Write Every Day, December 4th

[bladespark]

Today I have a to-do list that's massive. It's all teeny, tiny things, ("empty the dishwasher", etc.) but they do add up. I did write in some writing on the to-do list, and I got some done last night, so I can check myself in for yesterday. :3

My life runs on "the brain" the notebook where I keep my to-do lists and related notes, on post-its, and on phone alerts. Which is, btw, why I post these posts in what's to me late afternoon and is probably a weird time for most of you. I have a daily alarm labeled "post!" at 4:30pm, which is a good time to post on most sites if you care about traffic/view numbers, and helps me not do the dumb "Oops, I finished that weeks ago and thought I'd posted it, but forgot!" thing, which I used to do a lot. The alarm goes off, I mentally check if I'm meant to post anything anywhere, and then I do so.

Structure is useful! It's always interesting seeing other people's structuring and scheduling methods.



Dec. 1:
alexcat, alexseanchai, auroracloud, bladespark, bookherd, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, lferion, lilacsigil, nafs, sanguinity, sierranovembr, silveradept, st_aurafina, sylvanwitch, trobadora, yasaman, ysilme


Dec. 2:
alexcat, alexseanchai, auroracloud, bookherd, china_shop, cornerofmadness, lferion, lilacsigil, nafs, sanguinity, sierranovembr, silveradept, st_aurafina, sylvanwitch, trobadora, yasaman, ysilme

Dec. 3:
alexcat, alexseanchai, bladespark, bookherd, china_shop, bookherd, lferion, nafs, sanguinity, sierranovembr, silveradept, st_aurafina, sylvanwitch, trobadora, yasaman, ysilme

Dec. 4:
alexseanchai, auroracloud, bladespark, bookherd, china_shop, cornerofmadness, lferion, nafs, sakana17, sanguinity, sierranovembr, silveradept, sylvanwitch, trobadora, yasaman,

Comments

[alexseanchai]

Reading through where the firelight fades and making edits here and there and I had damn well better make some progress on the scene I left off writing on

[bladespark]

I like your style of pep-talk!

[alexseanchai]

😺

except I haven't made progress yet. between distractions and various other things. (like, making food, and finding out the hard way that when the Thanksgiving guest who brought food for ovening suggested we clean our oven after ze really meant it, and moving my laptop setup downstairs so as to split the difference between "air above 45°F" and "air that doesn't have smoke stinging my eyes and throat" while the oven self-clean runs.) I'm nearly to the end of chapter five on the reread, so about 30K into the draft? a few thousand more words until I reach the scene I left off writing on, though.

did pin down how to pull off a thing I thought I was going to have to discard on account of he'd have to be in a different room to do it and he wasn't gonna go, at least. and made phrasing better in a lot of spots, special highlight to "how he thinks an earlier episode happened" (he's wrong, and we know he's wrong because we saw the episode, but how he's wrong is important) and "that is not even the character who's speaking in that paragraph".

[sylvanwitch]

Yay for to-do lists! And schedules! I don't have a phone (on purpose), so I don't do alerts, but I do have a routine for writing during the work week. If I get home earlier (say, before 4:30), I'll do my writing before I prepare my dinner. If I get home later than 4:30 or so, I'll eat and then write. I don't have too much trouble sticking to it because the writing is a "Have to" for me, and my anxiety will increase in direct proportion to how late it's getting in the evening if I don't do it. That's a motivator. ;-)

Today was a rough one, and I got home earlier than usual, so I created my own bingo card from free-writing prompts and wrote a 1230-word H50 fic based on one of the squares.

[bladespark]

I saw the bingo card. That's a good idea!

[china_shop]

I use a paper diary, alarms on my phone, and paper lists on the edges of printed-out crosswords, littered all over my house. The last is not always super-effective. ;-P

Dec 5: Attempt at canon review. No focus. Alibi sentence. :-)

[bladespark]

You still got words out, so that's great. But I know exactly what the no focus thing is like.

[yasaman]

Day 4: 565 words on my Yuletide fic tonight! It's now past 1k, which is a relief even if I probably have at least 5k to go to finish it, and I'm excited that I found a way to work in a couple of my recipient's favorite fic tropes.

[bladespark]

That sounds great.

[nafs]

I am 7/8ths of the way there in knowing what subjects are in the schedule, which is a step towards knowing what the schedule is for one of my characters (one POV character is a student on an accelerated track, one POV character is a teacher at the school, I need to figure out *her* schedule too).

Here is what I have so far: spell theory (math/physics), ritual language (mostly written), prophecy/history, a practical course that's partly metalworking, partly mineralogy/stone working and is mostly a "develop a practical interest now, specialize later" course, a weapons/defence course (phys ed), spellcasting 101 (which the POV character is too young for and has independent study during) and an elective of either art or music. Going by what I vaguely remember of my own high school years I need one more course. Toying with the idea of either a basic contracts course (business) or some sort of astronomy variant that counts as geography. They both would need to be in the curriculum at some point but do both need to be available to 16 year olds?

Anyway, Progress Has Been Made, even if the word count isn't further on.

[bladespark]

That all sounds really interesting. My own memories of high school are so vague at this point, I can barely recall half my classes.

Yay for progress, in any case!

[lferion]

Day 4 - 300+ words, some on a possible opening for the SWG challenge piece, and more on my HLH piece. I am now over the minimum wordcount for the HLH, which is a relief, though nowhere near the (or an) end to the story.

Calendars, colored ink, phone alerts, sometimes actual lists. Some days are better than others at staying focused.

[bladespark]

Having organization tools doesn't always mean actually being organized, yeah.

Sounds like you got some great progress today, though. :3

[sakana17]

December 4: 604 words. My first words for the month (finally!)

[bladespark]

Huzzah! Never too late to get started. (Also, I love your avatar. <3 )

[cornerofmadness]

I'm nowhere as structured as I should be.

I wrote while my students took exams today. Got 3523 words on Come Undone

[bladespark]

That's great. :3 (And despite the above about all the things I use, I'm not either, most days.)

[cornerofmadness]

thanks and I hear you

[sierranovembr]

:waves: I wrote for fun this evening - less than two hundred words, but it neatly tied together two scenes and I'm tired so I am not going to push for more.

For work, everything lives in a neat black notebook with to-do lists sprinkled between meeting notes and math. For home stuff, I just pay attention to what's making me panic and deal with it (laundry: Do we even HAVE underwear? Gifts: When am I going to have to pay more for shipping? Fic: What if they were SOULMATES?) :D It works though.

[bladespark]

I definitely have a habit of letting things go until I have to. See the fact that we only *truly* clean the house when taking a long vacation where my mother in law will come over to feed the cats while we're gone.

Your writing sounds great today. :3

[silveradept]

Managed the December Days post, and that's it, but that's not bad, either.

[bladespark]

Yeah, daily posting is a lot of work. You're doing some great content there, too!

[silveradept]

Thanks. Sometimes I wonder if people are interested in me nattering on about things or not.

[bladespark]

I've been very interested so far. It's quite interesting to me how your general experience with consoles parallels mine, but your interaction with games seems to have been completely different. We got an Atari about the time you seem to have (at the same age, at least, I was six) and have always run a console or so behind, too. But I found the experience of playing for a score pointless and frustrating, didn't like any of the Atari games, *still* was more into watching and being the one who remembered where everything was rather than the one who had to dodge and jump and do the actual play on Nintendo games, up until I encountered the Final Fantasy franchise with II/IV and discovered that games could have stories, omg! (And also, you know, that there were games where you didn't have to have perfect timing to not fall off of things, run into things, get killed by things, etc.) After some years of enjoying JRPGs, I was the one who spearheaded the sibling effort to pool our money and buy our first *new* console, a Playstation, solely so I could play Final Fantasy VII as soon as it came out.

[silveradept]

Óoh, that is a neat experience. And when I get around to talking about adventure games and RPGs, a lot of parallel experiences will come out, but until the convergence of the PC and the console, the systems will be used for different purposes and have different amounts of time commitments. (I still like playing 80-hour RPGs, even though I rarely have large chunks of time to play them with.

[alexseanchai]

I am!

I just don't have a lot to say about it.

[silveradept]

And that's okay.

[auroracloud]

I always find it interesting to learn about other people's structuring/planning/life management methods, especially because I'm a complete disaster and keep trying to figure out how not to be one. And no ordinary calendars, to-do lists, to-do applications or such seem to work for me, because I forget where I've written down what, or I forget to use the thing that has my to-do lists, etc. I recently picked up the Bullet Journal Method book at the library, and that sounds like something I might actually manage to live with - one notebook for everything, from calendar to to-do lists to things you need to jot down to anything else you might need. Just this week I've bought a very pretty notebook for that purpose and am trying out the basics of the method, so that I could then fit it to my needs. I'm honestly just very fond of notebooks and writing by hand, and can make sense of things better that way, so using a notebook seems much better than apps - it just needs to be all in the same notebook because otherwise I lose them.

I'm also thinking I could maybe create a separate one for writing purposes especially, in the sense that it'd house my ideas, plans and brainstorming, progress tracking, deadlines etc. while it'd also be possible to use it for drafting when needed. Until now I've had this writing notebook where I do freewriting, lists, random scenes, writing exercises etc. and I also jot down ideas and planning there, but then I never find them again. One option would also simply start fitting my all-purpose writing notebook with page number and index... We'll see what I come up with.

Anyway, that was a bit of rambling! But it's a topic I've been thinking about a lot. Anyway, on the 4th I wrote 679 words of the novel, very pleased with that. Clearly writing in the morning is working for me, too bad I shouldn't really schedule it first every day because it can sidetrack me from other things I also should do.

[bladespark]

Well, my planning methods don't prevent me being something of a disaster all the same.

It sounds like you have some good ideas, though. Even when things don't keep one perfectly organized, keeping somewhat on top of things seems better than never being on top of things at all, if that makes sense?

(Also, I *adore* buying notebooks and have to restrain myself all the time. It takes a year or two to go through a "brain" book, so I can't buy every pretty notebook I see!)

Sounds like your writing is trucking along. A novel seems like so much, but really one can turn them out awfully fast just with a few hundred words a day.

[bookherd]

Day 4: Thanks to a writing date with friends, I actually got more than an alibi amount written! Still not as much as I would like, but it's apparently taking me a while to regain momentum after Nanowrimo.

[bladespark]

Words are words! I'd love to do writing dates, that sounds awesome. In person? I should pitch that at the writer's group I go to sometime...

[bookherd]

Yes! Meeting up with friends at a coffeeshop for a couple hours of quiet worktime, with socializing at either end, is just a lovely way to combine writing and friending.

[st_aurafina]

Checking in for Day 5: I wrote 420 words on my Spicy Advent fic.

[bladespark]

That's awesome! There's something just delightful about smut for the holidays, isn't there?

[sanguinity]

Dec 4: 1200 words, some of which was during the writing date with friends that bookherd mentioned above. :-) It's on a goofy over-the-top side project instead of any of my "main" projects, but eh, sometimes goofy side projects are where the words are.

[bladespark]

That's some good words. The goofy side projects are often the most fun, and sometimes even come out with the best stories.

[sanguinity]

Sometimes they really do. :-)

[trobadora]

For the 4th: wrote a little and also made some notes for an exchange fic during my lunch break, but didn't manage anything in the evening.

Thank god the weekend's coming.

[bladespark]

Writing is writing! (For me weekends are even worse than weekdays for getting things done.)