Post Pandemic Concentration – The Climb #832

Thursday 3^rd June 2021

I love it when you have what feels like a unproductive day, and you still turn out some 3500 new words. The novel seems to be progressing well now I’m into the second act. I’m still plagued by the odd doubt but my mental reassurance that it can be fixed afterwards seems to be doing its job.

Of course, I would have loved to have written more. I probably could have written more but I spent a lot of time in between sessions on Fortnite. Ideally I should just limit myself to a single game and then jump back into the writing, but I’ve been busy getting my and now C’s character to level 100.

Not sure I’ll get C’s done. They’re level 19 and there’s only a few days left in the season. But after hitting 100 myself I jumped on his and started grinding through quests. I try and do multiples at the same time to maximise efficiency. I managed to complete 13 quests in one match.

They’re already at level 42 but it came at the price of an additional writing session. I’m also going to run out of quests at some point. If it weren’t for the fact that medical conditions stop them being able to play, he could do it themselves.

Amongst all this I am aware that I have a load of other work that’s not got done. I’m willing to forgive a lot if it means that I make a lot of novel progress, but some of these other things do need to tick along in the background rather than grind to a halt.

Still, it seems I can have one thing but not the other. I just need to adjust my focus from week to week to stop tasks in secondary areas piling up. I still want to get the first draft of this novel done by the end of the month though, so maybe I’ll worry about it in July.

I’ve always been pretty bad at planning timescales for drafts. I pick a date that seems reasonable and never seem to make it. Life comes along with a curved ball to throw me off, or I have an unfocused week, and suddenly I’m no closer the end with days to go.

What I am noticing is that my concentration is starting to come back. It’s slow and sporadic but I can see it in my writing numbers. I used to write one session a day and be lucky to get 500 words out. Now I’m doing several and having sessions of over 1000 words. That’s progress and I’m loathe to do anything to stifle it.

Maybe I’ve just found my stride with this novel or with my first jab out the way, I can start to see the end of the pandemic in sight.

But even this period of productivity and focus might not last, for all I know. That’s why I don’t create tasks for my writing.

At one stage I gave myself a daily task to write a thousand words. But what I’d find is that something would come along like a Warcraft Wednesday and I’d do no words, leaving the task uncompleted for the next day. And sometimes I’d just get to a stage where I was either unable or unwilling to write for a few days, by which time I was flooded by tasks.

So weirdly, I don’t put writing in my ToDo list. I probably should, even if it’s just to say write something.

So whilst I really do hope to finish by end of June… that’s a soft deadline rather than a hard one. I still have to decide what to do afterwards. The story needs some time to sit before I edit it, but whether I do another first draft in that time or something like short stories remains to be seen.

I’ll worry about it when I get to it, I suppose. As to when that will be, I have no idea.