Wrecking my hearing for wordcount

Tell me, oh internets, can you recommend some music? I'm looking for something with a similar feel to the "chanty monk bits" of Carmina Burana (aka, "Fortune Plango Vulnera" and "O Fortuna"). Not that I necessarily want more chanting, but something with the same brutalist-architecture swirly energy would be great.


I've spent about a week being obsessed with Ringo Starr's "It Don't Come Easy". Which is somewhat inconvenient, as this is a song I don't own, but it turns out YouTube can be quite useful. (If one can stay the hell away from the sidebar links, of course.) I ended up making a mix of other songs that fit with the same mental settings. (And yes, the chanty monks are on it. It works for me. Let it never be said that my tastes aren't idiosyncratic.)


(The title refers to the fact that putting in the good headphones and cranking the volume seems to be the one thing that'll get me going when the words otherwise refuse to come. This is a useful thing to know, but I'm starting to feel like I've just been to a rock concert.)

Day 24 and counting

Yesterday: I made quota -- at 3:30 am. My time zone is now set to Alaska. Hawaii, here I come!

I'm still at the point where if I do 2000 words a day, I'll finish well on time. That doesn't sound so bad, except that 2000 words a day has been my unofficial goal all along, and I've only managed to do it six times. (Actually, that six was a lot better than I'd have guessed; I thought it was more like three.)

What I'd really like it to get about 3000 words today, to make a decent dent on catching up. This is... an optimistic goal, given my stats so far. But I really don't want to be scrambling to finish at the last minute, when the word validator's likely to be overloaded. (Last time I hit 50,000 the day before, for just that reason.)


A useful trick I mentioned earlier, that I should probably explain for my future self: I've been doing multiple rounds of what I call home-made word sprints. Normally, a word sprint involves either competing with someone else for highest word count in a set amount of time, or trying to hit some arbitrary (and often ridiculous) amount of words. None of this works for me and in fact it's counterproductive, but I am finding that setting a timer helps with the concentration; it's easier to make myself focus if I know it's only for twenty minutes than it is to try to focus indefinitely. My twenty-minute sessions are more like 30-40 minutes, as I'm not being rigorous about starting or stopping to the stopwatch, but that's okay; the point is that my brain knows it gets to stop fairly soon, so it's more willing to dig in and do. It also helps me take frequent breaks, which when I'm straining the already-drained word reservoir is good; last night I was stopping to read a Campion book for fifteen minutes or so between batches.


That said, I wrote over a thousand words in one sitting earlier today, and the trick to that was putting the headphones in and blasting the "brutalist architecture" mix as loud as I could stand. Other tricks are also useful, but that one seems to be the go-to for productivity.

And now I just need to sit down and do it again. Rah?