So after two more weeks of tracking how much time I spend on my writing, I am much happier with my productivity during the week. I am better able to stay on track and I spent more hours working on writing. However, weekends gave me trouble. I don’t have a particular block carved out on weekends because they can be so variable. What this means is while I get writing done, I have dropped the ball on more than one occasion on actually writing down the hours spent and on what.
Added to that the change in schedule caused by some news I got on Tuesday (more details about that in my newsletter this month.) and the Roanoke Regional Writer’s Conference I went to this past Saturday, meaning I’m taking today off, my spreadsheet is nowhere near as beautiful as I would like.
However, I have been feeling productive. (And I think I have been, despite not having all of the cold hard data to back it up.) Being able to look back and see: “Oh yeah, I actually spent an hour and a half smoothing the Huntsman.” Does wonders for dispelling my mind trying to tell me I’m slacking off too much.
I’ll likely keep trying with the spreadsheets and see if I can’t get writing down my time to be more habitual, since it’s something I would like to keep up with.
The “event on Tuesday” also lead to a change in priorities that means I got very little done with the Huntsman. That in itself wouldn’t be horrible except that that morning I had finally decided to pull the plug and yank a (fairly) main character out. So not only did I get less done, I had just given myself more work.
So this journal entry is my reset point for my goals. I need to remove the character from the manuscript, and finish smoothing it out by the end of the month, which is only a week and a half. Looks like that’s most of what I’m going to be doing during this time.
