Saturday 18th February 2017
Given how last week I slept in until the afternoon and how knackered I was feeling after this past week, I’d not planned to accomplish much on Saturday. However, I woke at 9am (which wasn’t that late given how late I’d gone to bed) and despite trying to get back to sleep (because I thought my body needed it) I was up by 10am.
So I did a bit of admin in the morning (some social media and editing of yesterday’s The Climb before posting it) and then made myself a nice big brunch.
After yesterday’s disappointment in Starbound, I arranged for my brother to come and join me and help me with the quest. He’d not played Starbound in ages so time he got patched, created a character and got to the same stage as me, it took some time. I have to say that I’m really impressed with Starbound’s multiplayer over Steam. I thought I might need to build or hire a dedicated server. There were still some hiccups with instances but nothing that got really frustrating.
We completed the difficult quest which unlocked the ability to fly to other systems, and logged off there.
By now it was late afternoon and so I walked into town and went to the gym. I upped my pace on the 5k by 1km/h – not a huge increase given how easy I found it last week but my idea is to up it week by week until it feels difficult. Finished with 5 mins on the cross trainer and 5 mins on the rower.
I got home about 7pm and made dinner and then worried about writing. Part of me knows that this is the best time to write for me, but I also note that it’s when I feel the most drained. I try and get the distractions out my head and then write from a calm place. But I think, next week, I’m going to experiment with writing first, and dealing with distractions later.
Tonight I was finishing up the big fight scene. I’d written all the action but the difficulty came in bringing the scene to a nice close. It wasn’t a huge number of words but they were important words. Perhaps that was where my issues from yesterday came from, as I spent a long time getting that scene to a place where I liked it.
The end still feels a bit clunky but I think that’s something that can be fixed in the next draft. I’m not entirely sure what constitutes being OK to fix next draft and what needs to be fixed in this one as it’s very much a gut feeling. I guess, if I can progress to the next chapter not worrying about any negative impact on it from the last, then I’m happy to fix it next time round. I’ve never been one of these people that can write stories that break continuity (i.e. the hero changes from bob, a 43 year old barman to Daphne, a 17 year old hockey player).
I worked long and hard on that chapter for very few words, but that’s how it goes sometimes. Progress is progress is progress. The next chapter is one I already have a half-draft on (although I’m rapidly approaching the part where I have no prior drafts) so I’m hoping that it’s in good shape and won’t need much of a rewrite. I suspect it probably will.
The last 2 weeks seem to have been one of distractions and I do think that whilst my progress has been steady, it’s lower than my normal rate. I keep telling myself that if the only impact of major distractions is that my word count slows down a bit, that’s not entirely bad (I’m still managing an average of around 1500 words a day. But I still think I need to be better at compartmentalising those distractions so they don’t eat into writing time and I can still do the word count that doesn’t lead me feeling pissy the next day.
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