Day 674: Figured out a difficult plot problem

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I’m still working on my Hawaii book outline today. I didn’t get as much done yesterday, but I woke up a bit earlier today, so I hope to get more done today. As yesterday, I did only the bare minimum of writing and blocking on my Regency book, just to keep up my streak.

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I had a long stretch of uninterrupted time, but for some reason I had to keep pulling my attention back to my work. I wasn’t distracted for more than a couple minutes at a time, I wasn’t completely focused on my work. However, I don’t feel like I wasted time or anything like that, I was always able to get back on track quickly.

Part of the reason might be because I was wrestling with a particularly difficult story problem today. I could practically feel steam coming out of my ears as I tried to think and figure out a solution to the problem.

Since I was having so much trouble figuring out how to solve my problem, I did a lot of free-writing to brainstorm solutions. In many ways, 4thewords is perfect for this because I’m motivated to write a lot of words as I free-write in order to defeat monsters, and the more I write, the more I’m able to brainstorm ideas, whether they’re good or bad. The important part is to just keep writing and free-writing.

Eventually, after enough brainstorming, I was finally able to figure out the solution, so that made me pretty happy. However, my brain is also pretty tired by now. I got about 5 hours of work done rather than 6, but I think I’ll stop here for today.

The good news is that as long as I don’t come across any more plot threads with broken logic, I think I’ll finish the outline tomorrow!

Regency series:

Editing: Time spent: 3 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 8 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 189 words

Writing streak: 153 days

Blocking: time spent: 10 minutes

Blocking streak: 147 days

Hawaii series:

Outlining: time spent: 4 hours, 47 minutes

Time spent doing other writing-related business: 3 minutes

My takeaway for today: Remember to just keep free-writing and brainstorming when I come across plot problems.

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