Okay dokey. Now that NaNo is over I can take a breath to report on the past month:
1. I made my 50K words for NaNoWriMo 2022 with 3 hours and 10 minutes to spare. I did not write on the same project all month.
2. I kept up all of my streaks throughout the month (daily workout, daily writing, daily French, no solo video games)
3. I missed a bunch of my volume/productivity targets.
4. GBOT: ROTFLMAO
5. GOBOT: see above
It's time for a reset in some areas and some adjustments in others.
1. Writing.
I struggled with NaNoWriMo this year because I started the month working on a project I just was not ready to start drafting yet. As a result, getting words out felt like pulling teeth, and the words I did get were crap. (Many people advocate for allowing the first draft to be crap. I know myself and my writing style well enough to know that the level of crapitude I was getting was not helpful.) I have a number of different projects in various stages of planning, development, and revision right now. I have exactly zero projects which are ready for drafting. This is less than ideal. But it's where I'm at at the moment.
I think it is important for my efforts to get back on track and progress as a writer for me to be writing actual story words on a regular basis. But trying to write a story I'm not yet ready to write is not helpful. So I am going to try the following writing schedule for a while and see how it goes:
- CREATIVITY - 10 minutes per day, 6 days per week - writing games and idea generation exercises such as mind-mapping, listing, world-building, character creation, etc., all as brainstorming exercises with no promise to ever develop any of them further
- CRAFTING WORDS - 500 words per day, 6 days per week - writing new words in story form. Ideally this would be work on a WIP I've committed to pursuing to completion. But when I don't have one in a suitable phase of development (like now!) I will pick something that interests me from my idea generation work and write an exploratory scene on that
- STUDY - 1 hour per day, 5 days per week - I am working through several courses to improve my writing craft. This is time for viewing lectures and reading course texts.
- COURSEWORK or WIP - 1 hour per day, 5 days per week - exercises for the writing craft courses and/or work on a current WIP (in whatever phase of development it's in)
- GAME DEV & STUDY - 1 day per week, minimum 1 hour - I am exploring the creation of RPGs. One day per week will be devoted to study and work in this area.
- DO WHATCHA WANNA - 1 day per week, minimum 1 hour - One day per week is for doing whatever I want to support my writing career. If I have a WIP that I'm burning to write and I want to sit at my desk for eight hours and work on the thing, I can. If I want to turn my computer off and go for a walk in the woods and just daydream about my project, I can do that too. If I have an opportunity to hang out with friends and I want to spend my entire day doing that and not think about my writing at all, I can do that--and it counts as "working on my writing"! (To be a good writer one needs to have a life. Hands down the biggest hole in my life is the social isolation born of living where I do. When I have an opportunity to spend time with friends, I take it!)
2. French
I've almost completed my Fluenz coursework now. I will definitely be going back to review sections of it regularly. The Fluenz course has helped me a lot with increasing my vocabulary and understanding of French grammar. But most of the progress I've made in understanding spoken French has come from watching Netflix shows in French. Therefore, I'm going to up my target for French language study to 5 hours per week, but I'm going to start including in this any time I'm watching French language video and actually trying to comprehend it. (I also often have French language Netflix on in the background when I'm not fully focussed on it. I still will not be counting this time towards my 5 hours per week, although I think it does help.)
3. Artwork
The target is still 5 hours per week. I'm going to get serious about meeting this again, starting this week.
4. Health & Fitness Study
I'm still doing some of this, but I'm not going to formally track it at this time.
5. Reading
I need to do more of this, both fiction and non-fiction. I don't have any volume targets at the moment, and I'm not going to track time or words, but I am going to start logging when I actually do it.
6. Fitness
My target remains a minimum of 5 hours per week of moderate to intense physical activity
7. Yoga
I'm dropping my 3 hours per week goal and replacing it with just trying to do some yoga asana practice a minimum of 6 days per week.
8. Meditation
I'm dropping my 60 minutes per week goal and replacing it with a minimum of 5 minutes per day, every day.
9. Running
My goal remains 20 km per week. Because it takes so much longer to get ready for a run now, and to strip back down again afterward, and because we're starting to see days with unsuitable weather, my schedule has pretty much shifted to only running 4 days per week, doing 5K each time. There are likely to be weeks over the winter when even this is difficult to maintain, but 20K/week will remain my target.
10. Streaks
I am maintaining my daily exercise, daily French, and daily writing streaks. (Even though my new writing schedule affords that I can have one day per week when I don't actually put any words down on paper or a screen. So long as this is only one day per week, and so long as I do
something on that day that feeds my writing, I'm going to count it as maintaining my streak.) I'm dropping my no solo video games streak because a.) if I want to procrastinate, I'm going to find a way to do it, regardless of how many problem activities I commit to avoiding, and b.) I backed a
Kickstarter last month that I'm really excited to play, but the physical game isn't expected to ship until December 2023. There is a prototype available on TTS, but the friends I game with online tend to prefer more lightweight games. I still don't want to spend a tonne of time gaming online solo. But I'm definitely going to check out the
Unconscious Mind TTS workshop while I'm waiting for the physical game!
I am going to replace my "no solo video games" rule with a "work before play" rule. Work before play means I need to complete my writing work, French study, and workout for the day before I am allowed to game solo. Yoga asana (if it's restorative, not my workout) and meditation can happen after gaming as I often like to do these things at the end of my day. Work before play does not apply to gaming with friends since that is time-limited anyhow due to my gaming friends' availability and because, as established above, I am starving for social interaction, and because one of my gaming friends lives in a time zone 6 hours ahead of mine. We typically game together first thing on Saturday or Sunday morning.
11. GOBOT & GBOT
I need to get back on track with these! My targets remain 6AM/6:30/7AM for GOBOT and 10PM/10:30/11PM for GBOT. Solo gaming after 11PM (a
major contributor to my messed up sleep schedule last month) counts as violating my work before play rule for the next day.
from
Bavaria, Germany
goodbye Trudi, hugs Laura.
Posts: 894
500 WORDS - wtd 2/6
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