Day 1057 - Broke my dictation streak

-

I was simply way too busy last week to get my work done, and so I broke my dictation streak. :(

I just had a lot of house chores to do, and then I had office hours and homework for the book launch course I’m taking. The course has been really useful so far, but taking a lot of time because I find myself wanting to attend all the office hours in order to learn from other students’ questions.

I also made a mistake and kind of? broke my website. That whole thing was really stressful and ate up a ton of time on Saturday.

So rather than trying to stress myself out and try to squeeze in my dictation, I decided to just do some of the cleanup editing I never got around to doing, and then called it a day.

Even though I know that skipping dictation makes it slower the next time I do dictation, it’s just a bit too difficult to try to find something to dictate every single day. It’s easier because I’m working on two projects at once, but not when one of those projects is imply editing an old manuscript rather than writing a new one.

On top of that, I need to do research for a novella I need to write for a multi-author box set that’ll be releasing this October, so there really is nothing else for me to dictate. And if my blocking notes aren’t prepared for the next scene, I can’t dictate the scene.

So I decided to just not worry about a dictation streak right now.

Not having to keep up my dictation streak also made it less stressful when I got a bad IBS flareup on Saturday. It wasn’t debilitating pain, but it was uncomfortable and distracting, and I ended up only doing my coursework yesterday and the bare minimum of writing.

I feel better today, and so I went to office hours for my course. There’s also no homework today so I went for a walk and got about an hour of dictation done, finishing a scene I was working on. The problem is that I lost about 10 minutes of dictated words when I paused my digital voice recorder and forgot to turn it back on. :( So my words per hour is low, but at least I got the scene finished.

Unfortunately, I now have a ton of cleanup editing to do since I opted to dictate over cleaning up my writing. If anything, I’m predictable.

I’ve been neglecting my Hawaii book recently, but now that I’m done with that scene in the Regency, I think I’ll shift gears and work on my Hawaii book tomorrow.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 21: Bullet journal, Surrender statement

-
Today was my writing Sabbath so I didn’t do any writing today, but I spent a lot of time doing writing-related things. I did some blogging, and I also reviewed my writing To Do list. I cleaned it up by checking off what’s been done, deleting what I no longer need to do, and making note of what I need to do this coming week. Before I started bullet journaling (in an electronic journal app, Day One Journal ), I had my To Do lists in a couple different places and I’d usually forget things I needed to do. Now I have them in my bullet journal, which combines journaling with task organizer, and I’m less likely to forget. I still set reminders for myself in my phone, but since I’m using my journal throughout the day every day, I’m more likely to see things I need to do. I found some of my old To Do lists today and incorporated some things in my bullet journal. One of them was my writing Surrender Statement, which is a prayer I pray before starting each day’s work. What’s a Surrender Sta
Read more

Day 783: Evaluation 7

-
It’s been almost seven months since I wrote my last Evaluation 6 , but I finally got around to Evaluation #7! Here’s the gist of what I’ve learned over the past few months about my writing and productivity. New schedule My IBS was slowly been starting to feel better recently. I am still extremely strict with my diet, but I am also starting to experiment with what foods I can and can’t eat. I have also started a new eating and sleeping schedule, which I have dubbed my “chrono-diet” because I’m trying to take advantage of my circadian rhythm, according to the book Change Your Schedule, Change Your Life (I had borrowed a copy from the library but I enjoyed it so much I went ahead and bought it). I have started waking up at 6 am and exercising first thing, then having breakfast after exercise. I do house chores and/or work until noon, which is when I eat lunch. I’m supposed to not eat until dinner around 5:30 or 6, but I haven’t been able to break the habit of snacking in the aftern
Read more

Day 91: Evaluation 3

-
Even though I was taking a few days off because of my health issues, I ended up doing some work after all, and also came up with some new ideas. But first, let me summarize the past month. Outlining my series Something which I thought was interesting was looking at the raw numbers of how long it took me to outline my Lady Wynwood’s Spies series. It had a rough start, especially because I changed my mind about it several times and had some bouts of writer’s block, but things picked up this year especially when I wrote down my writer’s process and began systematically doing the Snowflake method on each of the volumes in the series. I finished outlining all the books in the Lady Wynwood’s Spies series on August 1st! Yay! This included the serial novel. Unfortunately those numbers were not included in the above post on my raw numbers, but I will eventually do a follow-up post and also list how many hours it took me to write and edit the volumes in the series. Hopefully it will take
Read more