Day 1017 - New priorities

The good news is that my IBS hasn’t been bothering me as much lately. The bad news is that I ended up having a lot of family/personal/house business the past week(s) that kept me from doing more than just the bare minimum on my writing.

New priorities

In light of the fact that I’ve had other non-writing things to do, I decided to cut back on my work time and reprioritize my projects. In a sense, it’s like when I was working full time and I only had 2-3 hours each day to do my writing. At the moment, I have to try to cram in all my work in the time I have available each day, which is usually only a few hours, and I don’t have many uninterrupted hours. The time I have to write is usually only available here and there in small chunks throughout the day.

However, it’s actually been really good because I’ve been able to focus since I only have a limited amount of time to get my work done. Something about the time deadline really does make me resist distractions.

Anyway, since I haven’t gotten a lot of work done for over a week, I took an unplanned break from the book I just finished writing, my Regency book 6. This ended up being a good thing since now I can do the self-editing on it, and it will seem a bit more fresh.

So my priority will be to finish the self-editing pass on this Regency manuscript so that I can send it off to my editor, and then put it up for pre-order. I am hoping this won’t take more than a week of time, especially since I hate self-editing. :(

I had the Hawaii book as my minor project to work on at the same time, but since I haven’t had as much time lately, I’ve decided to drop the Hawaii book until the self-editing is done.

After the self-editing is done, I decided I’m going to shift my focus away from my Regency series and instead work on my Hawaii book as my main project for the rest of this month. I’ll spend more time on that book, and a lower priority will be the next book in my Regency series, book 7—I’ll probably use the Regency for my dictation streak, but only for a few minutes each day to keep up my streak.

Broke my dictation streak

I ended up breaking my dictation streak last week. I felt a bit guilty about it, since it’s only 5 minutes of dictation a day, but lately I’ve been just so busy with other non-writing things that I had very little time to myself.

However, part of the reason I broke it is because I had to rearrange my writing priorities. I’m currently focused on self-editing the book I just finished, which I can’t use dictation on, and my other (minor) project is the Hawaii book. However, the Hawaii book is not a typical book project for me because it’s mostly rewriting/revising. So I have two projects that are editing or revising, and there isn’t a need for me to do any dictation on either of them.

I tried working a bit on the next Regency book (volume 7) and doing a few minutes of dictation on that, but it was too confusing for me to do work on volume 7 while I was editing volume 6—my sense of the timeline of the story got really screwed up.

So I decided not to do dictation while I’m finishing the self-editing for my Regency book 6. Once that’s done, I’ll shift my focus to the Hawaii book as my main project and Regency book 7 as my minor project, and I’ll be able to do some dictation on the Regency.

Usually, I’d be able to use dictation on at least one of my two projects, so the current two projects are not typical. My next Hawaii book will be written from scratch, so I’ll be able to use dictation on it.

Procrastination

It’s actually a really good thing that I’m doing my self-editing right now, since I don’t have large uninterrupted chunks of time. Most days, I'm able to get some editing done earlier in the day in between interruptions.

The problem is that once again, I’m battling against procrastination because I dislike the editing so much. A few days ago, I even did 2 hours of marketing work instead of the editing before I realized I was just procrastinating.

I’m not procrastinating quite as badly on days when I have a lot of non-writing things I need to do. On those days, there are only specific times when I can sit down to work, so the time pressure helps to force me to get started on work and not procrastinate.

On other days, I decided to try 25-minute Pomodoro sprints and breaks in between, and that seems to help me focus. If I’m interrupted, it’s not a big deal since I’m only doing self-editing, but if I’m not interrupted, I end up being able to work for an hour or two.

(Lack of) focus during self-editing

I really wish I could learn to focus when I’m self-editing like I can focus when I’m dictating. However, I like doing the writing and dictating, while I dislike the editing, so it takes me more energy to focus, and I end up procrastinating instead. The one thing that keeps me working is the thought that if I focus more now, I can finish the self-editing sooner!

I ended up doing more than 5 hours of work today, which was fantastic considering I had so many other things to do today. I think it was mostly because I had a long chunk of uninterrupted time this afternoon and got a lot done.

About 2 hours of that was time-sensitive marketing work that needed to be done, but it was some evergreen marketing that would keep working for me without much work on my part after I put in the initial effort to set it up.

The rest was editing on my Regency, but the majority of time was in writing an entire new section of a scene that needed to be added.

I was reminded that when I do a better job of doing the cleanup editing after dictation, or the cycling edit the day after I writing via typing, the self-editing is a lot easier for me. When the prose is clean, I find I am able to focus on the words and sentences and work on improving the writing. When there’s a lot of notes I left for myself and revisions I need to do, it feels like the momentum comes to a screeching halt and I have to shift gears from improving the writing to instead fixing whatever problem I come across.

While I was doing cleanup editing, there had been some information I needed to add to earlier scenes in the book, and instead of figuring out how to do it at the time, I just left notes for myself. I need to not do stuff like that and just work on the additions/revisions at the time I realize I need to do them.

Instead, I spent two hours of the self-editing time today writing those new sections in the book. I only got 3 scenes edited today. Normally, a scene takes anywhere from 15-30 minutes to edit, but in this case, it took 2 hours and 15 minutes for a single scene. That’s kind of disheartening.

My takeaway for today: If there’s revisions/additions that come up, make sure to do them while doing the cleanup or cycling edits so that I don’t lose momentum when I’m doing the self-editing later, and to make it overall easier to do the self-edit.