September books: 0/5 (but I’m in the middle of 3)
I got the card story outlined, but I did run out of purple cards with this iteration. I may have a plan moving forward.
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Hm, I’m out and about, and the glare on the pics is worse than I thought. Oh well!
Outlining the card story did set me back, though. When I actually got to sitting down and finalizing the outline, it didn’t take me too long (though I did need to do some very brief research on parallel universes in the middle of it), but adding it onto my to-do derailed my productivity for days.
Now, did I also add on some tasks for planning the generation ship story? Yes. Yes, I did. See, my brain was like, oh, well, if I can spend 15 minutes on outlining, then I can also spend 15 minutes on a couple of less intense generation ship things for my bingo card for my writing community.
And that was apparently too much for my poor brain, and nothing got done for three days until I finally sat down on Monday and did the outline (which took longer than 15 minutes. My brain is bad at time estimation).
I’ve re-centered at this point, but I am annoyed at myself about the time wasted. For most of my life, I’ve been able to work on multiple projects at the same time, but varying what steps each project is on (card story – outlining, short stories – drafting, generation ship – planning) and by working in discreet time periods (one writing session a day for each project). In general this has worked fine for me for decades, but does not always work and is not working right now.
Now, I have two options really. I can continue to put multiple writing-related things on my to-do list and hope my brain gets its act together, or I can hold off for now and focus on a single project and try again in a week or so. (Or, related to the latter option, I put a single option on my to-do list and if, and only if, that gets done and I have additional writing time, I work on something else. A secret goal, if you will, though sometimes my brain will count secret goals as normal goals and then the whole thing breaks down.)
The card story is outlined, and so it’s out of the normal purview at this point, and I have managed to get a few easier generation ship things done (set a daily writing goal, for example, and came up with a working title), but I really do need to focus on getting my short stories done before October so I can focus on writing the generation ship story at that point. But I also need to remind myself that if a writing challenge isn’t working on my time frame, it’s okay to not do it. Not ideal, what with having joined this new community, but no reason to cause myself undue stress.
What do you do when your projects aren’t getting done, or aren’t playing nice with each other, squider?
See you next week!
