Fiction writer. Expert procrastinator. This is my life.
I’m afraid I’m going to lose some words today. The current material is going too far afield of the scenes I’ve already written. I had hoped they would join up but now it’s not looking good for that possibility.
I’m at 965 words for the morning and I’m still trying to reach 2000 before lunch. That’s with 2 hours and 5 minutes of writing. I’ve been careful of breaks but obviously I’m still losing time somewhere. I got started at 8:36 and it’s 11:15 now.
Back to the book. Too much to do to tinker.
I need to make this quick, so I’ve let myself have WiFi on my computer for this one post. Nothing else.
I’ve looked at my previous day’s efforts and concluded that for me to meet this challenge today I really need to pass 2,000 words before I stop for lunch, if not sooner, so that will be my morning’s priority.
I think I’ve given the writing too much focus and the challenge not enough and I’ll try to shift that around today. What I mean by that is that I’m too focused on the writing and making it “right” instead of trusting my gut with this story. (I have yet to decide if my gut is trustworthy, but for me to meet this challenge, I have to assume it is.) If I focus on the challenge and what I need to do to meet it, I can leave my subconscious unobstructed and free to work the story while my active brain fritters away the time worrying about words per hour and other numerical calculations.
So that’s the plan that aims to make today different than yesterday and it’s why I believe I have a chance of succeeding at this today. :)
Yesterday I had several instances where I forgot to start or restart my time tracker app, and that, too, I think make it easy to stop what I was doing (because it wasn’t recording anyway, right?) and interrupt myself with distractions that stole time from me and ruined my flow.
Seriously, I’m a huge fan of Gleeo, but I’ve always managed to make the whole thing much too granular and burdensome and every time I quit using it before I’ve really had a chance to collect enough data to be useful. This time, I set up one Domain for one Project with only one Task and it’s working great and giving me just the information I want.
(Writing→Fiction→Writing)
It’s repetitious, but it gets the job done and doesn’t distract me with minutia. ;) Today will be day five with it, and I don’t see a need to stop using it into the foreseeable future.
I’ve had cereal, have water beside me, and I’m ready to start. It’s 8:20 am.