Wednesday 20th October 2021 

If there’s one thing I can never seem to get right, it’s the time I take to do various writing related tasks. I’m always over optimistic. 

My plan was to finish one scene on a secret project and then edit the 10 or so thousand words by lunchtime. But it took me all day and whilst I could tick this project off, I find myself with a load of other stuff I wanted to do, left undone. I’d hoped to work on another project, do a bit of learning, and even start laying out the structure for The Worthy, but no. I ran out of time. 

Part of my reason for thinking I could be done by lunchtime was because I’m currently trialling Prowritingaid. Now, I’ve loathed investing heavily in grammar checkers. I’ve found Word’s inbuilt checker good enough, which is why I use Word for editing. Even then, I find it wanting to change a lot of my sentences into nonsense. OK, so maybe it’s a sign that the sentence is clunky and needs some work, but I’ve honestly found that it’s harder to fix the sentence with these tools than just delete the sentence and rewrite. 

But Prowritingaid can now integrate with Scrivener, and that’s a big deal for me. It can also check Final Draft and web-based content… meaning that instead of checking the edition of The Climb in Word before posting onto the website, I can instead paste it into the website and edit from there. 

There are a lot of features, and some people I know who indie self-publish swear by it for aiding their speed, so I’m trying it. 

I’m still getting used to it, but I like what I’m seeing so far. I did a far more detailed edit on my work today than I’d planned, and I could see how I could really use it to the max on novels. 

But the deeper edit meant more work, which meant the edit took up most of the afternoon. Admittedly, if I’d edited a novel to that level of detail, I certainly wouldn’t have got 10k words done in a few hours, so I’m slowly being converted. Maybe once I get the hang of it, I can get it done even quicker. 

I need to, as I feel I have a ton of work to do by the weekend. Taking yesterday off for Super Squirt day makes me feel like I’m a couple of days behind (I’m not sure how that maths works!) and I’m finding I’ve got to really knuckle down over the next couple of days. 

Again, I’m going to make unrealistic estimates on my time, thinking I can get everything done on some project or other inside a single day. I won’t and I’m going to be frustrated come the weekend that I seem to have got nothing done. 

Little by little, bit by bit. I like that I’m busy, and I’m having a lot of fun, but I also wish I could get to the weekend not having massively underestimated the time it was going to take me to do the jobs I’ve got to do. 

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Past Years: 2020 – The Year of Being Fearsome | 2019 – The Year of Soldiering Through | 2018 – The Year of Priorities | 2017 – The Year Of The Offensive