Day 74: Combatting health issues with a sprint

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Yesterday, my cover designer, Dineen Miller, gave me some mockups of the new cover for my romantic suspense novella, Necessary Proof, and they looked fabulous! She really understands my tastes, and her work is incredibly professional since she worked for years for an advertising company.

It was so exciting to see the new author branding she’s working on for my romantic suspense books. We had discussed the looks of both my Sonoma series and also the Hawaii series I intend to write after I finish my Lady Wynwood’s Spies series.

I woke up with a low grade headache today, but I’ve been trying to work despite it by popping Advil (which sometimes affects my stomach). I just feel antsy since I haven’t gotten a lot of work done in the past week because of my health.

I did some editing on the ebook formatting of Necessary Proof in anticipation of the new cover, since I hope to be able to participate in a BookFunnel promo later in August if the cover is done in time. I also had to fix some broken code on my website, which was a bit tedious.

Not sure how much I’ll get done on my book today because of the headache.

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I ended up listening to some podcasts to wait and see if the headache went away, and eventually it did! However, I also still had some IBS discomfort.

I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d feel over the next hour or so, and so I didn’t want to spend half an hour doing dictation exercises and then not feel well enough to work on the book. This had happened yesterday, where I couldn’t focus enough to work on my book after I did some exercises.

So I went back to my tried and true tactic of doing a short sprint. I sent the timer for 10 minutes and jumped right into dictating my book.

It was very rusty and my words per hour was only about 2500. However I still felt okay after the timer went off so I continued dictating and going with the momentum.

I did about an hour’s worth of dictation on volume 2 of my book! I’m not entirely sure if I’ll keep most of it, but at least I got some forward momentum on the writing!

Time spent writing: 1 hour, 9 minutes
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 1 hour, 36 minutes

My takeaway for today: Sprints work!!!

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