Time Management

Morning! 10th of June 2021

Peter Germany Cat, Horror, Horror Writer, Writing , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Good morning! How are we all doing today?

Something that I am is an olympic level procrastinator, and finding reasons to sit on my arse. The last few days have not been for writing, but I found myself having a little time before bed last night (mainly because I knew I wasn’t going to sleep quickly) so I got a little writing done. It helped in that half an hour later I was very ready for sleep, but I also got some words down. And, this morning I woke up with a major breakthrough on Homestead.

I’ve started from scratch with it, and have been taking it nice and steady, you know scene setting and so on. But it’s given me a little time for my impressively slow grey matter to process the feel I had for this story. It’s far from ground breaking, nor epic. I just know the story I’m going to tell. I’ve gone through two rough characters and a setting to two less rough characters, a setting, and now a story.

Giving myself time to allow this happen is something I know I need to do more.

Right, I’m gonna leave it there. I’ve got work today so I’m gonna get a few words cracked out before I have to think about getting ready.

I keep telling her, printers are not cat bearing structures…

A Productive Evening

Peter Germany Books, Editing, Planning, Writing , , ,

1765 words were written tonight in two sittings for a time of 1.2 hours. It’s been a long week where squeezing in writing hasn’t been easy so having the time to write for 25 minutes or so, take a ten minute break and then get cracking again, has felt good. All week I’ve been wanting to get back up to the 1500-2000 word mark once more and doing that tonight has put a smile on my face a little.

This weekend I’ve got a few things I really need to do. One of them is tidy my room up. At the moment it’s looking a little neglected and it’s driving me a little nuts.
I’d also like to give my desk another tidy up. My desk is one which has a slid-out keyboard shelf under the main surface of the desk and before I brought my iMac I took that shelf out, tonight I’ve put that back in and I’ve found it was more comfortable while I was writing. Doing that though means I’ve had to move something from a shelf under the desk which sits higher then the shelf does. So I need to find a new home for that but hopefully that’ll happen when I rearrange the desk.

I’m due to be out for lunch with a couple of old school friends on Sunday so that’ll be a couple of hours that I won’t be writing but I’m planning to write before I go and then again when I get home as well.

With what I’ve written today I’m now at (just over) 12,000 words, which puts me back on the thousand words a day target I want to do. I’ve set this little target as I’m thinking this story will be about 60,000 words and if I keep to a thousand words a day then I’ll wrap up by the 1st of February (which is a date that is looking like a date that another project will hopefully start).
With that in mind something I need to do is find a good balance between editing and writing, but I’m thinking it may be beyond me to try and do both at the same time, especially if they’re different projects, with what little time that I have. One way of doing it may be to edit on a weekend once I’ve hit my minimum for the day, but I’ll see how that works out. If anyone has any tips that may help me with this then please feel free to share 🙂

Today’s Post

Peter Germany Outlining, Planning , ,

I got a good hours worth of outlining done tonight and got a couple of the key parts of the story noted down. I’ve cut a few pieces and adjusted others and I think I’m streamlining it nicely. I am going to have to go back in my outline and make some adjustments. I’m at a point which has a lot of emotion for two of the characters and their relationship needs to be at a more advanced stage then it currently is.

I had been beating myself up a little about not having done much the last few nights, but it’s occurred to me that as long as I get back into the rhythm I’ve had for NaNoWriMo this month then it’s not something I need to worry about too much.
Being behind where I thought I would has also been on my mind. I think it’s even been bringing me down a little, but I realised that it doesn’t matter if I’m behind a little as I’ll never catch up those few days. It’s like if you set yourself a daily target and miss it by a mile one day, its not worth stressing yourself out trying to play catch up on time and words that were lost. Just carry on with what your doing and you’ll get there. I did want this outline to be done well before now, but it’s not and beating myself up about it wasn’t helping.

Once I’ve finished work I’ve got most of the weekend to work on it, I also want to work on how I’m managing my time as well. NaNo is over and I want to get back into working on some blog posts which aren’t just about what I’m working on at the moment. At the same time though I need to keep my momentum, it should be fun trying to figure out how to manage it all 😀

(i haven’t proof read this post, so have fun with any typos there may be in here)

Brain Freeze!

Peter Germany Books, Editing, Movies, Writing , , , , , ,

I tried editing tonight but for some reason my brain didn’t get going. I tried editing with the TV, like normal but that was too distracting do I turned it off. Still could not get going so eventually I write some bullet points down for an idea I’ve been playing with in my head for a while. This was not especially productive but I have something down on paper now. I’m not ready to even think about writing this one but I wanted to get some details on paper so I can add little bits and pieces to the notes when they come to mind.

I’m going to try and get The Gunslinger read by the end of the month, which will be a tough ask as I am a slow reader but I’m going to give it a try. I dont have any movies thst i am eager to watch. Movies are the biggest competitor for books of an evening for me. last thing I do before bed is either watch a movie or read a book. S I’m going to focus on the book for the last few days of the month.

Back to The Gunslinger though, I’ve found the world that King has created here quite fascinating and I know that once this book is finished I’m going to be eager to read the next one in the series but I’m going to contain myself and read one of the other books in my to-read pile.