Day 493: Terrible procrastination today
Clearing the decks:
I woke up feeling okay-ish and had been planning to jump right into writing, but I found that I kind of need a little time to myself in the morning to wake up. I made tea, ate breakfast.
I haven’t been feeling well enough to do my house chores lately. I have one house chore assigned to each day so that I eventually get to the entire house over the course if two or three weeks, with some chores repeating (such as cleaning the toilet). When I was feeling better, I would get my chore done before writing, because otherwise the thought of a chore left undone would nag at me while I was working. Also, I was less likely to get it done if I left it for later in the day.
This morning, I was still feeling a little sleepy, and decided to do my house chore for today (mopping the kitchen floor), especially because it was bothering me that I hadn’t done it last week.
It took all of 10 minutes, and I felt so much better after it had been done. Something about a clean house, clean mind, I guess.
Plan for today:
My energy levels have been low lately because of my health issues, so I mixed up the order of my tasks to try to take advantage of my higher energy levels in the morning. I’ll start with writing, then move to blocking, and only after that’s done will I do my Japanese study and also check email/social media.
I’m continuing my experiment in fast writing. I’ll be doing vomit writing in 25 minute sprints, and then after I’ve reached about 1500 words, I’ll do a self-editing pass to correct errors and take care of anything I’ve flagged (this is mostly things for research, or occasionally different word choices).
Today I decided to try using my Freewrite Traveler again, since it makes it very difficult to back up and correct what I’ve written before. It’s more effort to move the cursor than on the Alphasmart, so it’s ideal for training me to just keep moving forward despite typos and stuff.
After writing, I’m hoping to get about 2 hours of blocking.
Thankfully, since I’ve been pretty consistent with my Japanese study for several months now, I’m hopeful that it won’t be difficult to get myself to do it even after my blocking is done. And yesterday my email/social media took only 15 minutes, so I think I’ll be more likely to do it since I’ll be expecting it to take less than 30 minutes total.
***
Vomit writing on the Freewrite Traveler
My writing speed was not that much faster than yesterday, and I have a TON of typos.
Since I was concentrating on writing fast, and on not backspacing, I closed my eyes a lot while typing because the lag between my typing and the letters appearing on the e-Ink screen is distracting. Since I was closing my eyes, I wasn’t as frustrated with the lag like I have been before when I used the Freewrite Traveler.
However, I’ve been too spoiled with using my gaming keyboard for the past several months. The Freewrite keyboard is actually quite nice, but I definitely prefer the Blue Outemu keys on my keyboard. They just feel so much better. So typing on the Freewrite Traveler had a little more resistance than I’m used to, and it made it harder for me to type accurately.
To be honest, I’m only on the second day of my experiment with vomit writing, and I don’t really like it. I fully admit, I’m currently procrastinating going through and editing all my typos.
I confess that I like the idea of just to keep writing without stopping, without second-guessing yourself and where the story is going. I found myself closing my eyes a lot as I was typing. I think I will try doing that more.
But I don’t think I’ll use the Freewrite Traveler again tomorrow. I also decided I want to try to have cleaner copy without the typos. For why, read on.
Pulp fiction writers
Yesterday before bed, I was reading another writing book, this one about the writing process for pulp fiction writers from the 1940s until about the 1980s. For the ones whose only source of income was their writing, since they had to write SO many stories every month in order to try to get one or two of them published, they were writing a crazy number of words each month.
They essentially wrote one to two stories a day on their typewriters, then mailed them off to magazines for consideration. It sounded essentially like flinging spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Out of the 45 stories they wrote each month, if two of them sold, they made enough to feed a middle-income family of the times.
The author of the book talked about reaching pulp fiction writing speeds, showing that it was entirely possible (although the book neglects mentioning anything about the time required for plotting for the people who outline before writing).
But what struck me was that these pulp fiction writers were writing about 8000 words a day on a typewriter. I know there are probably some of you who have never used an electric typewriter, much less a manual one. Corrections are a PAIN.
I don’t think all of them, but many of these full-time pulp writers were essentially writing first drafts clean enough to send straight off to magazines. The author of the writing book was saying that it is possible to achieve these kinds of large word count days without vomit writing, without tons of typos and errors and things to be corrected.
I’m sure at least some fo them were retyping their first drafts before sending them off, but if they had to sell to make money, and if they had to write a lot in order to sell, the time they didn’t have to take retyping was more time to write another story.
I honestly don’t know how those pulp fiction writers would be able to write such clean drafts. I guess they thought about each sentence before typing it so that it said exactly what they wanted to say. (Which actually sounds a lot like the way your mind has to work when you write via dictation.)
The author just says that these pulp authors practiced a lot (and if they were writing 8000 words a day, they were practicing a LOT) and eventually learned to not only write fast, but write clean. They trained themselves to do it.
I can see how that might be the case. I don’t know if I could do that, but I can at least train myself to write continuously during my sprints, without stopping.
I had thought that it wouldn’t be possible to write a lot of words without vomit writing, but perhaps that isn’t true (at least, not true for everyone), especially since these pulp fiction writers were actually writing quite a lot of words a day. Since I’m already disliking the vomit-writing (especially without backspacing), maybe this notion of writing clean rough drafts is something I can aim for.
Also, maybe if I write a little more consciously, I’ll stop making spelling errors or need to rewrite my sentences. It might seem counterintuitive to slow down my writing in order to speed up, but I won’t lose time to going back to make corrections.
Well, I can at least try to do these things—write fast and write clean. Also, at least I now know they’re not necessarily incompatible.
Timeline confusion
I actually ended up confusing the timeline of my book while I was writing, because I had blocked a future scene yesterday. While writing, I almost mentioned a character who hasn’t appeared yet, and if I had done that, it would have changed the entire direction of the dialogue, and I’d have had to heavily edit it later. Luckily, I wasted some time scrolling through my blocking notes and belated realized I had forgotten that the character hadn’t been introduced into the story yet.
I actually noticed myself doing this when I did this experiment before of writing one scene while blocking scenes later in the book. I would be forgetful and confused about what had happened already in the book, and what hadn’t happened yet.
The only solution I can think of is to reduce my daily word count for the next few days and just finish blocking the rest of the scenes in this book.
The problem is what happens after that. If I continue to do a little writing each day, and a little blocking each day, then I’ll end up outlining/blocking the next book in the series while writing this one. And I don’t know if I’ll run into the same type of confusion of my series timeline.
And the only solution I could come up with for THAT would be to reduce my daily word count until I finished outlining and blocking ALL the books in the series.
That might not be a bad idea. It will take me longer to write this book, but other books in the series will take much less time to write. Once I finish blocking this series (all the books are already outlined), I can write the books in the series while outlining the books of my contemporary series, so I won’t have to worry about the confusion issue since it’ll be an entirely different series and time period.
And this way, I won’t have to stop my writing streak in order to block the rest of the scenes of this book, I’ll just reduce the writing a little. Since I’m in the middle of writing a long serial novel, I will have to block all the other books, too, but I’ll still be writing this book, just fewer words per day. When I finish all the blocking, I’ll be able to ramp up my words per day again to what I’m doing now or maybe even more.
Yes, I think I’ll try this.
***
Self-editing done
I did the first pass of self-editing on what I wrote today, and it didn’t take very long at all. I also hadn’t made many notes to myself, so there was very little to look up.
However, I am hoping I didn’t miss too many spelling errors. I actually just checked and discovered two more I missed. My spell-check catches most of them, but there are some which are correctly spelled words, but the wrong word is used. For example, the word sue instead of use (I do that one a lot).
I hire a proofreader, and she catches almost all my errors, but even she doesn't catch every single one. And the more errors I have, percentage-wise the more will get past my proofreader.
This just reinforces my belief that I should try to write cleaner. I didn’t see a gigantic leap in writing speed when I didn’t stop to correct my typos, and even though it might simply be because I haven’t practiced enough in writing fast, I’m not entirely sure that not backspacing will make that much of a difference for me. It will only end up decreasing the quality of my finished book, and I’m not willing to do that, not unless my speed is significantly higher, such as double what I’m doing now.
***
Distracted
I was really distracted after finishing the editing, maybe because I had procrastinated a little bit before doing the editing. Afterward, I looked into something for my mom, and then it was time for lunch. So I suppose I can just say I took a long lunch.
But then after lunch, I was still distracted. I did have some slight IBS discomfort, but I don’t think my distraction was entirely because of that.
Calming activity
I’m reading another writing productivity book from the library (Scrappy Rough Draft: Use science to strategically motivate yourself & finish writing your book by Donna Barker), and this one has a really interesting and unique take on procrastination. Many times when people procrastinate instead of writing, it’s because of some underlying fear or anxiety, but you don’t actually have to know exactly what you are afraid of or why you are procrastinating in order to stop the behavior.
The results of neuropsychology research suggest that in order to pave the way into writing, you can affect your amygdala and calm your brain. When doing an activity that releases more calming neurochemicals, it eases some of the anxiety that may be underlying your procrastination behavior and may then make it easier to stop procrastinating and get to work.
The difficulty is finding activities that can do that for you. Also, activities will sometimes stop working as well for stopping procrastination behavior, so you have then find other things.
I did some knitting, which did calm me, but now that I was sitting down and relaxing, it also made me more aware that my IBS was really uncomfortable. So maybe my procrastination wasn’t just me being weird in the head.
I’m still feeling a bit uncomfortable, but I also want to get more work done, so I’ll start on the blocking now.
***
Terrible procrastination
My procrastination today was TERRIBLE! And I don’t even know why!
It’s true I did have some IBS discomfort, but it wasn’t enough to keep me from working. I’ve worked through worse discomfort before.
I was rather looking forward to going back to more blocking and getting all the blocking for book 4 done quickly. That would’ve been really nice, actually. So it wasn’t as if I was dreading the work I had to do.
I admit I haven’t been reading much fiction in the last few days, and it could be that I was creatively drained because I haven’t been refilling the creative well. I’ve read a lot of nonfiction, but I think it doesn’t recharge my creativity like fiction.
When I was procrastinating, I did some knitting and found myself feeling brain-dead as I was doing it. That could mean any one of several different things. Maybe I need to read some fiction. Or maybe I was just really physically tired but hadn’t realized it.
Regardless, I didn’t get as much work done as I wanted to today. However, I kept up my writing streak AND my email streak. In face, email/social media checking took 8 minutes. Exactly.
I also still managed to do my Japanese study, although I cut it short at 45 minutes.
So despite my terrible procrastination, I at least got everything checked off my To Do list. I just didn’t spend as many hours blocking as I could have.
Looking back over my day, I started getting derailed when I procrastinated doing the self-editing after writing. This was partly because I didn’t want to do it, but I realize that it’s also partly because I moved from my standing desk to my sitting desk right after finishing writing, and I had to transfer my writing from my Freewrite to Scrivener. I think that act of stopping and doing something else broke my momentum.
If I’d done my editing right away, I might still have procrastinated a few hours later. Or maybe I wouldn’t have because I hadn’t already set a precedence for my procrastination, so it wouldn’t have been so easy to fall into.
Regardless, it would probably be better for me to do my self-editing immediately after I finish writing so that I don’t get distracted or lose momentum. I probably shouldn’t change desks, but also maybe I shouldn’t even be distracted by the act of transferring my words over to Scrivener because it’s a completely different type of work and it distracts my brain. It gives me time to think about how much I don’t want to do the editing, and therefore to procrastinate.
It seems silly to be thinking like this, but I think my brain is just wired this way. I’m sure other writers have other weird personal quirks.
It might be the case that I’m creatively dry because I haven’t been reading, but right now I’m just too tired to want to spend a few minutes reading fiction. So hopefully I’ll have time to read tomorrow, instead.
Tomorrow:
I’ll continue my experiment of doing my writing and blocking first thing, and hopefully I’ll be better able to take advantage of my energy levels tomorrow morning.
I’ll be reducing my word count tomorrow so I can spend more hours doing the blocking. I think I’ll aim for only 1 writing sprint of 25 minutes.
I’ll practice writing continuously without stopping, so I can write faster. I also will try to write clean copy.
I’ll try to do the self-editing right away after I finish writing so I don’t get distracted.
I’ll try to speed through the blocking for book 4, and then get started immediately on the blocking for the other books in the series so I can get it all done at once. This will hopefully prevent the timeline confusion I had today.
I have to make sure to read some fiction!
***
Writing: Time spent: 1 hour, 32 minutes
Writing: Total number of words: 1550 words
Writing: Overall writing speed: 1011 words/hour
Writing streak: 6 days
Editing: Time spent: 16 minutes
Blocking: time spent: 2 hours, 2 minutes
Email/Social Media streak: 4 days
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 1 hour, 33 minutes
My takeaway for today: Train yourself to write faster like pulp fiction writers by practicing writing continuously during sprints, without stopping.
My second takeaway for today: Aim for cleaner rough drafts like pulp fiction writers.
My third takeaway for today: To prevent the confusion I’m having with the book timeline, reduce the daily word count until I finish blocking not just book 4, but all the books in the series. Then after the blocking is done, ramp up the word count and outline the contemporary series, which has completely different characters and time period.
My fourth takeaway for today: Self-edit RIGHT AWAY after you finish writing, so you don’t lose momentum.
I woke up feeling okay-ish and had been planning to jump right into writing, but I found that I kind of need a little time to myself in the morning to wake up. I made tea, ate breakfast.
I haven’t been feeling well enough to do my house chores lately. I have one house chore assigned to each day so that I eventually get to the entire house over the course if two or three weeks, with some chores repeating (such as cleaning the toilet). When I was feeling better, I would get my chore done before writing, because otherwise the thought of a chore left undone would nag at me while I was working. Also, I was less likely to get it done if I left it for later in the day.
This morning, I was still feeling a little sleepy, and decided to do my house chore for today (mopping the kitchen floor), especially because it was bothering me that I hadn’t done it last week.
It took all of 10 minutes, and I felt so much better after it had been done. Something about a clean house, clean mind, I guess.
Plan for today:
My energy levels have been low lately because of my health issues, so I mixed up the order of my tasks to try to take advantage of my higher energy levels in the morning. I’ll start with writing, then move to blocking, and only after that’s done will I do my Japanese study and also check email/social media.
I’m continuing my experiment in fast writing. I’ll be doing vomit writing in 25 minute sprints, and then after I’ve reached about 1500 words, I’ll do a self-editing pass to correct errors and take care of anything I’ve flagged (this is mostly things for research, or occasionally different word choices).
Today I decided to try using my Freewrite Traveler again, since it makes it very difficult to back up and correct what I’ve written before. It’s more effort to move the cursor than on the Alphasmart, so it’s ideal for training me to just keep moving forward despite typos and stuff.
After writing, I’m hoping to get about 2 hours of blocking.
Thankfully, since I’ve been pretty consistent with my Japanese study for several months now, I’m hopeful that it won’t be difficult to get myself to do it even after my blocking is done. And yesterday my email/social media took only 15 minutes, so I think I’ll be more likely to do it since I’ll be expecting it to take less than 30 minutes total.
***
Vomit writing on the Freewrite Traveler
My writing speed was not that much faster than yesterday, and I have a TON of typos.
Since I was concentrating on writing fast, and on not backspacing, I closed my eyes a lot while typing because the lag between my typing and the letters appearing on the e-Ink screen is distracting. Since I was closing my eyes, I wasn’t as frustrated with the lag like I have been before when I used the Freewrite Traveler.
However, I’ve been too spoiled with using my gaming keyboard for the past several months. The Freewrite keyboard is actually quite nice, but I definitely prefer the Blue Outemu keys on my keyboard. They just feel so much better. So typing on the Freewrite Traveler had a little more resistance than I’m used to, and it made it harder for me to type accurately.
To be honest, I’m only on the second day of my experiment with vomit writing, and I don’t really like it. I fully admit, I’m currently procrastinating going through and editing all my typos.
I confess that I like the idea of just to keep writing without stopping, without second-guessing yourself and where the story is going. I found myself closing my eyes a lot as I was typing. I think I will try doing that more.
But I don’t think I’ll use the Freewrite Traveler again tomorrow. I also decided I want to try to have cleaner copy without the typos. For why, read on.
Pulp fiction writers
Yesterday before bed, I was reading another writing book, this one about the writing process for pulp fiction writers from the 1940s until about the 1980s. For the ones whose only source of income was their writing, since they had to write SO many stories every month in order to try to get one or two of them published, they were writing a crazy number of words each month.
They essentially wrote one to two stories a day on their typewriters, then mailed them off to magazines for consideration. It sounded essentially like flinging spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Out of the 45 stories they wrote each month, if two of them sold, they made enough to feed a middle-income family of the times.
The author of the book talked about reaching pulp fiction writing speeds, showing that it was entirely possible (although the book neglects mentioning anything about the time required for plotting for the people who outline before writing).
But what struck me was that these pulp fiction writers were writing about 8000 words a day on a typewriter. I know there are probably some of you who have never used an electric typewriter, much less a manual one. Corrections are a PAIN.
I don’t think all of them, but many of these full-time pulp writers were essentially writing first drafts clean enough to send straight off to magazines. The author of the writing book was saying that it is possible to achieve these kinds of large word count days without vomit writing, without tons of typos and errors and things to be corrected.
I’m sure at least some fo them were retyping their first drafts before sending them off, but if they had to sell to make money, and if they had to write a lot in order to sell, the time they didn’t have to take retyping was more time to write another story.
I honestly don’t know how those pulp fiction writers would be able to write such clean drafts. I guess they thought about each sentence before typing it so that it said exactly what they wanted to say. (Which actually sounds a lot like the way your mind has to work when you write via dictation.)
The author just says that these pulp authors practiced a lot (and if they were writing 8000 words a day, they were practicing a LOT) and eventually learned to not only write fast, but write clean. They trained themselves to do it.
I can see how that might be the case. I don’t know if I could do that, but I can at least train myself to write continuously during my sprints, without stopping.
I had thought that it wouldn’t be possible to write a lot of words without vomit writing, but perhaps that isn’t true (at least, not true for everyone), especially since these pulp fiction writers were actually writing quite a lot of words a day. Since I’m already disliking the vomit-writing (especially without backspacing), maybe this notion of writing clean rough drafts is something I can aim for.
Also, maybe if I write a little more consciously, I’ll stop making spelling errors or need to rewrite my sentences. It might seem counterintuitive to slow down my writing in order to speed up, but I won’t lose time to going back to make corrections.
Well, I can at least try to do these things—write fast and write clean. Also, at least I now know they’re not necessarily incompatible.
Timeline confusion
I actually ended up confusing the timeline of my book while I was writing, because I had blocked a future scene yesterday. While writing, I almost mentioned a character who hasn’t appeared yet, and if I had done that, it would have changed the entire direction of the dialogue, and I’d have had to heavily edit it later. Luckily, I wasted some time scrolling through my blocking notes and belated realized I had forgotten that the character hadn’t been introduced into the story yet.
I actually noticed myself doing this when I did this experiment before of writing one scene while blocking scenes later in the book. I would be forgetful and confused about what had happened already in the book, and what hadn’t happened yet.
The only solution I can think of is to reduce my daily word count for the next few days and just finish blocking the rest of the scenes in this book.
The problem is what happens after that. If I continue to do a little writing each day, and a little blocking each day, then I’ll end up outlining/blocking the next book in the series while writing this one. And I don’t know if I’ll run into the same type of confusion of my series timeline.
And the only solution I could come up with for THAT would be to reduce my daily word count until I finished outlining and blocking ALL the books in the series.
That might not be a bad idea. It will take me longer to write this book, but other books in the series will take much less time to write. Once I finish blocking this series (all the books are already outlined), I can write the books in the series while outlining the books of my contemporary series, so I won’t have to worry about the confusion issue since it’ll be an entirely different series and time period.
And this way, I won’t have to stop my writing streak in order to block the rest of the scenes of this book, I’ll just reduce the writing a little. Since I’m in the middle of writing a long serial novel, I will have to block all the other books, too, but I’ll still be writing this book, just fewer words per day. When I finish all the blocking, I’ll be able to ramp up my words per day again to what I’m doing now or maybe even more.
Yes, I think I’ll try this.
***
Self-editing done
I did the first pass of self-editing on what I wrote today, and it didn’t take very long at all. I also hadn’t made many notes to myself, so there was very little to look up.
However, I am hoping I didn’t miss too many spelling errors. I actually just checked and discovered two more I missed. My spell-check catches most of them, but there are some which are correctly spelled words, but the wrong word is used. For example, the word sue instead of use (I do that one a lot).
I hire a proofreader, and she catches almost all my errors, but even she doesn't catch every single one. And the more errors I have, percentage-wise the more will get past my proofreader.
This just reinforces my belief that I should try to write cleaner. I didn’t see a gigantic leap in writing speed when I didn’t stop to correct my typos, and even though it might simply be because I haven’t practiced enough in writing fast, I’m not entirely sure that not backspacing will make that much of a difference for me. It will only end up decreasing the quality of my finished book, and I’m not willing to do that, not unless my speed is significantly higher, such as double what I’m doing now.
***
Distracted
I was really distracted after finishing the editing, maybe because I had procrastinated a little bit before doing the editing. Afterward, I looked into something for my mom, and then it was time for lunch. So I suppose I can just say I took a long lunch.
But then after lunch, I was still distracted. I did have some slight IBS discomfort, but I don’t think my distraction was entirely because of that.
Calming activity
I’m reading another writing productivity book from the library (Scrappy Rough Draft: Use science to strategically motivate yourself & finish writing your book by Donna Barker), and this one has a really interesting and unique take on procrastination. Many times when people procrastinate instead of writing, it’s because of some underlying fear or anxiety, but you don’t actually have to know exactly what you are afraid of or why you are procrastinating in order to stop the behavior.
The results of neuropsychology research suggest that in order to pave the way into writing, you can affect your amygdala and calm your brain. When doing an activity that releases more calming neurochemicals, it eases some of the anxiety that may be underlying your procrastination behavior and may then make it easier to stop procrastinating and get to work.
The difficulty is finding activities that can do that for you. Also, activities will sometimes stop working as well for stopping procrastination behavior, so you have then find other things.
I did some knitting, which did calm me, but now that I was sitting down and relaxing, it also made me more aware that my IBS was really uncomfortable. So maybe my procrastination wasn’t just me being weird in the head.
I’m still feeling a bit uncomfortable, but I also want to get more work done, so I’ll start on the blocking now.
***
Terrible procrastination
My procrastination today was TERRIBLE! And I don’t even know why!
It’s true I did have some IBS discomfort, but it wasn’t enough to keep me from working. I’ve worked through worse discomfort before.
I was rather looking forward to going back to more blocking and getting all the blocking for book 4 done quickly. That would’ve been really nice, actually. So it wasn’t as if I was dreading the work I had to do.
I admit I haven’t been reading much fiction in the last few days, and it could be that I was creatively drained because I haven’t been refilling the creative well. I’ve read a lot of nonfiction, but I think it doesn’t recharge my creativity like fiction.
When I was procrastinating, I did some knitting and found myself feeling brain-dead as I was doing it. That could mean any one of several different things. Maybe I need to read some fiction. Or maybe I was just really physically tired but hadn’t realized it.
Regardless, I didn’t get as much work done as I wanted to today. However, I kept up my writing streak AND my email streak. In face, email/social media checking took 8 minutes. Exactly.
I also still managed to do my Japanese study, although I cut it short at 45 minutes.
So despite my terrible procrastination, I at least got everything checked off my To Do list. I just didn’t spend as many hours blocking as I could have.
Looking back over my day, I started getting derailed when I procrastinated doing the self-editing after writing. This was partly because I didn’t want to do it, but I realize that it’s also partly because I moved from my standing desk to my sitting desk right after finishing writing, and I had to transfer my writing from my Freewrite to Scrivener. I think that act of stopping and doing something else broke my momentum.
If I’d done my editing right away, I might still have procrastinated a few hours later. Or maybe I wouldn’t have because I hadn’t already set a precedence for my procrastination, so it wouldn’t have been so easy to fall into.
Regardless, it would probably be better for me to do my self-editing immediately after I finish writing so that I don’t get distracted or lose momentum. I probably shouldn’t change desks, but also maybe I shouldn’t even be distracted by the act of transferring my words over to Scrivener because it’s a completely different type of work and it distracts my brain. It gives me time to think about how much I don’t want to do the editing, and therefore to procrastinate.
It seems silly to be thinking like this, but I think my brain is just wired this way. I’m sure other writers have other weird personal quirks.
It might be the case that I’m creatively dry because I haven’t been reading, but right now I’m just too tired to want to spend a few minutes reading fiction. So hopefully I’ll have time to read tomorrow, instead.
Tomorrow:
I’ll continue my experiment of doing my writing and blocking first thing, and hopefully I’ll be better able to take advantage of my energy levels tomorrow morning.
I’ll be reducing my word count tomorrow so I can spend more hours doing the blocking. I think I’ll aim for only 1 writing sprint of 25 minutes.
I’ll practice writing continuously without stopping, so I can write faster. I also will try to write clean copy.
I’ll try to do the self-editing right away after I finish writing so I don’t get distracted.
I’ll try to speed through the blocking for book 4, and then get started immediately on the blocking for the other books in the series so I can get it all done at once. This will hopefully prevent the timeline confusion I had today.
I have to make sure to read some fiction!
***
Writing: Time spent: 1 hour, 32 minutes
Writing: Total number of words: 1550 words
Writing: Overall writing speed: 1011 words/hour
Writing streak: 6 days
Editing: Time spent: 16 minutes
Blocking: time spent: 2 hours, 2 minutes
Email/Social Media streak: 4 days
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 1 hour, 33 minutes
My takeaway for today: Train yourself to write faster like pulp fiction writers by practicing writing continuously during sprints, without stopping.
My second takeaway for today: Aim for cleaner rough drafts like pulp fiction writers.
My third takeaway for today: To prevent the confusion I’m having with the book timeline, reduce the daily word count until I finish blocking not just book 4, but all the books in the series. Then after the blocking is done, ramp up the word count and outline the contemporary series, which has completely different characters and time period.
My fourth takeaway for today: Self-edit RIGHT AWAY after you finish writing, so you don’t lose momentum.
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