Aft gang agley

I was planning lots of writing yesterday, but somehow it failed to materialise. Not through the block returning, thankfully, but through real life returning. I had various chores and things to accomplish in the morning, and then thought I had time to do lots in the afternoon, but it was not to be, as other things ended up happening earlier than I had expected or planned for. (And could that description be any vaguer?)

So, I only managed 100 or so words yesterday, but as I woke up early this morning, I have now done another 900ish words to take that over 1000, and I can call the time up to now Saturday. All I need to do now is find the time today to write another 1000. Total so far: 21,781

It does make me wonder about what time is best for me to write. I'm generally not a morning person, so it's not usually the time I get some writing done, but as I've been able to put down a good chunk of words, and it's quiet and I haven't been disturbed or distracted, maybe I should be forcing myself to do more early on. Or maybe I just generally need to learn more discipline in my writing and stop procrastinating and wasting time.

The line that comes to mind is one I first heard a good few years ago: "I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I am inspired at 9 o'clock every morning". I think I need to take that as my motivation, and maybe start using Scrivener in full-screen F11 mode, blocking out all else until I've done a certain amount of work. Use what I like to do when procrastinating as a reward for getting to where I want to go, perhaps.

I think it's about this time in every writing project that I make the same promises and declarations, which gives an idea of how likely I am to keep it. However, I have made it publicly this time - even if barely anyone reads this - so perhaps the prospect of being ashamed in the eyes of non-communicative strangers will motivate me?

Snowmageddon is coming

So says the weather forecast, but the threatened weekend of snow chaos has yet to materialise here. I'm looking forward to it, somewhat, as it will hopefully motivate me to stay inside and keep writing for a few days and really plough on with the story.

(Ploughing pun not intended)

One thing I need to get into the habit of doing is starting writing earlier in the day when I get the opportunity. As I've said in other posts, I'm very good at procrastinating, and then rushing through to hit my target for the day when time for writing appears to be running out. When I've got a big blank of time to fill, it's amazing how much of it I can while away doing not very much, or things that suddenly seem really important, and have to be done before I can get to writing the current story. One day I'm going to write a story with an ADD protagonist to capitalise on this.

Bond was almost ready to take on Blofeld, but first he realised that there might be some useful information in the xkcd archive, so he had to spend an hour or so going through random posts there.

The good thing about working under time constraints like I had yesterday is that it removes my excuse for procrastination - ah, there's enough time to do it later - and compels me to work and write. Over 1000 words again, and reached a total of 19,199, which gets me a couple of thousand ahead of target again. The other good thing about being forced away was that I had to leave it in the middle of a scene that was going really well, and so when I start back today, I can plunge right back in there.

But first, there's something I hav to do on the internet...

Minimums and maximums

Weekends feel like they're vast spaces of unassigned time, yet I never seem to achieve as much as I want in them. Onw of my problems is procrastination - if I'm not working to a deadline, I can easily while away the time I should be working in on a vast range of other seemingly-important tasks and quests for shiny things instead of doing what I should be. And the internet is full of shiny things to capture my attention.

So, despite having what felt like loads of time to write yesterday, I still only managed just above 1000 words to leave me at a grand total of 5,383. I think one of my issues is that when I have an overall target I'm working to, I can sometimes treat reaching a milestone as a maximum for the day, rather than just passing an arbitrary point. Note how many of my days so far have been ones where I wrote just over 1000 words. I need to remind myself that the challenge is to write 100,000 in 100 days, and make sure I treat that 1000 as a minimum requirement, not as an excuse to go off and procrastinate some more.

As a corollary to that, I also need to ensure my motivation carries on beyond the end of the challenge. That's why 1000 a day does help - it's a reasonable amount to write, but not quite as likely to lead to that burnt-out feeling I've often had at the end of doing NaNoWriMo. Perhaps I should have the guts to set myself a bigger target - maybe 365,000 words of fiction in a year? - but something like that can seem so vast from early January that it's very unfeasibility puts me into a slump.

Anyway, it's Sunday, I'm awake, and it's quiet. Time to write.