Day 1044 - Might be procrastinating dictation

I completely admit I haven’t blogged lately because I’ve been lazy. I also haven’t gotten much actual writing done, but I had a good excuse for that—I was visiting my parents for a month, and when I returned home, after a couple days unpacking and cleaning up the house, I had a bad IBS flare-up.

But now that I’m feeling better, I haven’t blogged because I haven’t gotten much done, but I realized today that I really need to keep up my blogging in order to keep myself accountable.

I wrote one scene in my new book (book 7 in my Regency series) before I left to visit my folks, but I haven’t written any other new scenes. Part of the reason is that the next scene—which ended up becoming two scenes—were not blocked well. My notes about the scene were a mess of ideas thrown together, and I didn’t have a cohesive structure for the scene at all.

If I tried to dictate based off of my notes, it would end up being a bunch of prose thrown messily together, and I’d need to spend a lot of time untangling it in self-editing. Knowing myself and my abhorrence for self-editing, I decided to spend time to organize the scene(s) before I started dictating them.

Unfortunately the first scene was completely aimless and I had to figure out a goal and obstacles for the scene, which took a little longer than I would have liked. But I finished blocking it yesterday and I’m finally satisfied that it’s well-organized and well-structured.

Today I’m blocking the second scene, which had originally been combined with the first scene. Separating it from the previous scene has brought in new elements and I needed to do some research yesterday, but I will hopefully be able to finish blocking it today.

Unfortunately—and I realize this sounds like I’m just creating excuses, but I ended up having a slight garden emergency (a wide-spread leaf curl infection on our peach tree which I hadn’t realized since I was away from home for a month) that was causing me a lot of stress and anxiety, and it ate up a few hours this morning. There was simply no way I could have done writing work before addressing the problem because I was so worried about it. Then I was busy doing my normal chores after lunch.

So now I have only a couple hours to work this afternoon before I have to start cooking dinner. One thing I became painfully aware of while I was visiting my parents was that cooking was never such a time-intensive production before I had IBS, but now that my diet is so restricted, it’s a lot more work for me and requires more advance planning.

All that to say—I’m really not trying to rationalize my lack of working hours today, but my mental state is a bit frazzled and I only have a couple hours to work, so I’m just going to work on the blocking today and not try to do any dictation. I had been hoping to start the dictation on the scene I just blocked, but I decided to try to do that tomorrow instead.

I’m also still working on two projects at once, the Regency and the Hawaii series. The Regency is my main project, and if I only have a few hours, that’s the one I focus on first. If I have time left over, I work on the Hawaii project.

But since I don’t want to do dictation today on the Regency, and since the Hawaii project is mostly just revising and editing an old manuscript, I might spend an hour on it today and get more done. I want to write the first book in the Hawaii series (not the current book, which is the prequel, but the book that follows it) before September this year, so I have to start doing more intensive outlining on it soon. I want to reach a good stopping point on the current prequel book first, and then I can shift my focus to the new book.

It doesn’t help that I haven’t been sleeping well since I got back home—my parents had an expensive new guest bed that I was using, and my back is missing it. Another issue is that I have a book launch class starting next week which is going to take a lot of time each day, and I’m trying to prepare for it as much as I can in advance.

However, I’m really glad that aside from the one flare-up, my IBS has been pretty good. I’ll get one or two slight bouts of nausea or cramping for 20-30 minutes during the day, but on a whole I’m pretty much symptom-free for most of my day. I haven’t had to readjust my work schedule for my IBS lately, but I simply haven’t had much time for writing work, so it also hasn’t been an issue.

***

Well, I ended up cooking dinner late because I was trying to get more writing work done.

I didn’t finish blocking that one scene in my Regency manuscript today. I decided to join an online writing sprint on 4thewords.com (I joined a co-op battle), but it wasn’t starting right away so I started editing my Hawaii book to do something while I waited. But when the co-op battle started, I had gotten on a roll on the Hawaii book, and I just kept working on it rather than going back to finish blocking the Regency scene. I also ended up eating dinner late because I was doing one last sprint session.

So I got work done, but I didn’t finish a scene in either project. I’ll have to try to get both scenes finished tomorrow. I still have to take time in the morning to treat our peach tree, but hopefully it won’t take so long and I’ll still have plenty of time to work on my writing in the afternoon.

However—and I thought of this when I was blogging earlier—I feel like maybe I’m also doing the blocking as a means of procrastinating the actual writing. Since I haven’t done dictation in a while (since I didn’t have anything blocked and ready to dictate), it’s really hard to get back into the rhythm of it. I had gotten into a schedule of dictating, then doing the cleanup editing, then doing some blocking of the next scenes so I could get started right away the next day.

One big problem is that the scenes I have next to write aren’t well blocked. Actually, if I remember correctly, for the last book (book 6 in my series), I had taken time off to do more extensive blocking and outlining for a few scenes in that book, too. As a result, it wasn't much work to check the blocking on the next scenes before they’d be ready for me to dictate the next day.

So maybe I just need to figure in the blocking time when I write. If I want to dictate without breaking a consecutive daily streak, I’ll have to make sure the blocking is done way ahead of schedule so that I have time to do more blocking if a particular scene needs work.

In order to keep up a dictation streak, I could also dictate brainstorming and general book outlining, but at the moment I’m still working on Year of the Dog, my Hawaii series prequel, which is revising a finished manuscript, so there’s no brainstorming or outlining necessary. I won’t need to do any brainstorming until I reach a good stopping point in Year of the Dog and start work on the outline for book 1 in the series.

So maybe I just need to push through until I get to that stopping point. After that, each day I can dictate either in the Regency novel or brainstorming for the outline, and in that way maybe I’ll be able to start and keep a dictation streak.

Well, that still doesn’t address the fact that I might be procrastinating starting the dictation at the moment. I’ll just have to force myself tomorrow to start dictation, even just a little bit. I’ll get my blocking notes ready so that I’ll be able to just dive into the dictation first thing when I start work. I may not have as much time for writing tomorrow, depending on how much time it takes me to take care of my gardening emergency, but I’ll try to get at least a little dictation done on the Regency scene, even if I only do some of it and don’t finish the entire scene. I think once I start dictation, it’ll be easier to just keep going, assuming I can do the blocking fast enough.