Progress report (23/08): The good and the bad

There are both good and bad news this week. The day after I posted my last progress update, I learned that I had a work deadline a week and a half later – so that was bad. Most days I was still working when my phone alarm started ringing, telling me I had to write my daily half hour. I did not get half an hour done on most days, but I overcompensated on other days and my average is probably pretty close to half an hour a day.

How are we doing?

The above might sound like an excuse building up to me saying that I didn’t actually write much, but the fact is that I still wrote almost 5000 words in the past two weeks, so it really did go pretty well anyway. Most of those words have been on Ignition 4, though Ignition 2 and 3 are still in very rough draft stages (there are still occasionally bolded bits saying “write x and y here“, but the meat of the chapters is there). The half-an-hour-a-day habit isn’t anywhere close to stuck yet, though, and I’ve pushed the daily time a bit back because I am always doing something every evening. So those are good news – writing is happening faster now than it has for a few months, and I’m hoping I can speed it up still more.

I’m afraid I haven’t gotten the time to work more on any lore posts, though it’s possible that I will find the time to finish one before the next update.

The next two weeks…

I will pretty much continue like I have since the last update, with the added benefit of not crunching to meet an unexpected deadline. It remains to be seen whether half-an-hour-a-day is a sustainable habit that I can keep up in the long run or whether I need to do longer but less regular sessions, but I’m sure going to give it a good, solid shot and try to change things around if it doesn’t appear to work. Hopefully I’ll have an even higher word count progress to report next time.

Until next time!

Progress report (09/08): Week of the procrastinator

Today is another not-too-lengthy update. The truth is that not much has happened at all. I’d like to say that I’ve been very busy, and while I could make a bunch of quasi-valid excuses, the truth is that I’ve had plenty of time to write this past week after I got home. I just didn’t really get it done.

How are we doing?

I wrote a paltry 327 words this week – one sit down of a few minutes one evening soon after I got home and started working again. So, we’re not that well this update – but at least it’s still something, and I’m still writing, however slowly. This is one for the long run, after all.

I did get one good review on fanfiction.net, and my (somewhat lengthy) reply to that will probably form the basis for part of the lore post on written seals at some point in the future.

The next two weeks…

I shall endeavor to build up a habit. I forgot that the key to writing enough (or doing anything enough) is building up a good habit about it. Just sitting down for at least half an hour a day at a certain time to try and write something will make sure that my mind stays on the business. However, building up habits is hard. Sometimes I can be a horrible procrastinator. I’m going to see what I can do about it, though – there is a bit more to that one specific skill than merely writing fanfiction, after all!

This blog is one good example of a habit that it appears I’m managing to maintain. I don’t pretend that a lot of people are reading it – IFF’s readership is after all rather tiny, and this blog’s readership so minuscule as to be practically non-existent, but it does have a value to me all of its own, despite of that.

For now, I’m simply going to try and consciously allocate a certain minimum daily slice of time, say 20:00 to 20:30 in the evenings to writing, and then freely let it extend past that if I can. We’ll see how that worked out in two weeks.

Until next time!