1.
I have achieved a new title for TLOL.
*hugs it to herself*
It’s probably not as cool as I think it is, but I’ll let myself believe it for a little longer.
2.
Writing the synopsis has helped me think a bit more about everything that I want inside it.
More importantly, how it all coalesces – writerly moment about pretty word here! – together.
That’s more important than the pieces, IMHO.
3.
And that’s it for today because I’m already well on my way to RSI.
1.
1-2-3 was not a disaster, in terms of discipline. I mostly kept up with it.
2.
I do think it’s a disaster in terms of what I got out of it.
Which I think is nothing.
3.
I already have an account that I set up to email my entries to. I’ll try to 1-2-3 when the mood strikes me.
Just don’t think it’ll be very often.
1.
I cut half of what I had in two days.
Because I wasn’t brave enough to do it all in one.
2.
Things started picking up speed again yesterday.
3.
Today was 788 words.
I like the number 88. It looks like two infinity signs rotated 90 degrees.
I also sent off something to someone. So we’ll see how that goes.
4.
I’m not sure that I’m going to continue with 1-2-3.
I’m not sure if I should.
1.
Little plot arcs! Everywhere!
I can feel the climax building and building and building. I can actually see where I am going.
2.
I’m into the third chapter now. :)
And tomorrow, I will most probably hit the 5k mark – which would mean that I’ve been writing, on average, double the 250 minimum I hope to meet each day.
3.
Today was the first 1k day of this draft of TLOL. That’s always a nice milestone to meet.
The Twitter people who told me I was crazy for trying to cram 20 years worth of plot into 80-90k? They are still probably right, but I shall try anyway.
4.
1-2-3 is going surprisingly well. It’s so much a part of my schedule now that I was planning to do them tonight too.
I might do that. The thing is, I can’t tell if the heebie-jeebies started because I started 1-2-3. So maybe they aren’t so good for me.
1.
I may have done something really silly today. But it will make me read more fiction and right now, that’s a really good thing.
And god, please don’t let me accidentally send an email from the wrong account.
2.
Night 1-2-3 pages are definitely better for me. Infinitely better.
I still don’t make the full half an hour, but I think I could get there someday.
3.
I settled for the solution I already had. I figure that since I didn’t yet have another solution, if there was one, it still needed to cook and I might as well ‘practise’ some more.
I think it’ll work out though. My sooperwoman wears her new sooperpower more comfortably than the previous, fuzzy one.
I’m keeping to a one page a day or so minimum too. Some days are easier than others, but none of them painful.
4.
I like that. I think from now on, I shall call my female protagonists sooperwomen and male ones soopermen. It sounds much better than the heroines and heroes of romance, and not nearly as clunky as XX/XY protagonist.
Main character is more inclusive, but it doesn’t really touch on the fact that most – okay, all – my work so far tends to revolve around a love story.
1.
It snowed today.
Reconsidering my plans to study in Canada now.
I have no idea what I was thinking (maybe that it IS February?) but I decided I’d be warm enough in just a sweater. Which I was. Nearly.
But…snowgasm! In a Sweater! At least it didn’t settle.
2.
I haven’t written pretty much since my exams ended. What’s up with that? So I’ve started on TLOL again.
I would have done so earlier, but it really irritates me that WriteWay does not allow you to open 2 WIPs at a time and I haven’t yet had the time to go print it out.
3.
1-2-3 isn’t going very well. I didn’t do it
I’m just finding it to be such a chore. Damn it.
1.
How perfect would it have been if I had managed to make this the first post with this tag.
2.
There are a lot of studies that have concluded that willpower is a finite resource.
I won’t link to them here, but I do believe it is true.
It makes sense. Everything else is finite. Why wouldn’t willpower be too?
I do, however, also think that willpower is like stamina. If you use it enough, if you work it enough, you’ll have more of it. Similarly, if you use it for running mostly, your stamina goes longer if used for running.
That is, you can also use efficiency more efficiently.
For instance, once you get used to writing every day, it’s easier to write every day. You need less willpower to write every day, so you can have more willpower left over to do other stuff.
3.
Efficiency can also be achieved in another: setting attainable (but not too attainable) goals that are well-defined, i.e. not nebulous.
You don’t want to waste willpower fiddling over how you are going to achieve your goal.
If you say you want to write x amount of words a day, that’s easy. BICHOK.
If you say you want to read more craft books, make that…I don’t know, one every month. I think one every two weeks would be pushing it, but what do I know? I read economics blogs for fun.
4.
This year, there are two things I would like to add to my daily life. 1-2-3 is one of them, and the other is stitching pretty much every single day.
Primarily, the reason is that I need to relax more. I just don’t like waking up about a quarter of the way to a panic attack. Or sitting in a lecture and trying to Zen my heartbeat into a more normal rate.
Now combine the two, and exchange lecture for exam? That’s called a catastrophe waiting to happen.
5.
So new and better habits.
So I can be a better, improved version of me.
1.
Morning pages have yet to happen.
I am thinking about turning them into night pages. To empty out my head so I can start afresh in the morning. Maybe it’ll help me sleep.
For now, lunch pages seems to work. We’ll see when my schedule fills up a bit more.
2.
TLOL continues to percolate. I’ve essentially reworked the plotline for the third act, but I still need to fix the first.
I have found my not-so-pretty protagonist’s defining trait, so the first act must change. The plot works, but not the way it is currently written.
3.
MO has titles. Now it needs writing. I will probably work on this in parallel with TLOL, because it has so much in common.
Themes, worldbuilding, timelines even. I think the characters in MO will appear in TLOL and vice versa.
4.
The weather…OMG the weather!
It was freaking chucking it down yesterday. An actual Snowgasm in February! What. The. Fuck?
Talk about January-in-February! Which is, thankfully, going much better than the weather.
1.
I have a fetish for it.
I like to be able to say ‘I’ve done this in ____.’
It’s less that I want to be a better person, but I want to be better prepared to take over the world to seize every opportunity that comes my way, and just to do things better.
2.
In 2007, it was learning to be more extroverted.
That one was hard.
But it was a good year for that. I think it made my first year away from home a lot easier than it would have been otherwise.
3.
2008 and 2009 was meditation.
The reason why it was the same in 2009 was because 2008 was a bust.
So was 2009, come to that.
4.
Which is how we ended up in 2010.
I’m looking for my replacement for meditation, if that makes sense. A way for me to clear The Space in My Head. Hence 1-2-3 and The Year of Starts, to enable more Stabbing Fabric with a Needle.
I decided that this year, I am going to attempt a multi-pronged approach. 1-2-3 is active, whereas stitching every day is passive.
We’ll see how this one goes. 1-2-3 is a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. *bangs head*
5.
I periodically do this with my gadgets too.
I have given up on Outlook. Chrome has to go. Word doesn’t quite fit my writing needs so now I have WriteWayPro. Twitter is better with a Twitter client rather than on web. So forth.
I may settle for Google-izing my laptop in the short-term*, but I doubt I’ll actually do that. I don’t like Chrome. I really don’t like Chrome.
6.
I think that everything can be improved. It’s just a question of whether the improvement is worth the time you spend getting there.
I am, after all, an economist. Marginal marginal marginal!
*Defined as for the next year to eighteen months, as I’ll almost definitely switch out my current laptop for another, or at least get a secondary.
1.
I did get around to 1-2-3. Just at lunch time rather than the planned breakfast time.
I expect that I’ll be doing it at the same time tomorrow as I have a 9 o’ clock start and I’ll be out late tonight.
2.
TLOL still suffers from the Heebie-Jeebies.
3.
I may start messing around with my M.O. Which because I think I’m funny, I have tagged Modus Operandi.
Even though it actually stands for Magnum Opus.
4.
But I’m still in social butterfly* mode, so you know, unwriting and not much work will be done.
*That’s why the start mentioned in yesterday’s post has yet to happen.
The Plan:
1. Write first thing every day for half an hour.
2. Email to sooper-sekrit account.
3. Rinse and repeat.
1.
Odd.
I swear I’m undergoing difficulties…but WriteWay tells me that I’ve written over a thousand words in the past two days.
And I would say that WriteWay has lost its mind (a theme so prevalent in my life right now that it ought to have its own tag) but for the fact that I thought about it, realised that I have written one completely new scene, and added to two others.
2.
This novel has been different in every way.
The writing of it has been surprisingly easy. Not that I don’t wrack my brains over the plot and so forth, but I have never felt like I’ve to cut myself to bleed the words out onto the page.
Nor have I wanted to throw out this entire draft to start all over, despite the fact that I am nearly at the 10k mark.
3.
Still thinking about January-in-February.
Joely said she’d be my accountability partner for it.*
I dread the thought of getting up early to scribble three pages before class, though I know what’s good for you is often hard to do.
It’s the logistics of it that bother me. I don’t know how I want to do it.
I do know that I want to get up in the mornings to do it.
But do I do it by hand on paper and toss it? Open up a new word doc every day, write it in an email and send it to sooper-dooper-sekrit account? How?
* If you’re interested, just ping me. I am Cardinal Emily of Gmail, with a full-stop between Cardinal and Emily. Apparently there’s another, more evil Emily Cardinal out there.
1.
Yes. I know. I’m supposed to be dead to the world and unwriting*.
2.
But sometimes the urge takes over and exam tomorrow be-damned.
My cast is slowly expanding, and my multiple storylines are weaving themselves in and out to make a coherent whole.
Never mind nailing Euler equations. This is a whole new level of high.
3.
I have decided I will be doing a January-in-February** challenge, to kick-start my 3 pages in the morning habit to empty my not-so-little mind of its detritus first thing.
I haven’t decided yet how I’ll do it. Pen and paper just doesn’t really appeal to me. At the moment, I’m considering typing 3 pages, whilst listening to Britney Spears’s Three on repeat, and not saving any of it.
Except…what if there are gems in there? There might be, like, diamonds in the rough.
*unwriting is my version of unwinding.
**Something I’ll probably not be able to do next year because I would like to celebrate what might be my first and last Chinese New Year at home in years in proper style.