Camy's Writing Diary

I only did the bare minimum today, partly because it’s New Year’s Eve, but also partly because I got a terrible headache. It was a battle just to get the bare minimum done, but I’m glad I didn’t break my streak. Editing: Time spent: 4 minutes Writing: Time spent: 12 minutes Writing: Total number of words: 225 words Writing streak: 57 days Blocking: time spent: 6 minutes Blocking streak: 51 days

My IBS is feeling better, but I had a bad sinus headache yesterday. And while I can sometimes work through IBS discomfort, I absolutely can’t work with a headache. Every time I try, the headache only gets worse and can sometimes turn into a full-blown migraine. So I did only a little work yesterday, just to keep my streak. Streak versus public accountability I know I talked a few days ago about how my writing streak took the place of the public accountability of my blog, but I realized something yesterday that made me realize that maybe I was wrong. The writing streak does ensure I do some writing every day and keep my thoughts in my story world, which makes me much more efficient on the days when I feel well and can get a lot done. It forces me to work when I’m not feeling 100%, and I thought that was all I needed to combat laziness. But I realized that while there are a lot of days where I feel like I’m microwaved poop, there are some days when I’m feeling okay-ish and I coul...

I had a bit of a flare-up yesterday, but I felt pretty good today and got a lot done. Blocking/outlining and writing at the same time I’m having a hard time because I’m blocking the rest of the scenes from book 4, but at the same time I’m writing chapter 5 of the same book, and whenever I start either writing or blocking, I have a moment of confusion about where I am in the story timeline. It’s very disorienting, and I end up needing to re-read things in order to remember what has already happened and what hasn’t happened yet. I don’t have a great memory to begin with, and deliberately working on two different points in time in the same series is taxing my poor brain. Now I wish I’d done all the blocking first so that I only need to write the book. So far, I’ve been working about 30 minutes a day on writing, which is 400-500 words. But because I’m having so much trouble in orienting myself in the story timeline, I think what I’m going to try to do is do only the minimum 100 wor...

Merry Christmas! I kept up my writing streak and worked a little even today. It helped that Christmas this year was quiet. I originally started this daily writing blog to be a sort of lab notebook to record my experiments to improve my productivity—what I tried, what happened, and an evaluation of the experiment. But a second reason for starting this daily writing blog was for public accountability for my writing. It worked to make sure that I did some writing every day and didn’t slack off, because I had to blog about how much writing I’d gotten done. It was harder to admit when I’d only worked for a short amount of time, or only written a few words. This was before my health really derailed me. Now I’m kind of lucky when I feel well enough to get an hour of work done. But I’ve also noticed that since starting my writing streak, the streak has taken the place of public accountability. Instead of needing to blog about how much work I did (or didn’t) get done each day, I am alwa...

Need to do more exercise to improve energy levels I’ve been slowly feeling better, but still not enough to get 5 hours of work a day (the other 3 hours, I do my Japanese study and reading to make a full 8 hour workday). There were a few days I worked more than one hour, but most days I’m working only the bare minimum. I’m feeling a bit disappointed in myself that I can’t get more done, but lately I just haven’t had the energy to try to push myself when I’m feeling like fly-meets-windshield. I think it’s because I’ve been lazy about exercising—if I feel a bit uncomfortable, I just don’t go exercise. For a while I wasn’t able to exercise at all because my IBS was so bad, but now that it’s getting better, I can go out walking without discomfort, so I should just do it, as Nike would say. Keeping up my writing streak has improved my productivity I’ve still kept up my writing streak and made sure to do at least the bare minimum of 100 words every day. I’m actually really grateful I ...

How I’ve been I haven’t posted in a few days since I didn’t really have much to post. I had marketing followup tasks to do after I had that Facebook event on Saturday, which took a few hours every day. I’m always surprised how much time marketing takes. Time always seems to fly by faster when I’m doing it, but I can’t say I’m really enjoying myself as much as when I’m writing. Yet when I’m writing, the time passes so slowly. I guess when I do marketing, there’s just so much to do that I just focus and get it done, even when it takes several hours. I haven’t been feeling terrible, but I’ve been about at 60-70% of normal. Every so often I’ll get some IBS discomfort, and the distraction as well as the tiredness that follows often makes it hard to get work done, but I’ve been keeping up my writing streak and doing at least the minimum each day. Hours of work a day I still haven’t gotten back to a full 5 hour work day, but I’m doing 1-3 hours. I also read in Telling Lies for Fun and...

As of today, I’ve written every day for 30 days in a row! it was really hard on days when I wasn’t feeling well, but I set a low daily minimum of 100 words, which was easy to hit no matter how I was feeling. I don’t yet have a reward system for my streak milestones, which I know I really need. At the moment, I’m motivated to keep up my streak simply because I don’t want to break it, since I know it will probably depress me if I do. Since I don’t have a reward system yet, I just made a 30-day writing streak badge for myself. I’ll post this on my Daily Writing Blog sidebar. I had a marketing event today, a Facebook party thrown by an author friend of mine and the other authors in the box set she belongs to. These kinds of things are great because I get to meet new readers, but the party itself is really easy because I can write my posts in advance and then post one every 30 minutes. My biggest beef is how hard it is to respond to replies, because Facebook doesn’t make it easy to ...

Streaks despite sickness I had an IBS flare up the past couple days, but it wasn’t too bad and while I only did the bare minimum of work those days, I’m feeling better today despite still feeling a bit of discomfort. (There was also one day where I actually did feel better, but I had a lot of marketing work to do, so I only did the bare minimum of writing and spent a couple hours doing the marketing.) Keeping up my streak during the flare up wasn’t as hard as before. Maybe it’s because I’m getting close to 30 days and I would feel terrible to break the streak at this point. So that motivates me to do some work every day to keep up my streak. It occurred to me today that if I ever did break my streak, I think I would be so disheartened that I wouldn’t start it up again (I’d just work and not record days in a row that I did some writing). I guess, for my personality, that’s the problem with streaks. I know I’m very achievement-oriented, so failing something I was really working har...