Camy's Writing Diary

I admit that this morning, I procrastinated work with other work. It’s easier to procrastinate with work that I’ll eventually have to do anyway, although it wasn’t particularly urgent, it was just a particular blog post that I’ve been wanting to do for a while now. I didn’t have anything else more urgent to do for my marketing work for today, but this particular blog post just took a while to do when I should have stopped after 15 or 20 minutes and finished it over the course of several days rather than all in one day. But I didn’t want to stop my inertia (momentum?) and just kept at it until it was done. I’m torn about how I feel about my procrastination today. On the one hand, I should have had more discipline and stopped myself after a certain amount of time so I could finish it another time. Because I kept at it, it took an extra hour of time that I could have spent working on my Regency. On the other hand, it was work that did need to be done eventually. And stopping to pick it up...

I’ve spent most of the last two weeks sick from the usual IBS issues, and I’m starting to wonder if a day will ever come when I’m not feeling pain from my IBS. This time, I honestly don’t know what I’ve been eating to cause the IBS, and I’ve had to simply make guesses. So I don’t know if I’ll start to feel better in a few days, I’ll just have to wait and see. I’ve been doing the bare minimum of work every day, although some days I do a bit more than that, but I’ve only been doing about 3 hours of work on the days I feel better. I’ve noticed a pattern in the IBS, where the most pain is between 6 am and 2 pm. I recently read a book, Change Your Schedule, Change Your Life , and apparently the intestines are most active at certain times of the day, based on the circadian rhythm, which would explain why my IBS is worst at certain times of the day. Because of that, I decided to try to brainstorm ways to work around the IBS and still get work done. The problem is that pretty much everything o...

I’m getting more and more frustrated that it takes me so long to get started on work in the mornings. This might be an aspect of the fact that I’ve never been much of a morning person—it takes me a while for my brain to start firing, so just getting dressed and out the door for my morning walk has been taking longer than it should. Then after breakfast, there are certain house chores that need to be done in the morning. It doesn’t take a huge amount of time, but it does take time. In thinking it over, I should instead adjust my schedule so that I do as many things in the late afternoon so that I can get started on work sooner. If I stop work a little earlier, I could do some of the house chores that can be put off until then. I can’t move all my house chores to the end of the day, but I could move one or two. It’s not going to reduce the amount of time things take, but it will enable me to get more done before lunch, and I think that will be a huge mental boost. Right now, since it’s s...

Today marks 210 consecutive days where I’ve written at least the bare minimum on my Regency series every single day! When I first started this writing streak, it was really hard. I was suffering from some bad IBS flare-ups and some days I felt so sick that I actually resented the fact that I had to write a little bit. The streak didn’t cause a feeling of achievement at that point, because I was forcing myself to work through some terrible pain. When I first started, I both loved and hated my writing streak. I think the key to my keeping up the streak was the fact that I deliberately made my bare minimum extremely doable—100 words or 5 minutes. Even if I’m feeling like roadkill, I can do at least 100 words. I might suffer through it, but it’s such a small amount that it makes it a lot easier for me to make sure I do it and keep up my streak. Also, a small amount like 100 words is something I can do on my phone if I don’t want to (or can’t) sit down at my computer. I have a friend who ha...

I got (yet another) late start to the day today, but it was because I was doing some “beginning of the month” organization of my bullet journal. I adjusted my main goals for the month of June and editing and reprioritized marketing tasks. Hopefully it will help streamline things so that when I do a little bit of marketing work each day, I’ll know what’s highest priority at a glance. I also took a bit longer for my marketing work today because I was in the middle of writing my June newsletter and didn’t want to break my train of thought. I have to send it out next week, so I’d rather take the time now rather than having to scramble to get it done later. Unfortunately, that means I didn’t get to doing my Regency writing before lunch. But I got all my other “frogs” done (exercise, Bible reading, email, marketing, the Hawaii serial novel) in addition to my organization of my bullet journal, so I feel like I actually accomplished a lot. I got a fair amount of writing done, but my back began...