Day 672: Focusing on my Hawaii book today

-

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.

***

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 21: Bullet journal, Surrender statement

-
Today was my writing Sabbath so I didn’t do any writing today, but I spent a lot of time doing writing-related things. I did some blogging, and I also reviewed my writing To Do list. I cleaned it up by checking off what’s been done, deleting what I no longer need to do, and making note of what I need to do this coming week. Before I started bullet journaling (in an electronic journal app, Day One Journal ), I had my To Do lists in a couple different places and I’d usually forget things I needed to do. Now I have them in my bullet journal, which combines journaling with task organizer, and I’m less likely to forget. I still set reminders for myself in my phone, but since I’m using my journal throughout the day every day, I’m more likely to see things I need to do. I found some of my old To Do lists today and incorporated some things in my bullet journal. One of them was my writing Surrender Statement, which is a prayer I pray before starting each day’s work. What’s a Surrender Sta
Read more

Day 783: Evaluation 7

-
It’s been almost seven months since I wrote my last Evaluation 6 , but I finally got around to Evaluation #7! Here’s the gist of what I’ve learned over the past few months about my writing and productivity. New schedule My IBS was slowly been starting to feel better recently. I am still extremely strict with my diet, but I am also starting to experiment with what foods I can and can’t eat. I have also started a new eating and sleeping schedule, which I have dubbed my “chrono-diet” because I’m trying to take advantage of my circadian rhythm, according to the book Change Your Schedule, Change Your Life (I had borrowed a copy from the library but I enjoyed it so much I went ahead and bought it). I have started waking up at 6 am and exercising first thing, then having breakfast after exercise. I do house chores and/or work until noon, which is when I eat lunch. I’m supposed to not eat until dinner around 5:30 or 6, but I haven’t been able to break the habit of snacking in the aftern
Read more

Day 91: Evaluation 3

-
Even though I was taking a few days off because of my health issues, I ended up doing some work after all, and also came up with some new ideas. But first, let me summarize the past month. Outlining my series Something which I thought was interesting was looking at the raw numbers of how long it took me to outline my Lady Wynwood’s Spies series. It had a rough start, especially because I changed my mind about it several times and had some bouts of writer’s block, but things picked up this year especially when I wrote down my writer’s process and began systematically doing the Snowflake method on each of the volumes in the series. I finished outlining all the books in the Lady Wynwood’s Spies series on August 1st! Yay! This included the serial novel. Unfortunately those numbers were not included in the above post on my raw numbers, but I will eventually do a follow-up post and also list how many hours it took me to write and edit the volumes in the series. Hopefully it will take
Read more