Progress report (31/05): I can see the holidays from here!

So, almost but not quite a late update again. A brief update this time because it is late.

The past two weeks, I’ve actually been trying to let myself relax a little bit and indulge in some winding down time. It’s been… working somewhat. I’ve been feeling more urges to write, and I actually sat down and had one very productive session yesterday where I wrote a good part of the beginning of Ignition 3.

So how are we doing?

Compared to the previous updates, not bad! I wrote 1973 words on Ignition 3 in a single evening, and I feel like I could easily write much more if I spent a few more hours sitting down with the chapter. It’s good to finally get to some of these bits – interesting stuff is happening and these are things I’ve been waiting to write for a while now. There is one very difficult scene in the chapter that I’m still not sure how to exactly approach yet, but I’ll tackle that when I get to it, or skip over it and move on and then handle it later – a benefit of not having to publish stuff up front.

Two thousand words in two weeks is still a lot less than I’d like to write, but given that I’ve still been in programming crunch most of the time, I think this bodes well for the future. Why, it’s practically a 2000% improvement over last time!

The next two weeks

I will continue to experiment with ways to be able to focus on both writing and programming without one losing out to the other. So far I’ve noticed a slight decrease in my programming efficiency, but we’ll see how it goes – I’m not actually sure how related that is to my writing efforts.

In two weeks I will be done with all the programming crunch for now as the summer holidays begin and I get some real time off for the first time in a bit more than half a year. That should last a few months. While I do anticipate being rather distracted by my family as per usual during the holidays, I’m also counting on hiding out somewhere for at least a few weeks, preferably a bit more, and just focusing entirely on spewing out as much writing as I possibly can, and otherwise in general attempt to write as much as I can get away with.

So I’m quite looking forward to that. These next two weeks, being the very final ones of my year, probably will hold a lot of crunch too, though. We’ll see how my attempts at writing hold up under the pressure.

Until next time!

Progress report (18/05): Work, work, work…

I apologize for the late update. I’ve been very occupied and I thought I’d written and posted the update earlier in the day, until I realized this morning that I actually hadn’t. That should say something about how my head feels like most of the time these days.

In the past two weeks, I’ve been trying to figure out how to be completely in the programming headspace most of the day, and then get completely into the writing headspace at the end of the day. This is much, much harder than I want it to be, and I haven’t succeeded in making it work out yet as I am an extremely single-minded and focused person and I have a very hard time immersing myself in more than one creative endeavour at once.

As a result, while I’m doing my exam projects, writing will probably proceed at this very slow pace. I ended a smaller three-week project last Friday with a solid result, but alas also started a new one today this Monday, which will last four weeks. There’s just no release.

How are we doing?

171 words have been written on the story since last – that’s it. Most evenings I’ve spent crashed and… well, entirely spent for the day. It hardly ever becomes anything more than that one sentence that I promised myself I would write every day. Programming crunch time is clearly not very conducive to writing (all of my projects are crunch from beginning to end these days, it seems – gotta be careful not to burn out soon).

The next two weeks

I’m going to see if I can make this thing with changing my mental focus towards writing in the evening work. I have a few potential ideas for how to sufficiently switch the context my brain operates in that I can sit down and genuinely concentrate a bit on writing every now and then, without the writing getting completely crowded out of my head by other things.

This isn’t really easy, though, so I make no promises. The only promise I make is that the story is, of course, still actively being worked on and nowhere close to being abandoned. And I sure hope I get a few months or at least weeks off soon without any programming to do, so I can get into the writing headspace proper. I had a few days of that just before I left Canada for Denmark, and I wrote very quickly in that period – so that bodes well, supposing I ever actually manage to get some time off.

Progress report (03/05): Moving, jet lag, exams and more

In the past two weeks, I’ve moved back to Denmark from Canada, dealt with jet lag, and plunged straight into crunch time on an exam project for a university course on game engines that I’m taking (I’m doing CS). I’ve been rather busy, having failed to anticipate how much effort was involved in cleaning out and moving, how time consuming it would be to get started properly on my team’s project back home, and how tired jet lag would make me in the evenings after work where I’d planned on writing since I usually don’t suffer jet lag much.

How are we doing?

Frankly, not a lot of writing has gotten done. I’ve opened the IFF files every day, and written at least one sentence – but that sadly doesn’t amount to much writing overall. That lore post on chakra that I’ve been mentioning is halfway finished, which is the largest chunk of writing that’s happened; I managed that just before I left Canada. Otherwise, a meager 201 words have been added to the chapter nine draft – nothing complete enough to even be added to the online draft I have open for high level beta feedback.

The next two weeks

I’m not really good at deadlines, as I should have proven beyond any doubt by now, but I do hope to provide the chakra post at some point these next two weeks. Just a matter of sitting down for two hours with a clear head and hammering the rest out and proof-reading it, perhaps shoot it past a beta or two. Story-wise, I will restate the apparently unrealistic goals I had for the past two weeks: to finish up the chapter nine draft and be well into chapter ten.

I’m optimistic about the next two weeks, so I think cautious pessimism is in order (given precedent). That project crunch I mentioned took a lot out of me, especially on top of the jet lag, but we’re now ahead of our schedule and the jet lag is gone. I can afford to (and somewhat need to) go a bit easier on work now.

The next two weeks look a lot brighter for getting back into writing and I’m definitely feeling the mojo now – I just need the occasional right confluence of time and energy, and both are looking to recover from their brief dip downwards. I am taking a tip that has been given me and planning ahead, designating specific hours each day as dedicated writing time. We’ll see how that works out.

So that’s the bi-weekly update from me. It’s brief today – sorry about that.

See you in at least two weeks, if hopefully before that!