Day 974 - Dictation brainstorming

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I didn’t sleep well last night, I woke up with IBS pain, and I also found a huge plot hole in this next scene I was going to write, so I’m not sure how much writing I’m going to get done today. I intend to dictate a brainstorming session to try to fix my plot hole. I think that I tend to brainstorm better while dictating, but it might also partly be because I’m moving around while dictating, and that probably helps me to think better, too.

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Well today ended up being rather terrible in terms of word count. My IBS didn’t get any better despite taking medication, which only made me sleepy. I did manage to get some marketing done while I wasn’t feeling well, so it wasn’t completely wasted time.

When I finally felt better in the late afternoon, I had technical difficulties. First my digital voice recorder set up had issues. Then our external hard drive started beeping and I had to figure out what was wrong. Then I decided to set up a different headset for recording to see how that compared with the digital recorder (I should have known it would be worse).

However, I did manage to get in two dictation sessions which were brainstorming my plot problem. The dictation brainstorming worked really well. Sure I repeated myself a lot, but I tend to do that when I type and freewrite also. However, I found that I needed to add a typing session at the end to clean up the dictation and organize my thoughts, then add notes to my manuscript so that I know what I need to add to what scene.

But in total it took me almost 3 hours to figure out a way to get past my plot hole, and I’m going to need to do some editing of previous chapters to fix it.

Normally they tell you to just keep writing and fix the issues later, but I think I’d like to get the editing done now. I think that if I can solidify the changes that have to happen in the previous scenes, it’ll help me better write the coming scenes. If I only have a vague idea of changes I wanted to make, then coming scenes might end up having problems.

So despite my stellar word count yesterday, today was a big fat zero. However, once I get the editing done and block the new scene (which I need to add in order to fix the plot problem), I will keep going on the manuscript. If I don’t run into any other plot problems, and if my IBS behaves, I’ll be able to continue to build up my writing stamina and get more hours of work done each day.

Right now I’m exhausted. I don’t know if it’s because I’m fatigued from struggling with the IBS pain all day, or because I’m mentally tired from trying to work through my manuscript plot problem. I’m too tired to work on my Hawaii book also, so I’ll skip that today.

Writing streak: 453 days

Dictation streak: 29 days

My takeaway for today: Dictation brainstorming seems to work well, but I do still need to add a typing session at the end to clean up the dictation and organize my thoughts.

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