Month: August 2017

Practicing longer session lengths today

Lynn

Writing longer is a problem I need to tackle. So today I am writing in one hour blocks. Practice is the key to improvement, right? So practice I will!

Also, I might reach a higher wph with a shorter session but I have a real problem doing a great many sessions. At least with the one hour blocks, even if I just finish one, I’m almost guaranteed to have a few more words than I’ll get from fifteen minutes. ;)

On that note, though, I am planning to do three of them, for three hours of timed writing today, minimum. As long as I reach 519 wph, I’ll reach 1,557 words. I have stuff to do today that isn’t writing, so I also want to finish those three hours relatively early. Relative, because it’s already 11:20 and I’m just about to have breakfast.

Yes, I did stay up too late, and I don’t have any writing to show for it. Kind of sad, huh?

Update

Well, I didn’t write. I started reading a book and it was good, and I just never got started writing. Then I had things to do and came home tired. I would have gone to bed early but the spider infestation made itself known again (another spider tried to crawl up my bed—the third one in four days!) and I started vacuuming ceilings at 10:30 and finished at about midnight. Really shouldn’t have procrastinated that the night before. :o After that I had to take a shower because I was ridiculously hot and sweaty. Got in bed at 1 a.m. All I can say is that if they’re using old webs to travel the skies, the spiders are going to have to build some new ones. Maybe I’ll get a few days of peace out of that. This is the problem with living in the middle of the woods on a mountain. Ortho can’t save you, unfortunately. Spiders are everywhere. I hate spiders.

Will this rainy morning translate into more words?

Lynn

Last night was a bit of a bust for words. I ended up with 329 net after I deleted a few of the one’s I’d written earlier.

I have this habit, you see, of writing something, then going back in and adding a line or two that takes the entire scene off track. Then I have to either incorporate what comes after or delete. I don’t know why I do this. It’s like I can’t decide which way to go with the story until I see it written down. Anyway, I’d like to stop doing this but it seems to be the way I come up with story, so I might be stuck with it.

Okay, for today, I’m going to start out with highly focused 15 minute sessions. I think anything longer is just going to invite me to do what I’ve been doing for the last 3 days—avoid writing!

I need breakfast but I want to start before 10:30 this morning. It’ll make me feel accomplished. :D

Updates

Session 1: 15 minutes, 42 words

The answer to my question above seems to be NO. :o Too much tinkering, not enough new writing. Maybe I can recover in the next few sessions.

Oh dear. I never got to a session 2. :(

It was definitely my own fault, but I am going to let it go because I really didn’t feel good yesterday. I’m hopeful today will be better and I’ll slide back into the groove I had going in the weeks before.

Today’s goal: 3 hours and 1,557 words

Lynn

So today I’m going back to talking about goals. Mostly because I’m tired of trying to find ways to phrase things so that I don’t use the word goal. It’s just a word, and giving it too much power probably isn’t helping me. I honestly don’t care if I reach it every day. It’s just something to aim at and a place to stop if I get there early and want to take advantage of that. :)

Session 1: 45 minutes, 351 words

Session 2: in progress

The next morning update: Never made it through session 2. Just one of those days.

Funnily enough I feel good about writing today

Lynn

After last night’s contemplative mood, I’m surprised by how well I feel today, about writing, about the future, about everything.

Well, except for the spider infestation I seem to be dealing with. Not so happy about that! But they’re little spiders, with feathery legs, and those kind don’t trigger my phobia the way most other spiders do.

Still, not that happy that one landed on my bed last night and started trucking it right up beside my leg. I couldn’t find any sign of where it came from, but I’ll be vacuuming my bedroom ceiling today regardless. Then of course I came down to find one tucked up in the corner over the breakfast room window and another in the corner of the hallway that leads to the garage. I vacuumed those ceilings just a couple of days ago. Let me just say, as a five foot one person with nine foot high ceilings, this has been a chore and a half! My bedroom has a tray ceiling and the middle section is ten foot high. That’s going to be fun.

So, on that note, I’d like to finish my writing before I have to go up and start vacuuming ceilings again. I figure when I’m done, all I’m going to want to do is crash on the couch and read a book!

Okay, on to today’s plan. I’m going to go with 45 minute blocks, because they divide evenly into 3 hours. I’m planning four of them.

I decided last night after some vague contemplation (I wasn’t forcing these thoughts) that 3 hours a day even if I reach 1,557 words earlier isn’t a bad expectation. I see no reason why I wouldn’t want to write for at least that long most days. So although I haven’t decided it’s a rule or anything, I think aiming for a complete 3 hours each day of writing isn’t asking too much of myself. Preferably I’ll do this in the mornings, but on days when I don’t, I’ll try not to stretch out my day to the point that I’m finishing an hour of writing at bedtime. Some authors do well writing late at night. I don’t. I give up much too easily when I’m tired. So I have to stop putting myself in that position.

Write early, write more later if I want.

Now to go write.

I don’t know

Lynn

I let my streak of writing every day end yesterday. Technically, I did sit at the computer and write, but it was of such a small amount that it didn’t overcome a few minor deletions and left me with a net word count of -40 for the day.

So why am I not counting it?

I asked myself that last night when I consciously decided I just wasn’t going to write any more and I wasn’t going to count what I’d done. The streak was dead. I read a book yesterday, finished it even (not one I’d recommend so I’ll just leave it there), and I was tired. Not too tired to write at least a few hundred words. But a hundred or two words felt like a token number just so I could count it for the streak, and I had a moment where I just thought, that’s ridiculous. And it really felt ridiculous. Even now, it feels kind of ridiculous. So I let it die.

I’ve always had a lot of difficulty figuring out exactly what I want of myself when it comes to writing, because there are so many things I want and not all of them make sense when taken together. I want to be prolific and write every day and finish books unusually fast. I want to sit down in the mornings and write until I’m tired of writing and then get on with my day. I want to split up my writing throughout the day so I don’t feel trapped in a routine. I only want to write when I want to write, but I want that to be every day.

What I do know:

Writing every day isn’t as important as writing most days. (Is this self-justification for last night’s choice?)

Writing 1,557 words every day isn’t as important as averaging 1,557 words a day. (We all know every day just isn’t going to happen in the real world. Not with something that’s going to take over an hour even on the absolute best of days.)

Still, 1,557 words a day is a nice number. A magic number, if you will, because I always feel like I can write that number of words in a very short amount of time, even if that hasn’t proven to be true, yet, with this particular book.

Knowing how other people self-publish and market doesn’t interest me. I’ll do things my way until my way doesn’t work anymore. Then I’ll worry about figuring out how to do things some other way.

I write fiction for a reason that has more to do with lifestyle than money.

What I need to do is stop thinking so much about the why and how and when, and just write.

Routines bore me. But I’m constantly fighting the feeling that I need a routine. I want one. I daydream about having one, how my life would be so calm and awesome and I’d sit down in the mornings with a cup of tea or coffee (which I no longer drink) and I’d write my words, and then I’d get up and go for a walk, then sit down with a good book, have lunch, go out, and go to bed feeling accomplished and satisfied, then I’d get up the next day and do it all over again.

It’s a very detailed daydream. ;)

The only problem is that I have no idea how to make it a reality because every time I try to get a routine going, I bail on it. I can’t take it after a while. I feel like I’m suffocating. It’s horrible. I hate it. I get bored so easily and that routine, the one I daydream about, would kill me after about three weeks.

So what do you do when the life you imagine you want isn’t the life that actually fits your personality?

I don’t know.

So here I am. It’s 8:41 pm and I haven’t written any fiction today. I did read every article I had waiting for me in Pocket—quite a few actually. They’d been building up. I talked to my mother. I watched a few episodes of television.

Now I’m feeling contemplative, but I need to start writing.

I guess I’ll do that.

Oh, and here’s an essay I read this afternoon that I can recommend and it ties in nicely to my previous post: “Avoid News: Towards a Healthy News Diet” by Rolf Dobelli. Yes, I did seek out a few articles in support of my decision to cut out news and a few of them applied quite perfectly well to forums too. I was surprised by how closely the essay mirrored some of my own thoughts.

It’s time for a permanent reduction in distractive reading

Lynn

I’ve started using the Mind the Time add-on for Firefox again, temporarily, to help me keep an eye on time I’m spending on things I need to cut out of my day so I have more time for reading fiction, watching TV, doing random stuff, all while still having plenty of time for writing.

See that number 1 in the picture above? Yeah. I’m not surprised, believe it or not. I know I have a problem with that site. And FYI, that 8:13 is hours and minutes not minutes and seconds!

Thirty-four percent of my time online is going to clicking through forum threads and reading them, and almost never engaging in actual discussion. It’s stressful. Maybe that doesn’t make a lot of sense, because why go there when I don’t actually enjoy it? But I do go there—every time I get a little antsy and start looking for a distraction.

I’m going to have to make it a rule that I can’t go there anymore. I really don’t know how else to stop this massive waste of my valuable time.

Same goes for news. Almost nothing I read has any relevance to my life at all, and yet, every time I get on my phone or tablets or my browser, I end up scrolling through the headlines, looking for something interesting to read. It’s like an addiction. I really don’t like feeling addicted to things.

Not only that, but I keep telling myself I’m going to watch more tutorials on design, I’m going to read more fiction, I’m going to study a language, I’m going to learn to draw, I’m going to write more every day, I’m going to go out more, I’m going to visit family more often, and yet I keep wasting vast amounts of valuable time reading news and forum topics that are just a repeat of what I read yesterday. It doesn’t make any sense to let it continue.

in light of that, I’m making a new rule for myself: no more trending news, no more NPR, no more Kboards, no more The Passive Voice. I already don’t watch news videos or television news, read newspapers, or news magazines, so I think that’ll cover it.

I’ve reduced my media intake before and I quite liked it. It’s time to make it permanent. It’s like that old adage of closing one door to let another open.

I will seek out the things that matter to me, and in the process, I’m sure I’ll come across other topics that I’ll feel are important enough for me to delve into in depth. No more skimming news items or forum topics looking for my next distraction.

Even writing that, I feel a huge sigh of relief just waiting to escape. It’s the right thing to do for me and I already feel better.

Ah… :D

Still working on those words

Lynn

As the title says, I’m still working on those 1,557 words today.

The good news? I had a speed breakthrough—now that I’m not stressing over speed, of course.

The bad news? It’s 7:59 and yes, it took me that long to get another 25 minutes of writing, and no, I haven’t been able to stay away from the internet AT ALL.

Still, I’m pretty psyched that my spreadsheet says I need only another 0.774038462 hours to finish my words at my current speed.

I switched from a 45 minute session (that I ended up doing in a 29 minute and 16 minute block many hours apart) to 25 minute sessions, as you can see in the table below.

Mins. Words WPH WPM
29 346 716 11.9
16 156 585 9.8
25 434 1,042 17.4

Now, it’s back to writing for me. I do not want to end today without those words.

And the next day… I wrote 1,334 words. At midnight, I gave up. My pace dropped to 552 wph average because of a few bad sessions so it took a lot longer to get there than I wanted it to.

It’s well past noon and I have not finished my words today

Lynn

That title says it all: it’s past noon and I still haven’t reached 1,557 words.

What happened? I couldn’t stay focused and on task today.  At ALL.

It’s 4:16 in fact and here’s what I’ve done: I have 16 minutes left on my first 45 minute timer and I’ve written 346 words. That’s actually pretty good, because eyeballing that, it means I was writing at about 700 wph.

I was really into my scene too. But I started to get anxious and I had to take a break. Sometimes that happens when I’m thinking too hard or something. I get so excited that I have to jump up and move around or I feel like my brain is going to explode. It doesn’t really make sense but it can really derail what’s shaping up to be a great work session.

Well, it derailed my session, and although I’ve had multiple hours since all to myself and perfect for writing, it’s like I’m afraid to start again.

But it’s time. I really want to reach that minimum and I’m not going to do it by avoiding that timer!

Oh, and no more forums today until after I write those words! I am officially banning myself from all other internet uses until my spreadsheet shows 1,557 words for today’s count. >:{

Start trying to reach minimum by noon

Lynn

The title is brought to you by my plan. :) Starting today (It’s only 9:05 a.m.!) I want to try to finish my minimum by noon each day. By finishing early, I’ll take a lot of the pressure off and be able to enjoy writing in the afternoons when I do it, read fiction and craft books, watch and work through design tutorials, and actually maybe get some of the stuff that I’ve had on the back burner done.

Writing is an important part of my life, but I really don’t want to let it become the be-all and end-all of what I do. I am a publisher too, and I do want to have and maintain hobbies that aren’t also writing (writing fan fiction is a hobby which I really miss some days, but it’s still writing).

On that note, I don’t want to spend all morning writing this post and then wondering why I didn’t have enough time to write 1,557 words before noon.

I’ll post once I reach 1,557 words with my end time and time to completion and all the other usual stats. :)

I’m estimating (pushing for) 623 wph and 2.5 hours of timed writing. :D

If you’re a writer, have a good day of writing! If you’re not, read something today and enjoy it. :)

A challenge for this second day of August to perk me up

Lynn

Since I did so poorly yesterday, only 123 words and 15 minutes!, I’ve decided a challenge might perk me up today.

It’s a simple challenge. Finish my 1,557 word minimum before I stop for lunch. :) I’ve finished breakfast and there’s nothing standing between me and lunch but time to fill. :D

I’m going to fill it with writing.

I’m just going to do 50 minute sessions until I get there.

Updates will follow below. :)

Well! That was unexpected.

I got in one 50 minute session then had to run off to a dentist appointment I’d forgotten about! So that blew this challenge. I was gone nearly 4 hours. I’ve found it difficult to get started again, mostly because it’s now so late in the day. Maybe I’ll try later, but at the moment, I’m thinking of taking the rest of the day off. There’s a movie I want to watch and I don’t like the idea of making up work time in the little bit of leisure time I’ve planned for myself in a while.

I’ve let the air out of this balloon

Lynn

Last night was the last day of Camp Nano. I was behind and had been trying to catch up for a week. The pressure has been a little too much, and I knew it coming into these last several days, but I wanted to try to catch up anyway.

Of course, this morning that pressure was gone, and boy, could I tell! I felt so much better just knowing I could switch my focus back to day-by-day writing, trying only to reach that 1,557 word minimum I set a while back.

Unfortunately, I stayed up too late last night and I’ve been dragging all day.

And the release of pressure must have gone too far, because I just haven’t been motivated to write today at all. I tried writing for just a few minutes, thinking if I could just get started, I’d be able to keep going, but getting started didn’t turn out to be the problem. I quit almost immediately.

So it feels a bit like I’ve let the air out of a balloon but forgot that I meant to only let out a little and instead let it all out. Now I’m flat and I can’t air myself back up. :o It looks like I might not even make my minimum today.

And no, I didn’t actually finish the number of words I’d set as a goal for Camp Nano. I wrote 1,641 words yesterday in 3 hours of timed writing. I needed considerably more to pull of a win.

Sigh. I’m going to start my timer now and do one hour of writing. If I don’t feel like continuing after that, I’m going to let myself quit. I need to get in bed early tonight and catch up on some sleep. I don’t want tomorrow to be a repeat of today.