Day 679: Switching to large chunks of time for outlining/blocking

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I admit that today I was really tempted to just make it a sick day, because the sore in my mouth where I bit my tongue is really painful. I haven’t bitten my tongue this badly in a long time.

But my husband smoked ribs yesterday so I don’t have to cook tonight, so I thought I’d use the time to get some work done. However, I’m not aiming for as many hours as a normal day and I’m going at a more relaxed pace, since I feel a little bit like an invalid recovering from a wound.

Today I’m going to devote the majority of my work time on blocking the next book. I decided this because in working on the outline of my Hawaii book, I was reminded how I do my outlining/blocking much better when I have larger chunks of time to devote to it.

Also, I had been vaguely aware of it earlier, but when I start blocking each day, I usually have to spend some time reminding myself where I am in the story and where in the scene I last stopped. I think I have to re-immerse myself because I have to reorient my mind to a different place in my series timeline.

I knew this about myself already, that I can’t readily shift my brain from place to place in my series. But I had gotten impatient about releasing books faster, so I had decided to increase my daily word count. That decreased my blocking time, so I ended up doing only an hour or two of blocking a day.

But after my experience with the Hawaii book, I realize that it might be best for me to go back to what I had been doing earlier, which was doing the bare minimum of writing each day, and devote the bulk of my time to the blocking. That way I have the large chunk of time that the blocking/outlining seems to require from my brain.

I guess as I get older, I just can’t switch between points in time in my storyline (or even in between different stories) without some time to reorient myself, and I’d rather not have to waste too much of that time. It’s just too inefficient. I might have done things differently if I were younger or smarter, but I want to be more productive, and that means some concessions to my menopause brain, which is tons more forgetful (and I was already pretty forgetful even before menopause).

I’ll do the same with the Hawaii book. When I have to do more extensive blocking notes for a new scene, I’ll temporarily only do the bare minimum on my Regency and devote a large chunk of time to finishing the blocking for the scene so that I can fully focus on it.

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I thought I could at least get 3 hours of work done, but my knee started bothering me also. I ignored it for a while, but soon both just bothered me too much, so I decided to stop for the day.

Regency series:

Editing: Time spent: 2 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 10 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 160 words

Writing streak: 158 days

Blocking: time spent: 

Blocking streak: 152 days

Hawaii series:

Outlining: time spent: 0

Time spent doing other writing-related business: 25 minutes

My takeaway for today: Do the blocking/outlining in large chunks of time rather than a little every day because you seem to waste time reorienting yourself every time you switch to outlining.

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