Sunday, Day 0 - Get writing! Look over outline for Devil in a Blue Bustle (DBB), start mashing out scenes that are ripe in my head. Only planning work is the five minutes "get set" time at the start of a writing session.
Monday, Day 1 - No writing. Likely to be a Kerfuffle day, as I have paperwork and phone calls to deal with concerning Unemployment and Insurance. So today will be outlining and Artwork day. (I gotta polish up Miss Leech anyway....)
Tuesday, Day 2 - More Writing! Continuing to work on DBB. (Because word count is important, I might work on ManWho2 if something hot comes up.)
The Reality
Sunday, Day 0 - 2563 words.
Got off to a good start, maybe a little late, but as I was leaving the house for my writing session out, I realized I needed some info from from an email. I turned my computer back on.... and it wouldn't boot! Aggravation! Distraction! Worry! Ran a basic repair routine, but didn't have time to do it all, so I ended up shutting it down and going out anyway. Had a good writing session -- 1119 words -- and then did errands and came home to fix computer. While computer is fixed, this is not due to any help from the orange cat.
Managed to do the rest of the day's words, but it was a squeaker, because I wasn't as prepared as I wanted to be.
Monday, Day 1 - non-writing day.
Boy was it ever a non-writing day. More kerfuffle in dealing with my layoff benefits. And all to naught... I have to do this all again tomorrow. I did not even get any outlining done. I did get my Miss Leech episode posted, but I used one that was almost ready, because the one I wanted to use was a long way from ready.
Tuesday, Day 2 - (hysterical laughter)
No seriously, I can't stop the mirthless laughing over the thought that I would get anything done today. Spent half the day tracking down a promised health insurance benefit only to find that -- even though was told I was certainly eligible -- I wasn't eligible. Spent the other half of the day wrangling with the wonky form from the unemployment office:
It was a PDF, but it was designed so you could NOT fill it in by hand (they had put zeroes in the spots where you would fill in the numbers). It was also locked down tight so you couldn't SAVE the information you put into it, so you had to look up all sorts of numbers and type dozens of them in, making sure all were accurate (and me with dyscalcula) -- then print them in the same session. No saving, no setting aside to do any of it later. Also, hidden deep in the settings, the was also was locked down to print in "duplex" mode...
Which you'd never notice if you don't have a duplexing printer. But if you do have a duplexing printer and the duplex unit is malfunctioning? The form was unprintable. You couldn't turn duplexing off. Even if you chose to print only one page, it would just try to print a blank back side of the page first, and then jam. So can't save it, can't print it, can't do it by hand, can't take it somewhere else to print.
Luckily, getting around things like that was a part of the job I had done for 20 years, and I finally just uninstalled the printer driver so that the printer didn't KNOW it had a duplexing unit. (It's amazing how many things you can fix by lying to the computer.)
So I got it printed, and bundled with all the proper proofs and mailed.
But the cat may never forgive me for yelling at him.
I did do some multitasking, though, in that I had my migraine day today. Got most of my headaches over with in one day.
That's right. Most. Still have some kerfuffle to hunt down and kill tomorrow.
Writing Lessons Learned
There were writing lessons learned? Yeah, remember Day 0? I learned stuff that day. Mainly that my plan of outlining and writing intermittently is a good idea, because the two feed off each other. When I get blocked in the outlining stage, I have to write it, just as much as I have to do outlining when I get blocked in the writing stage.
The things I worked on for Day 0 pulled out lots of questions that I didn't know when I was outlining.
This is sort of how I have always worked. I think that's the important thing about using a method like Rachel Aaron proposes: what it's really about is turbo charging your own methods. Finding the choke points and finding ways to bypass them.
(UPDATE: did the math, and I think I've figured out how to bypass a lot of the kerfuffle and just plain retire. This would make an enormous difference.)
See you in the funny papers.
1 comment:
Wow, what a week. They really do make things as hard as they can don't they.
Well done on that word count. I hope the rest of the week is a little calmer. x
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