Themeattics

Speed has never killed anyone. Suddenly becoming stationary, that’s what gets you.

Jeremy Clarkson

Hello, again. Thanks for bearing with a few weeks of respite from my end. Had a couple of weekends of family events back to back and it was nice to be able to fully take that time off. Nice, yes, but it was also a time that got me to thinking.

For those of you that follow me on Facebook or Twitter as well, I’ve been posting daily updates of my time spent writing. How many minutes, how many words, and ultimately what the total count is for each chapter as I get through them. As fundamentally upsetting as it is for me to say, this has been an incredible boon to my productivity. Being that accountable, at that level of granularity, has been the push I needed to get over some of my more recent hang-ups and just get the hell to work. Honestly, it’s been the best writing-based decision I’ve made this year.

I’ve been working with that for a couple of weeks at this point and have pushed through a couple of chapters. One a week, with a little bit of time capped at the end to review and make some notes for when I ultimately need to come back to edit. This last week I also added on a night session, which was actually ludicrously productive and I intend to keep myself to one of those per week, at minimum. I don’t expect the same sort of results, but the extra time is necessary at this point.

The next phase of this is getting around my speed bumps. What are those, you might ask? I have two, and they’re frustratingly common. They go by some pretty familiar names, too. Saturday and Sunday. You’re familiar, yeah? Turns out that when I’m not forcing myself to get up at 5, when I’m not put under a time crunch to finish my tasks before I head into the office for work, I end up pushing them off and doing some sort of brain rot until I can’t bring myself to sit in the chair and do the job. My hour-a-day tracking goes from perfect through the weekdays to non-existent, outside of this time right here. No story progress at all, defeated by the twin assassins procrastination and distraction. Well, in the eternal words of Joan Cusack in Addam’s Family Values, they had to go.

So, to that end, I’m no longer committing to just the weekday posts. It’s full on dailies, and I’ll be capping the week with some sort of snippet of the work itself. Getting a little prose out into the world. Might as well, right?

The engine is back on and I, for one, am not about to let it stall. Writing is as much work as anything else, and work never gets done without time. For every session like this last week’s nightly where I came off in an absolute creativity high and feeling euphoric, there are a dozen, likely more, sessions where it’s nothing more than pushing through. That’s just how it is.

And so I will push through, ever so gently pressing down on that accelerator. Keeping an eye out for the speed bumps and figuring out how to skirt them. There’s a lot of work to be done, still, to reach the destination and I’ve got my eyes set on that horizon.

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If you’re wondering what spawned the banner, the director of the game that I did some writing for in the past messaged me about it again recently. No additional work for that quite yet, but it’s a potential on the horizon, and it led me to do a quick recount of all the things I am currently working on or intend to be in the future. It’s, ah… a lot. But I always set myself up for a lot. Tends to bite me in the ass, but I think I’m finally able to grasp the situation there and actually prioritize. So, to that end:

• Residuum
  • Chapter 12
• Catalyst
  • No goals. This is now fully on the back burner as it’s too difficult to plot out a multi-story outline while working on rebuilding Residuum. I’ll get back to this when Residuum is in the hands of beta readers.
• Project CT
  • Basic character interviews for at least 5 characters.
• ThemeAttic
  • Never miss a day of Residuum work, and post about it each day.
  • Post one snippet.
  • Begin prepping the outline for CYOA (Could still use people to vote, by the way)
  • Create an extensive watch list for planning my cyberpunk world.

Looked at the banner again and laughed at myself. I remember the days of wanting to try and learn more graphic design. One of the infinite number of things I wanted to be great at. Glad I dropped that like molten slag. Economies of scale, Tom.