Day 97: Eating my frogs
After writing yesterday I realized that I hadn’t checked my email or social media all day, so I did it later in the evening. However, I almost didn’t do it because I just don’t really like it. In fact, it took me about an hour and a half to get it all done.
For me, email and social media are things I don’t enjoy very much at all. In fact, they’re kind of up there with exercising.
Productivity experts say to do first the things you don’t want to do (“eat that frog”) and in this instance I think they’re right. Since exercising and checking email and social media are my frogs, I should do that first before writing. A lot of writers advise not checking email first thing, but I think that if I don’t, I might be tempted not to do it later (just like exercise) or I might simply forget to do it entirely.
So I did email and social media before working today, and they only took me 26 minutes. Based on that and on how difficult it was for me to do my email and social media last night, I think I’ll continue doing my frogs (exercising, email, and social media) before I start work each morning.
Lately, I’ve been mentioning 4thewords.com a lot, but it’s only because it’s been incredibly motivating for me in my writing. Not every writer will enjoy games like these enough to want to use the website, but for me, this has hit a sweet spot.
I really love getting quests and figuring out what monsters I have to “defeat” in order to advance. Sometimes I have to defeat monsters who drop certain items that I need to craft weapons or items that will give me rewards. I’ve been really enjoying strategizing and then defeating monsters!
The website is always expanding the story world and adding more monsters. In addition, there are challenges (which I think are user-run, although they might be sanctioned by the game company) that encourage people to push themselves in their writing skills and wordcount.
Right now is an autumn challenge, which I decided to join without really knowing what I’m doing. I’ve been battling monsters not only for the quests currently running in the game, but also for this challenge, which is run via the forum boards.
I noticed that it’s very easy for me to say, “I’ll just do three more monsters because then I’ll finish this quest!” And I end up writing another 30-45 minutes.
As a result, I’ve been writing an awful lot. I haven’t been able to record all my words or my words per hour rate because a lot of what I’ve been writing for the past couple days has been outlining and characterization. But if I go by the monsters I’ve defeated, I’ve been able to see that I’ve been writing about 4000 words a day. I just copy and paste my words from the website into my synopses.
I finished doing the additional characterization elements for my villains for volumes 1 through 10. I think I managed to outline all the aspects of my villains’ characters throughout the series so the information comes out in a slow trickle rather than an info-dump, and to give each of them a resolution to their internal arc. I decided not to do the villain additional characterization for serial novel just yet, because I’d really like to continue writing the series.
I’ve hit the 70% point in volume 2, but I’m only at 54,000 words, so the book might be a lot shorter than I had thought it would be. That’s actually kind of a relief. I was afraid the books would go WAY beyond 100,000 words and I’d have to decide if I wanted to split the books into two or publish an extra-long book. I know that historical readers are usually okay with really long books, but I think I still tend to default toward the mindset of the editors at my traditional publishers, where trade paperback historical novels were usually 100,000 or less. I just didn’t want to have to make a decision because of long word count.
I’m a little disappointed that I couldn’t finish the characterization earlier today and get some words done on the manuscript, but I wasn’t able to focus as well, and I took lots of breaks. This might have been the heat--it was 100 degrees outside, and in the house it was in the upper 80s or low 90s.
As a result, I only wrote about 4.5 hours today, when I’d been hoping to get up to 6 hours. But when I looked at my writing “battles” on 4theword, I calculated that I wrote about 3500 words today, which isn’t a bad output for the day.
Tomorrow is Sunday, so it’s my writing Sabbath, so I won’t get back to the manuscript until Monday.
Time spent writing: 4 hours, 34 minutes
Total number of words: 0 words (Like yesterday, I didn’t keep track of the exact number of words I wrote when doing the outlining/characterization)
Average writing speed: n/a
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 26 minutes
My takeaway for today: For me, my frogs are exercise, email, and social media, so even though it goes against what some other writing articles say to do, I will continue to do that before work each day.
For me, email and social media are things I don’t enjoy very much at all. In fact, they’re kind of up there with exercising.
Productivity experts say to do first the things you don’t want to do (“eat that frog”) and in this instance I think they’re right. Since exercising and checking email and social media are my frogs, I should do that first before writing. A lot of writers advise not checking email first thing, but I think that if I don’t, I might be tempted not to do it later (just like exercise) or I might simply forget to do it entirely.
So I did email and social media before working today, and they only took me 26 minutes. Based on that and on how difficult it was for me to do my email and social media last night, I think I’ll continue doing my frogs (exercising, email, and social media) before I start work each morning.
Lately, I’ve been mentioning 4thewords.com a lot, but it’s only because it’s been incredibly motivating for me in my writing. Not every writer will enjoy games like these enough to want to use the website, but for me, this has hit a sweet spot.
I really love getting quests and figuring out what monsters I have to “defeat” in order to advance. Sometimes I have to defeat monsters who drop certain items that I need to craft weapons or items that will give me rewards. I’ve been really enjoying strategizing and then defeating monsters!
The website is always expanding the story world and adding more monsters. In addition, there are challenges (which I think are user-run, although they might be sanctioned by the game company) that encourage people to push themselves in their writing skills and wordcount.
Right now is an autumn challenge, which I decided to join without really knowing what I’m doing. I’ve been battling monsters not only for the quests currently running in the game, but also for this challenge, which is run via the forum boards.
I noticed that it’s very easy for me to say, “I’ll just do three more monsters because then I’ll finish this quest!” And I end up writing another 30-45 minutes.
As a result, I’ve been writing an awful lot. I haven’t been able to record all my words or my words per hour rate because a lot of what I’ve been writing for the past couple days has been outlining and characterization. But if I go by the monsters I’ve defeated, I’ve been able to see that I’ve been writing about 4000 words a day. I just copy and paste my words from the website into my synopses.
I finished doing the additional characterization elements for my villains for volumes 1 through 10. I think I managed to outline all the aspects of my villains’ characters throughout the series so the information comes out in a slow trickle rather than an info-dump, and to give each of them a resolution to their internal arc. I decided not to do the villain additional characterization for serial novel just yet, because I’d really like to continue writing the series.
I’ve hit the 70% point in volume 2, but I’m only at 54,000 words, so the book might be a lot shorter than I had thought it would be. That’s actually kind of a relief. I was afraid the books would go WAY beyond 100,000 words and I’d have to decide if I wanted to split the books into two or publish an extra-long book. I know that historical readers are usually okay with really long books, but I think I still tend to default toward the mindset of the editors at my traditional publishers, where trade paperback historical novels were usually 100,000 or less. I just didn’t want to have to make a decision because of long word count.
I’m a little disappointed that I couldn’t finish the characterization earlier today and get some words done on the manuscript, but I wasn’t able to focus as well, and I took lots of breaks. This might have been the heat--it was 100 degrees outside, and in the house it was in the upper 80s or low 90s.
As a result, I only wrote about 4.5 hours today, when I’d been hoping to get up to 6 hours. But when I looked at my writing “battles” on 4theword, I calculated that I wrote about 3500 words today, which isn’t a bad output for the day.
Tomorrow is Sunday, so it’s my writing Sabbath, so I won’t get back to the manuscript until Monday.
Time spent writing: 4 hours, 34 minutes
Total number of words: 0 words (Like yesterday, I didn’t keep track of the exact number of words I wrote when doing the outlining/characterization)
Average writing speed: n/a
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 26 minutes
My takeaway for today: For me, my frogs are exercise, email, and social media, so even though it goes against what some other writing articles say to do, I will continue to do that before work each day.
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