Tag: timesheet

2018 Timesheet

Laura Highcove

So one of my long term projects for this year was an excel spreadsheet that I recorded the hours I spent toward my writing career. I’ve heard the advice over and over that if you want to be a writer you need to treat it like a job. So one of the things I decided was that I needed to spend 20 hours a week on my writing. The spreadsheet was to help me track when I’ve done that. It also helped with the times when I felt like I haven’t spent enough time writing, since if I have the actual numbers, then I know. And when they’re low, I knew I needed to spend more time on it. Plus I love organized data.

I was still getting used to the idea and figuring out which things I was going to keep track of. By the end of January I settled on the basic DIY MFA sections of Writing, Reading, and Community with several subsections, and here’s the summary for the year:

Feb-April I was super on point, with hitting my 80 hours a month (20 hours a week) goal, with a solid 50% spent toward writing and ~25% ish toward the other two.

I was on vacation the first week of May and while I did some writing, I did not track the hours. The middle two weeks were less than productive due to making up hours over the weekend and then some depression.

June-August were Nationals as well as the beginnings of Nickel getting sick. I’m not really surprised that my hours plummeted. It was probably one of the worst periods of consistent depression I’ve ever had. I’m actually proud I got as much done as I did.

Sept and October are a little nuts. That is almost entirely due to the Writing Excuses Cruise. I chose to count the entirety of the time spent on the cruise on my timesheet, since I was technically there for my writing, but I didn’t want to spend time nickel and diming each little thing I did. This encouraged me to add an ‘event’ section to next year’s timesheet for things like writing retreats and conferences. Anyway, that retreat lit a fire under my butt for the next month to get the Huntsman draft done and do some heavy rewriting.

My November hours were curious to me, because I did NaNo, and I did it very well, but I had a sad dearth of hours. I think that since I had given myself the NaNo my goal, as soon as I had the words needed, I didn’t really push myself to do anything else. Two of my weeks were nothing but writing. Something to keep in mind for next year. Perhaps there’s a place between 50k and 90k that I can hit without burning out, or perhaps I just need to give myself two goals for November. There was also Thanksgiving travel, of course.

December was going great until my cat Copper got sick and had to be hospitalized for three days. That really killed the week. She ended up being fine, a known issue that likely flared up due to the stress of the new cat. I also did nothing while traveling for Christmas. Sort of sad to end the year on a down-swing, but such is life.

After looking this over, I’ve decided to take into account vacation time and ‘rest’ days (for sickness or depression) so that I don’t just look at my lack of hours and feel bad. I also noticed that overall, I am not happy with the lack of time spent on reading and analyzing what I read. I might give myself some sort of goal there.

I’m super excited to see what next year will bring. I already have the new timesheet made up, with some cool excel tricks to make the sheet itself less time consuming. Yay data!

New Timesheet Questions

Laura Highcove

Week before last I finished taking notes on the Huntsman. I organized what I had, wrote a bunch of new scenes (and rewrote old ones) based on what my notes had told me. I then realized I was still stuck. The idea that I had for the end of the story is just not coming together the way I want. So I did a quick cleaning and sent it to my husband for an alpha read so he has a better idea of the story to help with a plan. (He’s much better at outlines than I am.)

Since that is off my plate for now while the hubby reads it, I started working more on my Blessings of the Nerial story. I once again ran into the problem of being a discovery writer who now knows enough craft that I keep trying to put the plot together as I write. And right now I have no idea if it’s helping, or just stifling my writing. I talked out some of the ideas with my hubby and realized how little of my ideas are actually solid (ie, I can explain them successfully to someone else). It’s possible that it’s always like this at the beginning of a story and I’ve just never been aware of it before. I’m still on ‘vague feelings’ and ‘this is how it would look in a movie’ stage of writing. And who knows, it’s possible this story won’t stick at all. (It’s only at 13k words, so I’m not all that deep yet) But I’m going to keep working on it until I get the Huntsman back, barring anything else unforseen.

At the end of last week, I also noticed how little I had on my timesheet related to ‘reading’. I did finish my mushroom book, which is counted as ‘research’, but that’s all I had in the past month and a half. I think part of the problem is that counting ‘reading’ time toward ‘work’ time feels like cheating, since I enjoy it so much. Like yesterday I ready Dennard’s new Witchlands novella, Sightwitch. I put down the two hours it took on my timesheet and I feel weird about it.

And yet, I feel like I haven’t been reading much of anything because I’ve been so focused on getting the hours I want for my timesheet. I do want to work on doing more in depth reading, but in order to have fodder for that, it means I need to have read the story in the first place. Obviously this is just a timesheet I keep for myself and there are no right or wrong answers. We’ll see how the data pans out in the next month or so.

I also am working on making my descriptions more descriptive. My descriptions tend to come out rather …well like I’m writing code. (I have a BS in computer science.) It’s certainly a weakness of mine, so I’ve been looking for good examples in books I’ve read and trying to see how I can improve.

Goals for the next two weeks: Keep working on Blessings of the Nerial. I’d like another 7k words. I finally think I’m starting to get a handle on Eira’s (main character) personality. Write four descriptions that I’ll post on facebook and get some feedback. Spend at least two hours on some sort of deep-reading or analyzing. Man, I am being super specific this week. We’ll see how that goes.

Celebrating My Victories

Laura Highcove 2 Comments

This week, more on my new timesheets, because that is data and I love messing with data. I am really liking the effect the timesheet is having. It pushes me to do more work when I need to, but is also a way for me to sit down and say: “Okay, I’ve worked on my novel for two hours today, so no I don’t need to work on it more now.”

The other effect is that it lets me, definitively, see how long it takes me to do certain tasks. I find when writing new stuff, I tend to work better in half hour increments. When smoothing or revising, I can more easily work for up to an hour (or more).

It also lets me see what other things I did over the course of a week that I might forget I had done, like these past two weeks I went though my blog and re-jiggered the categories and tags. I now have:

Journal: Mostly talking about the writing I’ve been doing, but some of what’s going on in my life in general.
Blog posts: Which are posts that are meant to be more informational or topic focused than ‘what I’ve been doing’.
Reviews: Because I realized I really like doing reviews and talking about why I did or didn’t like particular media (tv shows, movies, books, and video games).
World of Warcraft: For all my old world of warcraft kill posts that I just can’t bring myself to delete.

It took some time, but it now means things are much neater, and that makes my heart happy.

Also, two great things happened this past week. First was that I reached the point in Huntsman where I *usually* bang my head against it, think nothing can be done, and become sad for several days. But this time I remembered my process after only one day, and went back to the beginning to smooth for a while. (I am also taking notes on the things I still need to do.) I am proud that I was actually able to look at my resistance and realize what it meant. It’s all part of getting comfortable with my process.

The second was that I got depressed (okay the depressed part wasn’t great) but I *realized* that I was depressed and gave myself the day off instead of beating myself up over the fact that I didn’t feel like working on the Huntsman. Instead I read more in my mushroom book (research for a potential story) and spent almost three hours writing the first drafts and taking pictures for the gryffin posts I have coming up. And those were both productive and fun.

So it was two wins in the “self-awareness” category and I am celebrating that fact. I didn’t try to force myself to feel the way I thought I should, I just listened to what I needed and worked from there and ended up more productive for it.

Added Feb 07: I totally forgot to make myself a writing goal. On Jan 21 my goal was to finish removing a character from the Huntsman and smooth to the end. Since then I got about halfway in, then went back to the beginning for another smoothing pass during which time I started taking notes on what I don’t like, or that needs to be fixed in each scene until I now reached the place where the book basically breaks down completely.

Plan for the next two weeks is now this: Finish off taking notes on the whole story (Wed), move the scenes around to try and make the story more whole (Thurs), write the new scenes I put in my notes as needing to write. (Sat/Sun).

Then the next week is another, heavy duty, smoothing pass. I’ll reevaluate where I am over the weekend and include my new plan in the next journal entry.