Day 138: Tracking writing pace at different times of the day
I'm not sure how much I'll get done today, but I don't want to call in a sick day. I woke up with a headache, although thanks to drugs that's now gone. However, my IBS is still bothering me like yesterday, and it can be distracting from the writing when it gets painful.
I'm going to continue with my cycling experiment from yesterday, which is to edit the book before I start writing. I hope it'll help me be more productive with my writing, and also ease me into the self-editing, which I usually hate to do. I'll also do the editing in 4thewords.com, so at least I'll have the fun and satisfaction of defeating a monster!
I don't know how much prose writing I'll do today because I have a lot of blocking to do for scenes in the Reader Magnet. Ugh! I have to come up with a name for it!
I gave it like, 5 minutes thought (I know, sooooo much brainpower) and decided on The Gentleman Thief. There's 3 books with that title (I actually have one of them, it's a Harlequin Historical Regency) but since this is a Reader Magnet and won't be available for sale anywhere, it won't matter too much.
All right! Going to start editing The Gentleman Thief! I'm battling a Nezthai monster today. He reminds me of a preying mantis.
***
Sooooo I did my editing, and it was actually great. I had no issues doing it, Future Camy--or rather, Present Camy had no hissy fits about the amount of work to do. Then I eased into doing the blocking for the next scene and did that for a little bit.
Then I decided to move workstations to ease the strain on my ankles. But what did I do instead? I wasted time online looking at various writing tools even though I have no money to afford any of them!
I am having serious distraction/procrastination issues! Yesterday it was my game, today it was retail procrastination.
Why am I so easily distracted lately? I know that I'm normally not like this. I just don't understand why I can't focus.
I have to calm down. Stop berating myself. BREATHE.
I didn't put on my normal aromatherapy when I write, so I'll do that. I also don't have my normal writing playlist, so I'll put that on. I hope the ritual will help me to be able to focus better.
Unfortunately, I can't do the blocking anywhere else except on a computer because I need the large screen and the ability to look back at what I wrote, and edit. I will make myself some tea and get a snack and try to focus.
***
I started something yesterday that I forgot to mention in the blog post: what time of the day my writing is being done.
Yesterday (or maybe it was the day before?) I was listening to the Six Figure Authors podcast and they were talking about craft. Lindsay mentioned something that I had read in Rachel Aaron's 2k to 10k book, which was to try writing at different times of the day and track how well you write. You can track words written or words per hour rate or just how you felt as you were writing. If you've only ever written at one time of the day, you won't know if another time of the day might end up being even more productive.
I already track start time and end time for all my writing sprints, and my spreadsheet calculates duration. I also input number of words at the start and end of the sprint and calculate total number of words written, and words per hour rate.
But I've never really tracked what time of day I write. I tried when writing volume 1 in this series, but it was hard to figure out because I didn't know how to sort it in my spreadsheet. The time start has a date tag attached, and I didn't know how to remove that automatically (and I certainly didn't want to spend the time to do it manually). If I had been able to remove it, I could have sorted it ascending by time start. So I gave up.
After listening to the podcast, I decided to give it a shot again, but I came up with a way to sort it by time of day. I added two columns on my spreadsheet: the time I woke up, and then a formula that subtracted my writing sprint start time from my wake time. This column is time duration, so it lists how many hours from my wake time I started the sprint. (I've only been recording my wake time since I started doing bullet journalling a few months ago. It was included in my eating diary to figure out my IBS issues.)
Now I can sort the spreadsheet by how many hours from my wake time (actually I have to duplicate the tab on the spreadsheet, then paste all the formula results in the cells before I can sort it in the duplicate tab). I can sort by ascending time duration and see how my writing pace is at different times of the day--1-5 hours from my wake time, 6-10 hours, 11+ hours.
I have very little data so far, but it looks like my faster writing pace is within 1-5 hours of when I wake, which is really strange to me since I'm a night owl! My lowest word pace is 6-10 hours from my wake time, and then 11+ hours from my wake time, my writing pace picks up a bit more, but it's not as fast as my writing pace 1-5 hours from my wake time.
I'll have to continue monitoring this to see if the trend continues. Right now, my writing pace varies widely in each time bracket, so I think that means my standard deviation is high (?) if I remember my statistics correctly.
***
Overall, my time spent today was pathetic. I had lots of time but ended up being distracted and unfocused. I did a lot of staring at the screen while sitting in front of my computer.
I actually think that one of the reasons I got distracted by my game and my retail procrastination is because I'm not able to focus on the work, and so it's easy for my brain to wander to other shiny things. The real problem is that I don't know why I'm so unfocused. Maybe it's my IBS issues? Maybe I just need caffeine? I don't know.
After several hours of being unproductive, my IBS got kind of bad so I went to take a nap, since I wasn't getting any work done anyway. The problem is that has screwed up my sleep schedule, so now who knows when I'll be able to fall asleep.
So, since it's already midnight, I'll post this blog and see if I can work a little more in the early morning hours.
I still have a lot of blocking to do--I only did 2 scenes today, and I had to spend some time rearranging the following scenes when it became obvious I had a time inconsistency in the story. I'm at 17k words right now, and I think I have another 10k or maybe 15k more, so it'll end up being around 30k words, a respectable length for a novella.
I think I'll finish all the blocking for the scenes before I start writing again, because I've found that it's a bit jarring mentally to shift from blocking to writing and back again. I think it's because the blocking is more like outlining, for me, and so it might be a different part of my brain that I'm using.
Blocking: Time spent: 2 hours, 34 minutes
Editing: Time spent: 28 minutes
Writing: Time spent: 0
Writing: Total number of words: 0
Writing: Average speed: 0 words per hour
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 1 hour, 15 minutes
My takeaway for today: Cycling seems to work well for me, but I'll have to keep trying it to see.
My second takeaway for today: Mornings might be my best writing time, but I'll have to keep collecting data to be sure.
My third takeaway for today: I need to figure out why I've been so unfocused lately and find out how to combat it.
I'm going to continue with my cycling experiment from yesterday, which is to edit the book before I start writing. I hope it'll help me be more productive with my writing, and also ease me into the self-editing, which I usually hate to do. I'll also do the editing in 4thewords.com, so at least I'll have the fun and satisfaction of defeating a monster!
I don't know how much prose writing I'll do today because I have a lot of blocking to do for scenes in the Reader Magnet. Ugh! I have to come up with a name for it!
I gave it like, 5 minutes thought (I know, sooooo much brainpower) and decided on The Gentleman Thief. There's 3 books with that title (I actually have one of them, it's a Harlequin Historical Regency) but since this is a Reader Magnet and won't be available for sale anywhere, it won't matter too much.
***
Sooooo I did my editing, and it was actually great. I had no issues doing it, Future Camy--or rather, Present Camy had no hissy fits about the amount of work to do. Then I eased into doing the blocking for the next scene and did that for a little bit.
Then I decided to move workstations to ease the strain on my ankles. But what did I do instead? I wasted time online looking at various writing tools even though I have no money to afford any of them!
I am having serious distraction/procrastination issues! Yesterday it was my game, today it was retail procrastination.
Why am I so easily distracted lately? I know that I'm normally not like this. I just don't understand why I can't focus.
I have to calm down. Stop berating myself. BREATHE.
I didn't put on my normal aromatherapy when I write, so I'll do that. I also don't have my normal writing playlist, so I'll put that on. I hope the ritual will help me to be able to focus better.
Unfortunately, I can't do the blocking anywhere else except on a computer because I need the large screen and the ability to look back at what I wrote, and edit. I will make myself some tea and get a snack and try to focus.
***
I started something yesterday that I forgot to mention in the blog post: what time of the day my writing is being done.
Yesterday (or maybe it was the day before?) I was listening to the Six Figure Authors podcast and they were talking about craft. Lindsay mentioned something that I had read in Rachel Aaron's 2k to 10k book, which was to try writing at different times of the day and track how well you write. You can track words written or words per hour rate or just how you felt as you were writing. If you've only ever written at one time of the day, you won't know if another time of the day might end up being even more productive.
I already track start time and end time for all my writing sprints, and my spreadsheet calculates duration. I also input number of words at the start and end of the sprint and calculate total number of words written, and words per hour rate.
But I've never really tracked what time of day I write. I tried when writing volume 1 in this series, but it was hard to figure out because I didn't know how to sort it in my spreadsheet. The time start has a date tag attached, and I didn't know how to remove that automatically (and I certainly didn't want to spend the time to do it manually). If I had been able to remove it, I could have sorted it ascending by time start. So I gave up.
After listening to the podcast, I decided to give it a shot again, but I came up with a way to sort it by time of day. I added two columns on my spreadsheet: the time I woke up, and then a formula that subtracted my writing sprint start time from my wake time. This column is time duration, so it lists how many hours from my wake time I started the sprint. (I've only been recording my wake time since I started doing bullet journalling a few months ago. It was included in my eating diary to figure out my IBS issues.)
Now I can sort the spreadsheet by how many hours from my wake time (actually I have to duplicate the tab on the spreadsheet, then paste all the formula results in the cells before I can sort it in the duplicate tab). I can sort by ascending time duration and see how my writing pace is at different times of the day--1-5 hours from my wake time, 6-10 hours, 11+ hours.
I have very little data so far, but it looks like my faster writing pace is within 1-5 hours of when I wake, which is really strange to me since I'm a night owl! My lowest word pace is 6-10 hours from my wake time, and then 11+ hours from my wake time, my writing pace picks up a bit more, but it's not as fast as my writing pace 1-5 hours from my wake time.
I'll have to continue monitoring this to see if the trend continues. Right now, my writing pace varies widely in each time bracket, so I think that means my standard deviation is high (?) if I remember my statistics correctly.
***
Overall, my time spent today was pathetic. I had lots of time but ended up being distracted and unfocused. I did a lot of staring at the screen while sitting in front of my computer.
I actually think that one of the reasons I got distracted by my game and my retail procrastination is because I'm not able to focus on the work, and so it's easy for my brain to wander to other shiny things. The real problem is that I don't know why I'm so unfocused. Maybe it's my IBS issues? Maybe I just need caffeine? I don't know.
After several hours of being unproductive, my IBS got kind of bad so I went to take a nap, since I wasn't getting any work done anyway. The problem is that has screwed up my sleep schedule, so now who knows when I'll be able to fall asleep.
So, since it's already midnight, I'll post this blog and see if I can work a little more in the early morning hours.
I still have a lot of blocking to do--I only did 2 scenes today, and I had to spend some time rearranging the following scenes when it became obvious I had a time inconsistency in the story. I'm at 17k words right now, and I think I have another 10k or maybe 15k more, so it'll end up being around 30k words, a respectable length for a novella.
I think I'll finish all the blocking for the scenes before I start writing again, because I've found that it's a bit jarring mentally to shift from blocking to writing and back again. I think it's because the blocking is more like outlining, for me, and so it might be a different part of my brain that I'm using.
Blocking: Time spent: 2 hours, 34 minutes
Editing: Time spent: 28 minutes
Writing: Time spent: 0
Writing: Total number of words: 0
Writing: Average speed: 0 words per hour
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 1 hour, 15 minutes
My takeaway for today: Cycling seems to work well for me, but I'll have to keep trying it to see.
My second takeaway for today: Mornings might be my best writing time, but I'll have to keep collecting data to be sure.
My third takeaway for today: I need to figure out why I've been so unfocused lately and find out how to combat it.
Comments
Post a Comment