Day 492: Energy management, and revisiting writing fast

Health issues again

I don’t know why, but I again woke up with an IBS flareup, and it took about an hour and a half this morning before I could deal with it and get the pain to settle down. I feel like I waste so much time getting my health under control every day. it’s very frustrating.

But I also try to tell myself that actually my IBS is getting better, slowly, because I’m on this elimination diet. I’m starting to realize what foods I’m particularly sensitive to, and I’m making less mistakes in what I eat.

Eating my “frogs” versus managing my energy

I was thinking about how yesterday I had real issues managing my energy. I don’t like feeling so tired and having that dictate my productivity. I want to avoid situations like that.

I talked before about eating my “frogs,” doing first thing in the morning the important things that I would otherwise never get around to doing if I left them for later in the day. My four “frogs” have been my Bible reading, exercise, house chores, and my Japanese study.

I still do my Bible reading just before writing. It helps me remember why I write and often the particular passage helps me with the spiritual theme of my books.

But since I’ve been having health issues, the exercise has fallen by the wayside. Chores, too, except for urgent things like cooking and laundry for my husband, who is working hard to support me as a full-time writer.

I’ve been trying to keep up with my Japanese, even if I only do a little bit a day, because my Japanese study is something where I absolutely HAVE to do a little every day in order for me to learn it. Doing my study yesterday was hard because I had a headache at the time, so I did only the bare minimum.

But I really want to be able to have the energy to get my writing and blocking/outlining done every day, and doing Japanese study for an hour takes away some of that energy. It wasn’t a problem when I was feeling fine, but lately I feel like I have less overall energy since I expend so much on battling IBS (and sinus headaches, if I happen to have one). That leaves less energy for my other work. I’ve been more aware of my energy levels and how they impact my writing productivity.

But I also don’t want to not do my Japanese study, because I’m afraid that if I don’t do it first thing, it won’t get done at all. However, I’ve been doing Japanese relatively consistently for about 5 months now, so I started to wonder if maybe I have developed enough self-discipline to get it done even if I don’t do it first. The writing and outlining/blocking has become more of a priority because I need maximum energy in order to get that done.

So I guess maybe I’m switching my “frogs” around. I think I should do my writing and outlining/blocking first, and then hopefully I can trust in my self-discipline to get my Japanese study done after that. And then only after that will I check email/social media.

Writing fast

I recently discovered that there are tons of writing ebooks available to read online from my local library (via Hoopla), so I’ve been reading writing books lately (I read one today while waiting for my pain meds to kick in). I keep gravitating toward the books about either productivity or writing fast.

I feel like SUCH a loser that I’m going back to this, I know I waffled over the whole writing fast thing months ago, and I know that I do enjoy writing slowly (editing-as-I-go) rather than quickly. But I also have 7 or 8 more books to write for this Regency series and I’d ideally like to release each one within a couple months of the last one.

Also no matter what I do, I am still fixated on my writing speed. I know logically that the number of hours it takes me to write is what I should focus on instead, because a fast writing speed does NOT mean it takes me less time to write the book. When I write fast and messy, my editing time skyrockets because I have to do several passes.

I personally hate doing several passes through a manuscript. I get lazier and lazier with each one. When I was doing vomit-writing for the first draft, the first editing pass had to correct all my typos and errors. Then I had to do at least one other pass to correct everything else, because I don’t have the mental capacity to correct typos and also look at sentence structure, word choices, and storyline at the same time. When I tried, I missed too many things and needed to do a second pass anyway, and that second pass was still much lazier than it should have been.

And since I hate self-editing, just getting myself to do it is a huge amount of effort. I’d rather not have to battle my tendency toward procrastination.

But I discovered through the [xxx]cycling experiment that I have less resistance to self-editing the sooner I do it after I’ve written the scene. I don’t know if the cycling experiment will work this time, but I’m going to try. I’ll be editing each scene the day after I finish it, rather than waiting for the entire draft to be completed and doing the editing then.

When thinking about cycling, it also occurred to me that I could do something similar when writing a messy first draft. I definitely write quickly when I vomit-write, but it’s the sloppy self-editing that reduces writing quality. So maybe I can do a 15 minute sprint of vomit-writing, and then immediately afterward (or immediately after my writing sprints for the day) do a self-editing pass just to correct typos. Then I can do another pass after the scene is done when I do my normal cycling. It will enable me to do a messy first draft and two editing passes with the least amount of resistance.

I’ve already done 1.5 scenes my usual method, so I can try another scene or two this way and then compare the total time versus word count. I can see if writing a vomit draft and doing an extra editing pass does or does not result in overall less time per word.

I might have made this comparison before, between vomit writing and non vomit writing, but I don’t think I ever tried doing a self-editing pass immediately after finishing a writing sprint.

I honestly don’t know how messy my vomit draft will be, and while I’m still interested in doing this experiment, I’m a little apprensive. If it’s as bad as some other times I’ve done vomit writing, the self-editing pass may take twice as long as the writing, because I’ll need to not only correct the obvious errors, but also rearrange paragraphs and sentences where I’ve repeated myself or written a logical flow out of order.

Motivating monster choices on 4thewords

Since I’ll be sprinting and then editing, I thought it might be better to instead do a large word count monster with the word count I’m aiming for for the day, such as 1000 words or 1500 words. I was using small word count monsters the past few days because the short time period forced me to keep writing and not stall or take too long to rewrite passages, but since I’ll be sprinting, I don’t need the time pressure from the monster I’ll be battling.

Game plan for today

1) 15 minute writing sprints of vomit-writing, then immediately editing the typos and errors

2) outlining/blocking

3) Japanese study

4) email/social media

I’m actually feeling rather good about this order of things. Writing work takes much more mental energy from me than Japanese or email, so it makes sense to put that first. I only hope I will have the self-discipline to do the last two things, which are often hard for me to get myself to do if I don’t do them first thing in the morning.

***

Vomit-writing was difficult and slow

I knew it would be, but it’s hard to stop myself from correcting typos or word choices and to not look up things like character eye color or small things for research. But despite leaving notes for myself, my writing speed was a little slower than the past few days (970 words per hour today, versus an average of 1037 words/hour for the past few days).

I thought about it, and perhaps the reason is because I counted my 5-minute breaks in with the writing time. I might have a faster writing speed if I did longer sprints and fewer breaks, so I might try that next.

I also know that whenever I got back to writing after a break, it would sometimes take me a couple minutes to get back into the writing groove. I’m not sure why that happened only sometimes and not other times. For my latest sprint, I don’t know that I ever really got back into the writing groove at all—I was writing slowly and hesitantly, and I reached a point in the dialogue where I had to make a decision about what I wanted spoken and what I wanted as internal monologue. Since decision making is so hard for me, I kind of froze a little.

I’m almost at my daily word count of 1500 words (in order to finish this book in 60 days), so I think I’ll only do one more sprint of 15 minutes, and then move to editing the mess I wrote, which is actually more full of notes to myself of things to look up than it has typos and errors.

I admit I’m rather disappointed not to see a dramatic improvement in writing speed since I was actively attempting to vomit write and I left way more notes for myself than normal. But maybe I just need to get back into practice of writing without editing.

***

Writing speed

My writing speed was faster for that one last sprint and my final daily writing pace was 996 words/hour, which is close to my average for the past few days. It’s still a little low, and for those other days, I wasn’t leaving nearly as many notes to myself.

I have to admit, I had been hoping that diving into vomit-writing would enable me to suddenly jump to 1500 or even 2000 words an hour, but that didn’t happen.

I guess I just need to improve my vomit writing. I ended up not doing what I had originally feared, and I didn’t leave for myself messy paragraphs that needed to be reworked. Instead, I just reworked them as I was writing, because I already knew the flow of the scene. If I left it for self-editing, I’d have to spend extra time to look closely at the prose to figure out what I was trying to say.

Self-editing

It was a little bit easier to make myself do the self-editing of the section I’d just written, but to be honest, I mostly just did a search for where I left notes for myself and looked up research information or corrected words I had flagged to be changed. I didn’t do a very detailed read-through, maybe because I was being lazy, or maybe because it was already taking me an hour to get through everything, and I was getting tired of doing the editing.

At the very least, it was gratifying to get to all the places I had flagged and take care of my notes to myself. When I do my cycling edit after the scene is done, I’ll be able to focus only on the words and writing and not worry about my notes.

My biggest concern now is that I won’t do a very good job on the cycling edit. I really don’t trust myself when it comes to self-editing!

One thing I didn’t think about when planning to do the editing right after the writing is that I forgot how much self-editing saps my energy. I don’t know if it’s because I just hate it so much or if it uses a part of my brain that uses more sugar.

So after doing the editing of my writing, I'm actually kind of tired. Not too tired to do the blocking, but still kind of exhausted, more than I would have been if I’d been writing for the same amount of time.

***

Blocking

I got another IBS flare-up after finishing the self-editing. But the drugs I take make me a little tired, especially the first hour after I take them, so I decided to eat lunch, and then slowly got back to work.

I’m not sure if it’s because I was tired from the drugs or the flare-up, but it took me a while to get back to my computer and back to work. But once I did, I worked for almost 2 hours.

Evaluating the new routine

My energy is really flagging about now, and I’m glad I got my two most important things done (the writing and blocking). But I hadn’t anticipated the editing to have been so tiring and that was an oversight on my part. I really should have remembered that, especially since I was so tired after doing my cycling editing a couple days ago.

I’m not sure what to do about that. I considered doing the writing, then the blocking, then going back to do the self-editing. However, I know myself and I’m pretty sure I’d forego the editing if I was too tired and instead opt to get my Japanese study done while I had the mental alertness. I know that’s pretty pathetic, but I am the author who procrastinated completing the self-editing on book 1 in my series until nearly 11 months after I’d finished the rough draft. I reached all-time record levels of pathetic-ness.

Well, I guess for now I’ll keep it this way. After all, I am in the middle of an experiment to see if I can vomit-write, then do an immediate editing pass and end up taking less time than a slower writing speed without that extra editing pass.

I have to admit that I really, really liked how that immediate editing pass took care of a lot of research and other general “looking up stuff” that had to be done. I feel like that’ll free myself to concentrate more on the words and sentences when I do my cycling pass, but I’ll have to see how that goes.

It could be that my vomit-writing isn’t so much throwing crap on the page, but just writing as fast as I can and teaching myself to leave notes instead of looking stuff up.

I don’t know that I could write without correcting typos or unclear/erroneous sentences. I wonder if I need to try writing on my Freewrite Traveler in order to train myself to not back up? Maybe I can try that tomorrow?

***

Distracted when tired

Unfortunately, after I got the blocking done, I was a bit tired and I admit I was distracted. I think that’s pretty common when I’m tired, which again makes me glad I did my writing and blocking when I was mentally freshest. Who knows how distracted I might have been if I’d been more tired?

However, after a little sidetracking, I was able to sit down and get my Japanese study done. I had been really afraid that I wouldn’t do it, since my self-discipline is so bad, and my Japanese study isn’t technically part of my writing work. Eventually it will help me reach a Japanese audience (I hope) but it’s not like I’m trying to become proficient enough to translate my books. NO WAY. At best I could translate some of my newsletters.

Since it falls more under personal improvement rather than my writing business, I guess that’s why I’ve usually had a hard time disciplining myself to do it. But this year I wanted to dedicate myself to it more and so far, I’ve managed to do my studies most days.

I was also able to do my email/social marketing after I finished my Japanese study, which was another relief since I DEFINITELY would skip that if I’m tired. But since I’ve been trying to do it every day, I was reasonably sure that the work wouldn’t take me very long, and I was right, I finished in 15 minutes.

Tomorrow

I’ll keep up my experiments tomorrow: First off, vomit-writing and editing right afterward, but I think I’ll aim for longer sprint times, maybe 25 minutes.

I’ll also do my writing and blocking first, and then Japanese and email/social media last in my day, so that I can save my flagging amount of energy for my writing. I really hope I start feeling better soon so that I don’t have to be so careful with how I’m feeling and what I do each minute of my day.

Maybe I’ll try using my Freewrite Traveler again? At the very least it might help me train myself not to backspace and correct typos.

***

Writing: Time spent: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 1498 words

Writing: Overall writing speed: 996 words/hour

Writing streak: 5 days

Editing: Time spent: 56 minutes

Blocking: time spent: 1 hour, 55 minutes

Email/Social Media streak: 3 days

Time spent doing other writing-related business: 56 minutes

My takeaway for today: To better manage my energy, do my writing and outlining/blocking first, then Japanese, then email/social media.

My second takeaway for today: Try doing vomit-writing sprints, and then do a self-editing pass immediately after finishing writing to add the extra editing pass required of vomit writing. Compare writing and editing time versus word count to see if it takes more or less time than my normal writing (with editing-as-I-go).

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