Tag: New experiments

January’s experiment

LynnLeave a comment

I’m halfway through the month, but yesterday, I realized there was an experiment I needed to do, so I’m starting it now, even if it’s a bit late into the month.

I’ve been writing for most of my life. I’ve been self-publishing for over 14 years now. I thought I’d be further along by now, but I can pretty definitively say that the reason I’m not is because I’ve struggled so long with trying to get faster in a way that hasn’t worked for me. I may never get faster, and I’m tired of that struggle, to be honest. I think pushing so hard for it at various times has led to burn out and blocks and other struggles that have really affected my desire to write when I most needed to do it to keep up my momentum. I don’t think I’ll ever be faster than I am now—or at least I don’t think me consciously pushing for it is going to make it happen. Who knows what the future will bring?

Anyway, my point is that I’ve decided to eliminate some of the things that get in my way, things that make me having feelings that affect my joy in writing, and that aren’t helpful. These things might be tied to perfectionism. (Isn’t everything?)

I often use timers to keep me focused while I write. They work. They work really well. And then I see the WPH that my spreadsheet usually calculates for me (because once I’m using timers I can’t seem to avoid tracking them), and it jump-starts that internal critic. That’s all you did? You should try for more words next time! Didn’t you focus? Why aren’t you faster? Why can so-and-so write so many words in a sprint/session/hour but you can’t? What’s wrong with you?

Yeah.

That kind of criticism isn’t good for anyone. It certainly isn’t good for me.

So this experiment for January came to mind.

I’m going to use my timers and (gasp) not track a single one of them. Total word counts for the day is all I’ll pay attention to. It’s all I ever should pay attention to, anyway. I won’t stop tracking that, because it keeps me moving forward and it is important to me. I’ve been tracking my daily word count since August 2012. I like having that record of my progress.

But as for the rest? I don’t need it.

At the end of January in about two weeks, I’ll see how I feel about the experiment and if I want to make it permanent. Or if I’ve managed to pick up a habit of not caring about those sessions metrics. :D That’d be nice.

Fighting to keep up my momentum

Lynn

April was a great month for writing. I wrote more than 50,000 words. May has been fantastic. But I’ve recently finished a book and now I’m fighting to keep up my momentum.

Finishing a big project leaves me feeling adrift. I have to stop letting myself feel like I’ve finished something when I finish a book. The big project is my career, not this one book, so I have to keep writing if I want to avoid a long break between books.

Implementing the plan should be easy but we all know it won’t be. But here’s what I’m doing.

1. No writing break between books.

2. No moving on to a book I “should” finish while I’m interested in writing a different book.

I’m writing the book I’m most interested in writing right now, not the book I feel like I should write right now. That particular series has waited this long for another book, and it can keep waiting.

Enthusiasm = intrinsic motivation = finishing the next book before I lose interest in it and have to work hard to regain it.

I hope it works, but I really won’t know until I’ve tried it a few times and seen the results. :)

I’m also still following my rule about sweets and 1,000 words. This little rule helped me write more than 50,000 words in April. And that momentum put me in a position to break my 6,241 words in a day record.

My new record? 6,606 words on May 7, 2019.

I don’t have a post for that day, because I’ve really been focused on writing fiction and saving the blog posts for progress updates, but I am thrilled I did it. It was awesome. It was also exhausting. I’m really not meant to write that many words in one day! :-) Next record to break? 7,000 words in a day. It’ll happen.

Now, off to write. Today is the first day of the new book. (Which I started in January, and wrote a few thousand on between then and now, so I’m not actually starting the book at zero words. I really want to write this book! It’s going to be so much fun.)

And I really want one of the brownies my daughter made so I’m definitely about to start writing. :D

Writing and an experiment with mealtimes

Lynn

Yay! I’ve been writing today. Nowhere near the amount of writing I wanted to do, and my only excuse for that is distractions, but it’s nice to NOT be struggling to sit down and write.

One distraction of note is my new mealtime schedule. I’m still trying to lose some of the weight I gained after transitioning from a job to writing at home and it seems I’ve plateaued. Therefore, I’m moving meal times to 7 a.m., 11 a.m., and 3 p.m. :-)

The new mealtimes should make snacks much less appealing, reduce my meal sizes, and give me a longer fasting period overnight. It’s also a mealtime schedule I grew up with and maintained into my twenties. It’s an experiment, doubly interesting because it loosely matches the mealtimes I had during all the years when I was at my ideal weight. I’m hoping the new mealtimes will work to my strengths and shore up some of my weaknesses. I like going to bed on an empty stomach and always try not to eat in the few hours before bed, but I don’t like feeling hungry during the day—in fact, when I get hungry, I feel sick and weak, and I don’t like that feeling at all. Ideally, I’ll go to bed on an empty stomach, but won’t actually get hungry until really close to my bedtime which I’m finally getting moved back to a reasonable hour for me. :-)

As a first run today, I’m pretty happy with what I found. I ate almost exactly what I ate yesterday, just so I’d have something to compare. Because I ate it all so much closer together, I realized really quickly that my meals these days are probably still too big. I think I’ll be able to scale back the amount of food I eat and not really notice it at all. And that, I hope, will help me lose a few of these stubborn pounds I need to lose!

Anyway, I’m sleepy and I’m calling it a night. 466 words. May tomorrow be better than today!

Facing resistance and adjusting the plan

Lynn

You know how you make a plan and then immediately feel resistant to actually following through? Yes, well, that’s been happening to me.

So instead of letting myself get too far down that hole, I’ve decided to make a few adjustments to the plan.

I wrote a long post about this and then decided to cut most of it. Suffice to say, I’ve decided I might be better served to have a minimum daily plan that is, to be honest, a little more minimum.

That’d be 1,557 words, every day. Yes. I know some days life will interfere. I still want to write 1,557 words every day, even if I have to switch projects to get them done, or write something quick and ugly just before bed to do it.

I can do this in 3 hours or less most days (based on the fact that my real, I’ve-tracked-it average is about 550 words an hour). It might take longer some days but I’m confident in these numbers—they’re real, they aren’t overly optimistic, and this can be done.

It’s really all about training myself to write every day, because I am not good with habits once I start letting them slip. Seriously, it’s the way I’m wired or something but there ain’t a lot of middle ground with me. The only habits that stick are the ones that I make non-negotiable.

Not gonna lie. This is going to be hard as hell to get embedded in my brain: writing daily is non-negotiable. 1,557 words a day is non-negotiable.

All I have to do is show up and stay the course.

I think the thing I’ll have to remember is that if the writing is going badly, I’m going to have to write shit and just accept that. Some shit is better than no shit, right? :P

Now that I’ve thought this all out, I’m ready to get started with this TODAY. :D I have 412 words written and I need to write another 1,145 words.

I like this more reasonable plan. It’s one I can start working on late in the day and still expect to get done. Here’s hoping that will stop the excuses!

(Have I mentioned that a lot of these posts are totally me just writing out my thoughts and trying to make sense of them? Because, yes, that’s what I’ve just done.)