Day 309: Motivation while editing

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I slept a lot last night, so maybe my body really needed the rest to recover from my bad health days earlier. I'm still not feeling great--I slept a long time, but I didn't have a very restful sleep and I kept waking up. So I'll see how productive I'll be today.


I usually don't like doing editing in 4thewords.com because I do a lot of deleting and very sporadic adding of words here and there, but it occurred to me last night (during one of the times I woke up) that I might be able to do some editing with small word count monsters. I can start a monster only when I need to add some words. I'll try that and see today, because I have to do some editing of the first scene of the book, in accordance with the blocking I did yesterday that gave it better structure and pacing.

***

I don't know why but I had a hard time getting to work today. It might be because I exercised before work (today was the first day in a long while that I felt well enough to exercise), and despite eating breakfast beforehand, I ended up getting low blood sugar. So I felt rather sick to my stomach for a couple hours after getting back from my walk.

I did a little bit of knitting to take my mind off my stomach, and now I finally feel better, so I'll start work on my book now.

***

I just can't win! Right as my IBS started feeling better, I got a sinus headache! Aargh! I had to pump myself full of drugs again.

I decided to try to work through the pain, and started editing the scene. Editing in 4thewords with small word count monsters worked really well. I could usually finish a small-word-count monster even if I was only adding bits here and there, and I didn't start a monster while I was only deleting stuff. It's also really satisfying to finish a lot of monsters, even though each one isn't that many words.

It was very motivating to be able to defeat monsters while editing, and it made the self-editing not so unpleasant, since I usually dislike it so much. This kind of self-editing was a little different from when I do cycling, however--I have to do cycling in Scrivener, because then I can make sure the formatting is correct. In 4thewords, the web editor is too basic, so it doesn't have things like smart quotes, proper em-dashes, and ellipses. But for piecing together a scene, editing in 4thewords is fine. 

I didn't work very quickly because of my headache, but once the drugs finally kicked in, I was able to focus a bit better. I finally got the scene where I liked it, and then I started writing new stuff for it.

However, now it's the end of the day and I'm feeling tired. I'm also still a bit sick from my IBS, so I think I'll go to bed early.

Outlining: time spent: 0

Blocking: time spent: 0

Editing: Time spent: 1 hour, 0 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 23 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 360 words

Writing: Average speed (sprints): 1137 words/hour

Writing: Overall writing speed: 947 words/hour

Time spent doing other writing-related business: 42 minutes

My takeaway for today: Small word count monsters work well when I'm editing a scene.

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