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 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.
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.
