Day 672: Focusing on my Hawaii book today

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I’m going to change things up a bit today. I’ve been prioritizing my Regency books when I work each day, and doing work on outlining my Hawaii book only if I have time and energy at the end of the day. However, lately I’ve been tired and haven’t been able to consistently be able to get work done on the book.

Once the outline is done, I only need to spend a few minutes each day on the Hawaii book and write 100 words a day. However, finishing the outline is taking a long time.

So I think I’ll do only the bare minimum on my Regency books today, and then spend more time outlining the Hawaii book. Once it’s outlined, then I’ll only have to spend 10-15 minutes a day writing it, and can spend the rest of my work time on my Regency books. That way, I can more quickly have at least a little something for my contemporary readers to enjoy while I’m still mostly working on my Regency books.

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I pushed myself a bit harder today and ended up getting a lot of work done, and put in almost 6 hours! I wasn’t too distracted while working, either.

Unfortunately I didn’t finish the outline for my Hawaii book, but I made a lot of good progress. I’ll do this again tomorrow.

I think that I am able to do outlining better when I have a long chunk of time to work on it. I recalled that this was how I did the outlines for the books in the Regency series—I spent long hours each day only doing the outlining, nothing else. I think it helped to be able to focus only on that one thing so that I could fully grasp the plot problems I had to figure out and come up with solutions.

I had originally increased my daily word count so that I could release my books faster, but now I wonder if it’s only making the blocking take longer because I’m only spending 1-2 hours each day on it. If I had 4 or 5 hours only for the blocking, I wonder if I’d be more efficient because I’d be fully immersed in it and be able to focus and concentrate better. I know from talking to other authors that for some of them, it takes them a bit of time to get to the point where they can fully focus. Maybe that’s what I’m missing.

I think I’ll focus only on outlining my Hawaii book until the outline is done. Then when I go back to my Regency book, I think I’ll go back to only a bare minimum of words written each day on the manuscript, and then devote the rest of the time to finishing the blocking. Giving myself a long period of time for the blocking might help me to be able to see and solve blocking problems faster than it’s been taking me recently.

Regency series:

Editing: Time spent: 7 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 15 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 220 words

Writing streak: 151 days

Blocking: time spent: 24 minutes

Blocking streak: 145 days

Hawaii series:

Outlining: time spent: 4 hours, 54 minutes

Time spent doing other writing-related business: 18 minutes

My takeaway for today: I might benefit more from a long stretch of time each day for blocking or outlining, to enable myself to full immerse in the task and concentrate better.

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