Day 728: Streak power, marketing work

-

I had a couple sick days because I caught a cold, but I managed to do the bare minimum of work on my Regency novel every day to keep my streak going.

It’s amazing, the power of this streak. It’s over 200 days now, so I feel anxious if I don’t get writing done because I don’t want to break it. Since my bare minimum is so low (only 100 words or 5 minutes), it’s easy to do even when I’m feeling sick.

I admit, the first couple weeks of the streak were probably the hardest, especially because I was in the midst of a pretty bad IBS flare-up and didn’t want to get to work. This was before I found medication to relieve the symptoms so that I could get at least a few hours of work done.

I felt absolutely terrible on Saturday because of my cold, but I managed to get words written anyway since it was only 100 words. Keeping my streak keeps me invested in my manuscript so that I don’t have long stretches of time where I don’t work on it because of illness. It helps me be more efficient when I am finally able to spend more time on it, since I don’t have to spend time to re-read large sections to try to figure out where I am in the story.

Since I didn’t work on Saturday or Sunday, I wanted to get some work done today even though it was Memorial Day. However, I almost didn’t get any work done today because my morning was completely shot by another IBS flare-up. This was my mistake, I forgot to look up an ingredient in my baking and it ended up aggravating my IBS.

I’m rather frustrated with myself because I’ve been pretty good lately about remembering to check everything I put in my mouth. I’ve been trying to adhere to my strict diet so that I don’t have days like this, where my IBS prevents me from working for several hours.

I did some marketing work instead of writing because it was easier for me to stop when the nausea and pain got bad. However, my symptoms got better later in the afternoon and I decided to try to get some work done. I have to remember to try this again when I have an IBS flare-up—an hour or two of marketing work is better than no writing at all.

I managed to get work done on my Hawaii book as well as my Regency series, although I didn’t have as much time to work on my Regency as I would have without the health issues. I also didn’t get any Regency research reading done today.

Still, I got some work done despite feeling terrible this morning. I think it’s been a good day.



Regency series:

Editing: Time spent: 26 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 1 hour, 6 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 587 words

Writing streak: 207 days

Blocking: time spent: 46 minutes

Blocking: Total number of words: 408 words

Blocking streak: 201 days

Hawaii series:

Editing: Time spent: 3 minutes

Writing: time spent: 16 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 228 words

Writing-related business:

Regency research reading: time spent: 0

Email: time spent: 10 minutes

Marketing: time spent: 1 hour, 28 minutes

My takeaway for today: The next time I have an IBS flare-up, do some marketing work so that I get something done besides just the bare minimum.

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