Accountability for 9/12/23
Whoops. Almost forgot to post today, and that’s because there’s very little to report for yesterday.
I wrote only 51 words yesterday, on 1 story.
Why so few? And what went wrong?
For most of the day yesterday, I worked on publishing related activities that took my focus off writing.
- Finalizing title choice
- Finalizing cover design (needed that title!)
- Generating the cover files I would need for publishing
- Adding the ebook front and back matter to the manuscript file
- Preparing the project file in Jutoh for the EPUB
- Writing description (sales copy!)
- Adding a web page to my author site (for the story)
- Updating related web pages on my author site (for the story)
- Writing a blog post (but not yet posting) to announce the publication of the story (it’s not published yet!)
- Writing (but not yet posting) a post for Patreon (to make live when I publish)
It took me a lot longer to do just about everything I did, and that’s a problem with my ability to either control my use of time or estimate how much time I really need to get certain things done.
Still, I was pretty shocked when I realized how late it was and that I hadn’t written anything all day.
I had already decided to stick to writing more novels instead of short stories and novellas going forward. Seems like this was a great example of why I need to follow through on that. I lose a lot of time once I switch into publisher mode.
Publishing absolutely interrupts my writing.
Nowhere in my head does it make sense that those things took up my entire day. And yet, there wasn’t anything else of note in my day to account for the lost time.
If only I were better at beating back my perfectionist tendencies—perfectionism does nothing but make everything harder than it has to be.
I’ll finish getting these few that are in progress done, and then I’m going to be putting the short fiction to rest for a while.