time management – Page 4

Taking stock

I may need to add another line to my side-tracker; I’ve got two pieces where someone’s indicated that they’re interested in publishing them, but it feels premature to mark them as acceptances since I haven’t gotten a contract yet. At the same time, they’re not really out in the “out and seeking responses” way that pieces that haven’t gotten a response are (and let’s be honest, that is the state a story spends most time in when it is out in the world).

I’ll probably leave it as is for now. Just a note for something to keep in mind going forward, I guess.

Another boatload of library holds for the Hugos came in, so I suspect that’s going to be a lot of my free time month, and I’m going to start entering my votes on the ballet. I’m hoping to organize my free time better this month, and actually get to a slightly weird writing project as well as the more typical ones I’m planning.

Writing is easy. Rewriting…

Rewriting is being a bit more difficult.

In addition to the trouble I’ve been having with editing the novel, my rewrites of the novelette that my handwritten draft turned into have been really hard to get into. It’s been a little better this long weekend, but it’s still taking longer than I thought. I’m not entirely sure that the way I’ve rearranged the story is a good one, but I know I’ll be able to better figure that out once it’s actually complete.

On the plus side, I actually did finish the edits for a short story and send them back, so I’m pleased about that. I did spend what might be a ridiculously long time trying to find a substitute for one particular word, and I’m still not sure I made the right decision, but at least the edits are done.

In a perfect, world, with unlimited time (and possibly without the need for sleep) I would spend another few hours on it at least, but unfortunately I only have so much time, and I need to figure out where I get the best returns on spending it.

Pen and ink.

Over the last week or so, I’ve been handwriting a story draft. I began because it was convenient to handwrite it at the time – I am very fond of my pens and notebooks, so one of each is generally to hand, and I wasn’t in the same room as a computer – and I continued because… well, I still had the pen and notebook handy, and I was curious.

First, it’s much easier to not get distracted while handwriting. I usually still have my phone with me, but when there isn’t an open browser window or a notification sitting in the corner of my eye, it does get easier to concentrate.

Second, it’s much slower – I can type easily twice as fast as I write, probably more. On the plus side, this means that I’m much less likely to feel like I’m adrift as I sit and stare at a blank page, because I am still writing out the words that I’ve composed in my head after I’ve composed them. On the downside, once I warm up, I cannot quite keep up with writing down everything I am coming up with, and that’s frustrating. I’m seriously considering looking into learning shorthand.

Also, I suspect this is a possible side-effect of it being slower: I’m coming up with more ideas of how to expand the story as I’m writing it, possibly just because I am spending more time thinking about any one particular moment in the story, and that gives me space to muse on what it could branch out into being.

It’s interesting. There’s a climactic scene and the dénouement left, and then I’ll have my first fully handwritten draft in years complete.

(Tangentially: this is also an incredibly effective way to use up fountain pen ink, even if you aren’t prone to fiddling with your pen and accidentally blotting yourself as I am. I’m not sure my 2ml sample of Astorquiza Rot will last until the end of the story.)

Learning curve

I’ve started editing a novel-length manuscript this month, and no lie, it’s a little overwhelming. A lot of my usual editing involves summaries and outlines and lists that fit on (at most) a double-page notebook spread, and I’m struggling a little to adapt that process–which is ultimately the kind of thing you can take in in a single glance–to this. Still, I feel like I’m making progress.

(I’m not actually sure the end result will be anything more than a trunk novel, but I’m hoping that even if that’s the case, I learn something about how to actually get it a work of this length done. Even if I decide novels aren’t for me, it’ll probably be useful to know.)

Well, it’s been busy.

I’m trying to get up early in the mornings so that I can write before work, and it’s starting to take, although it’s still a little rough. A lot of what I’ve been doing lately is going through older pieces that were never finished and deciding whether there’s enough there to make them worth polishing. It’s a little exhausting, but I’m making progress.

The weather seems to have broken early; we’ve had maple syrup weather for at least a week, which is nice.

I’m tired a lot. I’m hoping it’s a temporary thing.

Remember, remember, making it through November

This is fairly belated, in part because as soon as I won NaNoWriMo, I collapsed under a gentle heap of unanswered emails and overdue to-do items.

That said, I did win NaNoWriMo. Hit 50,084 words on November 26th, and wrote another 483 on the 30th for a grand total of 50,567 words.

I’m both saddened by how much other things seemed to pile up, and encouraged by how relatively easy it was. (Also, no joke: the light of my life helped with that a lot.) It wasn’t very easy, but it wasn’t like pulling out my own teeth, the way I’d been worried it would be. It was at least interesting to me.

(This isn’t to say that I think that everything I wrote was good, and I would like to thank Story Hospital for reminding me that it didn’t have to be, and Captain Awkward for the incredibly useful coping technique of responding to an internal editor saying “this sucks, no-one will care” with “you’re right, no-one will care, guess I’m writing it anyway.”)

If I just didn’t need to sleep, or work, I could get so much more done. Failing that, I’m looking at what’s possible in terms of carving an extra couple of hours out of each day.

Truckling along.

The title of this post was actually a typo, but I’ve decided I like it. Nice combination of “trucking” and “trickling”, which is what writing has started to feel like.

I’m just over 36,000 words (36,120! 13,880 left!), and I’m getting pretty tired. I’ve also learned that I need breaks; I can write every day for a solid week, but after that, there is going to be a day when my brain rebels, shuts down, and insists on just eating someone else’s words for a while.

(This might be different if I wasn’t also working full-time. I do get that. However, I do not have “November” amounts of vacation time, so that is a moot point. Relatedly, I am also very behind on all my reading and watching television.)

I’ve hit the point where I’m actually not sure what I have left to write, so I’m probably going to take the day and plot out what I already have (including some text from before November, because this novel has been hanging around for a long time), what order everything should be in, and what I need to still get down.

Ten days left, I should be able to manage 1,388 words a day. Wish me luck.

Grey and rainy.

The weather’s gotten properly icy, now; it’s below freezing at night, and winter coats are required. I can still get away without wearing winter boots, though.

I missed Sunday for NaNoWriMo, but I wrote yesterday and today, and I’m still ahead; slightly more than 25% done on the wordcount, although with what I had drafted up already I may hit the end of what I need to have written before I get to 50,000 words. We’ll see.

The usual small flood of magazines came in, and I’m working at getting my owned-and-to-read pile back down to a closer-to-reasonable level. It’s a process. I’m cherry-picking short works and ones that came out in 2017 (Hugos next year, and all).

I bought a sweater quantity of yarn, in a sort of raisin colour, and cast on a pattern tonight. I’m hoping to have a sweater done this month or early December.

Is that all it takes.

I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year (although honestly I’m thinking of cutting down my word goal–40,000 instead of 50,000, maybe), and today I had a day off. I got left in a coffee shop, handwrote for a couple of hours, came home and typed before a nap, wrote a little after dinner, and then managed to get into a 1h1k sprint.

I wrote 4,412 words today. That is not my personal best, I’m sure, but it’s probably my second-best ever.

(Clearly all I need to do is win the lottery, become utterly self-sufficient, quit my job, and be free to spend hours a day writing while still having time to, you know, walk and maintain social relationships and cook dinner and the like. Simple! Not easy, just simple.)

Back to work tomorrow. The weather has decided that it definitely wants to be November–chilly, rainy, and grey. No snow yet, though.

Time assessment

Well, WorldCon was lovely, although I’m pretty sure that by the end of it I was running on half the sleep I should have been. Very glad I went and got to see and talk to everyone I did, although I wish I’d had more time.

(Also I have to say that the experience of singing the Stephen Universe theme song along with the members and attendees of a panel was a really sweet experience.)

Work wasn’t exactly difficult, but there was a pretty close deadline and I ended up doing a fair bit of overtime. I knew that I worked well with deadlines; I hadn’t specifically realized before how easy it was to let a work-set deadline override all the other deadlines I tried to set for myself. I feel like I lost a lot of August to that.

Anyway, moving forward, I had some luck finishing a draft with an outline and I’m hoping to get some revising done this weekend–the uninterrupted block of time should help.