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Goals, heh, yeah
Thursday, January 19th, 2023 02:33 pmSo, my newfound resolve to produce 2500 words a week is proving... complicated.
Based on my January 1 output, it seemed like a reasonable goal. And for the first week, it was. Easy, even. What I neglected to account for was that that was the initial burst of starting a new story (and one that had been lurking in the brain waiting to go for ages, at that), which is usually a high-output phase for me. But a whole story, even a short one, doesn't go at that pace all the way through; even if the writing goes very well and quickly, as this one did, there's still the little fiddly bits to wrap things up at the end. So by week two, I had a day where I wrote about 50 words. That was filling in the find-a-better-word brackets and applying some research to fine-tune the world-building, so they were very necessary and important words... but there were still only about 50 of them. This is not an avoidable part of the process.
The other not-avoidable part is that I can't just leap straight from finishing one story into white-heat on another story. There's a mandatory refractory period, during which my brain eases out of the world of the completed story, basks in the glow of accomplishment for a bit, then starts poking around at the pile of ideas to see what else looks like fun. This isn't such an issue if I'm working on a novel, obviously (there are other issues with novels), but right now I want to concentrate on short stories for a while. And since that refractory period tends to be about a week, depending on the story... there's a significant glitch in my math. ;-/
The obvious solution to this is to have one longer-term project in progress, so that I can just drop into that in between short stories. I really don't want to get into another novel right now, but I do have The Green Ring, that just-for-funsies novella I started mumblety-something ago. It's been fallow for an appallingly long time, but I decided to boot it back up and use it for my fall-back project. And it booted up quite quickly, only took a day or two. Great, right? Except that, having gotten it booted up and gotten all the remaining pieces precariously balanced in my head so I can get them out in the right order and with the right pacing and the right antecedents, I am deeply reluctant to let go of it even for a week or so to work on something else, lest I lose it and have to do all that balancing act all over again. That was hard work, and it feels like juggling plates that are going to shatter if I drop them.
So, now I have Green Ring on the front burner, and it's going slowly because the juggling-plates phase is also the sticky, tedious phase where the words have to wade through all that damn plot stuff, and I'm loath to set it aside to work on, say, the next Dix Dayton story, even though that's what it's supposedly here for. It's week 3 of the year and I'm having to push hard to make quota -- I've met it so far on average, but only because I did nearly double the goal in week 1.
And of course there's the usual factor that all this writing doesn't leave much time for anything else. I can write ~833 words in a day, but it takes a large chunk of the day, which means a lot of other things aren't getting done. And sitting in bed until mid-afternoon writing leaves one feeling much the same as lying in bed until mid-afternoon dozing -- nice at the time, but loggy and not good for much for the rest of the day.
Writing is hard. ;-)
Based on my January 1 output, it seemed like a reasonable goal. And for the first week, it was. Easy, even. What I neglected to account for was that that was the initial burst of starting a new story (and one that had been lurking in the brain waiting to go for ages, at that), which is usually a high-output phase for me. But a whole story, even a short one, doesn't go at that pace all the way through; even if the writing goes very well and quickly, as this one did, there's still the little fiddly bits to wrap things up at the end. So by week two, I had a day where I wrote about 50 words. That was filling in the find-a-better-word brackets and applying some research to fine-tune the world-building, so they were very necessary and important words... but there were still only about 50 of them. This is not an avoidable part of the process.
The other not-avoidable part is that I can't just leap straight from finishing one story into white-heat on another story. There's a mandatory refractory period, during which my brain eases out of the world of the completed story, basks in the glow of accomplishment for a bit, then starts poking around at the pile of ideas to see what else looks like fun. This isn't such an issue if I'm working on a novel, obviously (there are other issues with novels), but right now I want to concentrate on short stories for a while. And since that refractory period tends to be about a week, depending on the story... there's a significant glitch in my math. ;-/
The obvious solution to this is to have one longer-term project in progress, so that I can just drop into that in between short stories. I really don't want to get into another novel right now, but I do have The Green Ring, that just-for-funsies novella I started mumblety-something ago. It's been fallow for an appallingly long time, but I decided to boot it back up and use it for my fall-back project. And it booted up quite quickly, only took a day or two. Great, right? Except that, having gotten it booted up and gotten all the remaining pieces precariously balanced in my head so I can get them out in the right order and with the right pacing and the right antecedents, I am deeply reluctant to let go of it even for a week or so to work on something else, lest I lose it and have to do all that balancing act all over again. That was hard work, and it feels like juggling plates that are going to shatter if I drop them.
So, now I have Green Ring on the front burner, and it's going slowly because the juggling-plates phase is also the sticky, tedious phase where the words have to wade through all that damn plot stuff, and I'm loath to set it aside to work on, say, the next Dix Dayton story, even though that's what it's supposedly here for. It's week 3 of the year and I'm having to push hard to make quota -- I've met it so far on average, but only because I did nearly double the goal in week 1.
And of course there's the usual factor that all this writing doesn't leave much time for anything else. I can write ~833 words in a day, but it takes a large chunk of the day, which means a lot of other things aren't getting done. And sitting in bed until mid-afternoon writing leaves one feeling much the same as lying in bed until mid-afternoon dozing -- nice at the time, but loggy and not good for much for the rest of the day.
Writing is hard. ;-)
