics when things go according to plan." This cycle works because it works with my psychology instead of against it. The psychological pressure involved in starting something, writing it, and finishing it are actually very different beasts and the cycle harnesses each of them in turn.
Today is day 2 of chapter 34's cycle. Yes, I did just finish chapter 33 yesterday, but there's a lot of flexibility inherent in this whole idea. Any chance that I get, I'm going to subsume the conceptual work for the next chapter in the previous chapter's cycle. I don't have any plan to shorten the cycle at this point, though, because having a day's buffer in it will help ensure I'm usually ahead of the game and make it easier for me to keep the schedule even when I don't.
One thing I hadn't worked out before is how to fit the OTs into the mix. I knew I basically wanted to do one a week, possibly on the weekends or possibly fixed to a calendar date. The question then becomes when to actually do the work on them. I have two thoughts here, and I'm going to try both of them.
One is to develop a seven day cycle for conceiving and writing them. Why so long? Because that way they never have to be my priority, but if I have benchmarks for particular days in the cycle then they won't fall by the wayside as things that aren't my priority tend to. It probably will almost never actually take seven days, but by giving myself that long I can adjust better when the main story is giving me fits, or when I'm busy with other things, and it takes longer to find the right start... side stories are often easier to write but sometimes harder to begin.
The other is to give them a four day cycle that fits somewhere into each week, starting on day 3 of a main writing cycle. This way I've got the light days on the side story at the same time as the heavy days on the main story, and vice versa.
Figuring out how to fit the side stories in is as a part of my new philosophy of work (which I've decided is more useful than a work ethic. Work ethics might be productive for some people, but I was raised Catholic so it ends up more like work morals, and guilt is not an efficient motivator).
I've also got a tentative (because I haven't been all the way through it even once yet) month long schedule for how to produce Kin & Distant Relations. These three things--Tales of MU, random Other Tales of MU, and the reader-selected ongoing side story--are going to be the only regularly produced stories that are on a set production cycle for the time being because they are my obligations.
But here's one of the keys of this whole cycle thing: this schedule leaves me with a lot of free time to write. More on that tomorrow.
State of the Me
I have a slight headache, but otherwise pretty good.
Plans For Today
I'm actually going to be writing on three different things today... well, two things in between taking stabs at beginning chapter 34, three things if Chapter 34 happens to be flowing a bit. And possibly only two things if it's flowing like water. The thing I'm definitely going to be writing on is a block of work on Kin & Distant Relations. The other is a bit of progress on Working Class Villain.