Day 968 - A change in how I record my writing time

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I woke up yesterday with another IBS flare up, but I managed to get some marketing work done in the morning, which is stuff I can do despite the pain. It got only a little better in the afternoon, but I wanted to try to get some work done on the manuscript, so I decided to dictate a bit. I realized I needed to block the scene better, so I dictated my blocking notes and managed to get that done. I didn’t write any prose, but I was ready to start writing the scene today.

Unfortunately I had some IBS pain this morning, and so I did a little bit of marketing instead. But the IBS didn’t decrease much by the afternoon, so I ended up doing dictation while still being a bit uncomfortable. I thought I’d only do a little dictation, but I ended up dictating about half the scene, approximately 3000 words, which took 75 minutes. My dictation speed wasn’t too bad, about 2500 words per hour. The cleanup editing took a little less time, 65 minutes.

I made a decision today to change how I recorded my writing time and word count. Until now, I’ve been counting both my dictation time and the time it takes to cleanup the dictation as writing time. This is because when I type and write, the editing I do in the cleanup time is essentially what I do as I type.

But today I decided to classify the cleanup time as editing time instead. This is because a lot of my cleanup editing time is making corrections and doing research, not writing.

Another reason I decided to classify my cleanup time as editing instead is because I’m considering not doing my cycling edits. The reason is because I’m just getting way too far behind on doing my cycling edits. They take up a significant chunk of my day, and at the moment, I’ve been aiming to dictate at least 3000 words a day. That usually takes me 60-90 minutes of dictation and then 60-90 minutes of cleanup editing. At the end of the day, I’m absolutely exhausted and I haven’t been doing my cycling edits. It doesn’t help that I don’t really like doing edits to begin with, and I have to force myself to do the cleanup editing right after I finish the dictation or else whenever I come across something Dragon misunderstood, I won’t know what I was trying to say.

I haven’t decided for sure if I’m going to stop doing cycling edits, because I still hold hopes that I can increase my writing stamina so I can get more hours of work done in a day. Unfortunately I can still only do so many hours of writing a day before I get too tired. It hasn’t helped that I’m more fatigued because I’ve had IBS flareups the past several weeks. When I have IBS, I tend to do marketing tasks, and I’ve had a lot to do since I decided to spend more time on social marketing and since I started experimenting with Amazon ads. I still try to prioritize the writing, but it’s often at the end of the day when the symptoms die down a little, but when I’m more tired.

Anyway, I classified my cleanup time as editing because it’s become a combination of cleanup and doing cycling edits at the same time, since I’m doing the same types of research as I do when I do the cycling.

What will happen is that the amount of time I spend in editing each book will increase compared to books 4 and 5. My writing time for book 6 will also be less than books 4 and 5 since the “writing” time for book 6 won’t include the cleanup editing.

Come to think of it, I haven’t yet done another analysis of the time taken for books 4 and 5 yet. I’ll try to do that this week.

Writing streak: 447 days

Dictation streak: 23 days

My takeaway for today: I need to remember to do an analysis of the time taken for my Lady Wynwood books and compare them.

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