Day 10: Efficiency in house chores, impatience to write

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I don’t know why it always surprises me how much time I have to spend doing house chores, but I’m left feeling frustrated that half my day is gone and I’m only just cracking open my laptop.

Part of the time-consuming part of chores is when I have to make decisions about what to cook, which I didn’t have to make before I was battling IBS. In Write Better, Faster: How To Triple Your Writing Speed and Write More Every Day, the author talks about how decision-making can be incredibly time-consuming, which is even moreso the case with me, because of the way my brain is wired. I have to find a way to make decisions about cooking a lot faster, or at least in a way that doesn’t impact my writing time.

I am going to start planning out my cooking on Sundays when I’m not supposed to be writing. It won’t make cooking take any less time, but it might save time in dithering about what to cook during the week.

I also realized that a large part of why I’m so frustrated at how much time my non-writing stuff takes from my day is because I’m impatient to finish plotting my series. Doing the Snowflake method on every book in the series in advance is pretty time consuming (although this time, it’s not taking nearly as long as it did for me to do the Snowflake method on just one of my other previous novels, so I think I’m improving).

But maybe I’m putting too much time pressure on myself and it’s making me tense. And of course that would hinder my creativity and make it harder to do the plotting for the series.

I realize I should just expect the plotting to take as long as it has to take and to be patient. I shouldn’t feel anxious if it takes me longer than I think (or longer than I’d like) to finish a Snowflake step on a volume. It’s not as if I have a contractual deadline, so I should just make sure to do this right.

On a positive note, my email took very little time today!

Today I’m continuing work on Snowflake step 2 (1-paragraph summary) on volume 8 (which used to be volumes 8/9, but I decided yesterday to combine them). If I finish Snowflake step 2, I’ll start work on Snowflake step 4 (one-page synopsis) today.

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I managed to finish Snowflake step 2. I originally had an idea of what I wanted to have happen in volume 8, but that would depend on how my characters would react to the events that ended volume 7, and figuring that out was hard.

Once I wrote Snowflake step 2, I was able to pretty quickly do Snowflake step 4 on about half of the volume, but then I got a little stuck. It was getting late so I decided to save the rest for tomorrow.

Time spent writing: 5 hours, 36 minutes
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 1 hour 4 minutes

My takeaway for today: Make decisions on Sunday about what to cook, and on what days to cook, to save a little time during the week.

My second takeaway for today: I should just expect the plotting to take as long as it has to take and to be patient.

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