alexandraerin

This is the second Wednesday in a row (it's still Wednesday to my body calendar, as I haven't gone to bed yet) where I've felt absolutely run down and out of gas when it came time to put the pedal to the metal, to use a somewhat confused car metaphor.

And when I think back on when I was originally trying to keep to a five day work schedule, I had the whole "Thursday is my archnemesis." thing that was going on. What actually happened there is that early in the week I'd be getting the work done pretty early on, sometimes by midnight of the day it was supposed to go up, and then by Thursday I'd be feeling pretty burned out.

I'm not consigning Wednesday to a midweek weekend just yet, but I'm keeping my eye on the pattern. When I started refining my work habits, I had an eye towards nailing down a five day work schedule so that I'd feel justified asking for money and people would feel justified paying me... but this is a salaried gig, not an hourly one.

If I can turn out a story that people want to read, that's a good thing, no matter which hours of what days I'm doing the actual physical work of hitting keys on.

If I can manage it so that people know that if they come back on this day and this day and this day, there'll be something new to read, that's even better... and it still doesn't matter when I'm doing the writing or how long it takes me.

This is another example of an idea I started with that I need to let go of: what it means to be a "full-time writer". I didn't trade one forty hour job for another. I traded a job for a vocation, I traded work for craft, one life for another.

It's also an example of the sort of internalized criticism I need to make myself impervious to. The people who find evidence that I'm not chained to a keyboard for 8 hours a day cranking out the next installment of their litcrack of choice and declare that I'm not taking my job seriously and can't expect to make any money aren't likely to be the sort of people who'd give money in appreciation of something they can consume for free anyway.

Bleh. You know what? I just realized something... this is a perfect an example of how deeply seated those ideas are in my brain: when I started off on the plan that's culminated in my renewed productivity, the idea was a 5 day production schedule with one "dead day" built in, because I knew from experience that my body and brain can't always be relied on to come to terms and both show up to work.

I knew that there would be days when I would just stare at the screen and the words wouldn't come at all AND THESE ARE THE DAYS THAT NEVER END</MEATLOAF> and I planned for them... and yet that didn't even pop into my head. I didn't even stop and realize that I'd planned for this when I was considering the implications of an off day and whether I was "justified" in giving up on it.

Justiwhat? I posted a chapter on Monday and Wednesday, just like I said I would, and I have twice as much time to do it again on Friday as I used for either of those chapters. The one I just put up is honestly... well, I'm not going to say it's the best thing I've written in a while because I don't know if I could make that sort of comparison. But it's different. I'm proud of it. It's everything I loved about writing MU during the best times of the last three years. It's got linguistic play, it's got social issues, it's got teenage drama, it's got world background, it's got fantasy-equivalent-of-real-world-phenomenon, it's got Harry Potter and D&D/gaming references, and it hangs together as a coherent story without (IMALTHO) any of those elements overwhelming it.

I've written things that are better in some technical sense or that have a bit more poetry about them, but it's an example of what I want to be doing with MU, in general. What I set out to do. It's me being the best at what I do best.

So, anyway, to wrap up this post before it becomes too rambly or self-justifying, I'm coining a nice little mnemonic device for my planned work schedule and I'm going to post about it here as a reminder to myself so I don't do the same thing next.

We'll call it the 5-4-3 Plan.

I plan on having 5 workdays a week, Monday through Friday.

I plan on actually doing substantial writing on 4 of those five days.

I plan on having a chapter to publish 3 days a week.

See how there are two different levels of "safety" built into a single week? Given that on a relatively normal day I can produce a chapter, I can still maintain the ultimate plan... three chapters a week... with a failure on both of the preceding ones. And if I succeed on them? Then I'm building up a cushion against the future.

So, anyway... that's it for tonight. I'm trying to decide if I should go take a hot bath to soak my legs, go to bed floor, or do more idle things with the computer. If I stay at my computer, there may be some more random blog posts or Facebook statuses, but I'm not writing anything of consequence tonight.

News For Today

Business

Well, I'm very excited about the mounting evidence that I've nailed down what (and how long) it takes for me to produce a chapter of Tales of MU. Allotting five hours in a day seems to do it. That's only two hours of writing... which is what I've always thought it took... but it includes an equal amount of time for planning/brainstorming/daydreaming and an hour for overage, clean-up, figuring out what to call the dang thing, and other "miscellaneous" things.

If I'd figured this out a couple years ago, who knows where the story would be up to now... but because the "brain" stage of writing had never been a deliberate part of the process, it had always just sort of happened during the boring hours of work, I never factored it in. Five hours of trying to straight up write doesn't produce nearly as much as I can get done in four hours with the proper mental preparations.

And I should add that during each of the chapters I've produced in a single day in five hours of work has happened when things are going on around me that require (or ensnare) my attention during the designated time blocks. So this isn't something that will require perfect ideal conditions to complete. It doesn't even require that the five hours be contiguous.

I'm going to keep doing "practice runs" this way until I've got it down, and then... with a realistic idea of how much time and energy and attention it takes me to produce Tales of MU on a set schedule... I'll look at how to fit the other stories I want to do in around it.

Personal

Illness abounds, though it's missed me. Jack is sick, back in Maryland. My housemate bryirfox is sick here in Nebraska, though not contagious.

I'm working on weaning myself off of soda as a dietary staple and switching to coffee, for reasons of health and economy. I've discovered that making coffee via infusion instead of dripping it through a paper filter into a heated carafe leaves it tasting good enough that I don't need to add sugar or milk or sweetened flavored dairy product to it to make it drinkable, which is awesome.

Personal Assessment

Still on the sleep of streaking... oh dear God, I'm going to have to preserve that for posterity... the streak of sleeping without pills. My nose is less stuffy. Brain feels sharp. Legs are a little stiff.

Plans For Today

Do what I did yesterday: write a chapter of Tales of MU in five hours of designated work time. This chapter won't go up today, it'll go up tomorrow. My plan for the week is to have three updates, Monday-Wednesday-Friday... my larger goals, though, are to lock in this work schedule that lets me accomplish that and to get used to working ahead.

With chapters being produced in basically two chunks in a single day, my "magic under construction" posts are going to need some re-working to be worthwhile or interesting to readers... yesterday you got half the story and then I was done so there were no further updates to the construction post. So I think that if things continue the way they have been I'm going to have to bite the bullet and make the construction post have the meta-data at the top and then a link to the Google Doc where I'm doing the writing.

Yes, you're going to get to watch me writing. Yes, that makes me incredibly nervous. I'm not going to be doing it just yet. I want to have at least a full week of the five hour schedule and then be starting into the next week, so I know it's not a fluke. (I don't think it is, though.)

Folks, there has been and is going to continue to be updates for everything this week, but I've just realized it's Thursday (I mean that literally... I just checked the computer's clock to see if it was Tuesday or Wednesday) and I'm not going to hit the planned number of updates for the week. I should have been able to see this in advance and said so: my roommate's off work this week, my insomnia was in full force coming out of the weekend and I haven't been able to catch up on sleep by crashing during the day like I did last week because they've been working on the parking lot right outside and we've had painters in to clean up the results of the bathroom renovation and people in the hall... basically, it's spring cleaning time for the apartment complex.

Basically, I am so bone-tired mentally and physically but I can't sleep, for internal and external reasons. I should have declared this a vacation week and just tried to relax through it as best as I could. Gah. I said at some point (last summer, I think) that I'd do that once a quarter. I don't think I've ever managed to hold myself to it except semi-retroactively.

The writing I have done I think has turned out surprisingly pretty good, so I'm not going to take today and tomorrow off. My goal for the week is just to get as much as writing done as I can, make sure every story is represented since they've all got sponsors and people rooting for them, and then get my sleep sorted out on the weekend.

Melatonin has been suggested to me... as I recall, when I tried it before I didn't enjoy the side effects the next day, but I think if I take it Friday and Saturday night to ensure a night's sleep, that might work since what it's supposed to do is reset the circadian cycle. With that done, there's no reason why next week can't be like last week but without the updates drifting into Saturday.