Day 1048 - Battle procrastination by leaving the house

Since I have been having such issues with procrastination for the past few days, I decided to nip it in the bud. When I leave the house and write in a different location, it always forces me to get work done, so I went for a walk with my digital voice recorder.

It worked really well. I dictated for about 90 minutes. My dictation speed was a bit slower because I was outside and I often had to pause and wait for a car or some chatting old ladies to pass by me, but I still managed to get a lot of words written.

I usually walk before my other “frogs” are done, but today was a little unusual because I slept badly last night. Because of that, I actually was awake and did some of my frogs in the early morning hours, so I didn’t need to do them when I finally woke up. So my schedule was even more free than usual and I had fewer obstacles in my way to prevent me from immediately going out for a walk.

I also avoided doing anything that might sap my energy before I started my writing—I didn’t check email or do any marketing.

I know I won’t always be able to go walking to write, but I will try to keep doing that this next week. I am hoping that as I get back into the rhythm of doing dictation every day, I’ll eventually stop needing to go walking to battle procrastination.

I did a little more than 2.5 hours of writing on my Regency book, since the cleanup editing took only about half the amount of time as the dictation. This isn’t normal, typically it’s a 1:1 ratio. I admit I was a bit tired and so my editing may not have been very detailed. The writing was also a bit messy because my blocking notes weren’t as detailed as usual. I think I was impatient to get started on my writing and so I rushed into the dictation without really organizing my blocking. The scene also ended up being really long, and I have a feeling I’ll need to cut a lot from it later. I considered doing the trimming right away, since I know I really dislike extensive revisions when I do my self-editing, but I think instead I’ll wait and see how the next scenes shape up. I’m fairly certain that there will be things in the current scene that will appear in the next scenes, so I’ll wait to cut those elements from this scene after those other scenes are completed.

I won’t be able to do any dictation in my book tomorrow because I didn’t finish the blocking of the next scene, and after the mess of the writing on this scene, I don’t want to rush ahead and do the dictation without a solid blocking outline. So I think instead tomorrow for my dictation exercise I’ll do some brainstorming of the book for the multi-author box set.