author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

This being the actually writing blog, I'm gonna blog about actually writing. Today I actually wrote. It's a good thing.

As I mentioned last time, I've been having trouble. My relationship with time-management has become fraught. More fraught than usual, I mean. I got to where the very act of planning my writing day, with a check-list and a schedule and everything, sent me fleeing into the wordless night. Things didn't get done. Things were bad.

So I gave myself permission for a few weeks to just sort of float along through the day, dabbling with whatever writing task came to mind, telling myself it was play and not work at all. It was safe to start writing because starting didn't commit me to continuing. It didn't require "clocking in" and it didn't require putting away the stupid clicky games because it didn't require Dedicated Butt-In-Chair time. I could write a sentence or two while running a rewarded ad in my stupid clicky game, for example. No pressure. Just play.

This was emotionally helpful, but not very pragmatic for a writer with several simultaneous projects and a handful of self-imposed deadlines. I got further behind on everything. Also, I discovered that the non-writing things I had scheduled in relation to scheduled writing tasks got forgotten half the time because the writing tasks were no longer scheduled. So that wasn't very sustainable.

So I've kinda-sorta gone back to having a schedule. It's a looser version of the schedule I got burnt out on. Instead of "Write X from exactly Y:00 to Y:25" it's more like "Start X sometime during the Y o'clock hour and go for as long as it takes to defeat a Knusha." (A Knusha is monster in 4thewords. It takes 1200 words to beat a Knusha, and you have 600 minutes to do it in. This is not hard.) Things get tighter when they have to, like when I've got a Tuesday full of appointments, but on a day like today when I don't have to leave the house, there's some float tolerance built in.

So this week I'm revisiting "Making Friends" and starting, slowly, tentatively, in a floating sort of way, to revise it. I hadn't touched it since sending it to my critique group about a year ago. Yesterday I got an idea for improving a scene where the pace had got bogged down, and though I never got to the keyboard about it, I did a bunch of working it out in my head during the drive to roller derby practice. That counted. I checked "Story Revision" off my to-do list for the day. Today I spent a few minutes typing up some concrete notes in the margins. That definitely counted. Tomorrow I'll make a first attempt at writing the new material. We'll get there.

I also wanted to actually get to this blog today, and now I have done that. Hooray! Another little victory for my collection.

Tomorrow will be one of those tightly scheduled days. My hope is that the loosely scheduled days like today will bolster me with enough positivity and achievement that I'll have the wherewithal to stick to a tight schedule on a day like tomorrow. We'll see how it goes. I'll report back and let you know. If not tomorrow, then at least sometime later in the week. Or at least sometime before another month has gone by. One blog post a month seems a little sparse.

Anyway, 'til then.