I don’t know whether it’s the fact that I’ve been gripped with the burning desire to play a ton of World of Warcraft for the past 2 weeks, my general lack of time-management skills or my ongoing battle with intense social anxiety (I lied I do know it’s all of these things), but things have not been going too well on the “getting shit done” front of late. I finally forced myself to watch Mockingjay Part 1 yesterday for my thesis, and I now know that 1) films I find really unappealing when I think about them are not always that bad when I actually watch them, especially if I have a theoretical angle to analyse them from, and 2) unpleasant business should be done as early in the day as possible so that you can end on at least one high note.
So starting tomorrow I am going to be devoting my mornings and early afternoons to Getting Shit Done. I tend to work out in the evenings; that will now be moved to the afternoon or perhaps morning. I will lunge at top speed into brain-seizure-inducing academic research as soon as I wake up. And then probably at 2 or 3 PM I will stop all of that and just chill.
Except I won’t “just chill” because I also have books to write.
And I’m not just going to focus on one, oh no! I’m going to continue with my plan to work through Realm of the Myth and also complete my shitty YA werewolf novel, this time making it as truly shitty as I possibly can instead of trying to make it “work” because it’s a first draft and also “making it work” was not my original plan and I have no idea how that suddenly became my priority but it’s been holding me up and I just need to get it done.
I’m also going to go back and start rereading the first draft of the Christmas-themed novel I was working on before I started writing Tallulah, because it’s a story that means a lot to me and that deserves to be told, and also because I have finally gotten around to accepting that if there are things that I genuinely feel passionate about I should try and make them happen if I can, and let’s be honest I at least have the time to try and make it work. Using mornings and afternoons for doing serious work frees me up, leaves me a few hours of pre-evening time to indulge in, and will hopefully encourage me to take advantage of this abundance of free time where I don’t feel guilty for not having done anything that day.
I don’t know how well Camp Nanowrimo is suited to revising a novel because word-count really isn’t a helpful metric, but given that the Christmas novel is around 180k words it could probably do with some downsizing, and it might end up being a rewrite. I guess I’ll know once I start rereading it. If a rewrite seems the best option, then it will be a rewrite. Otherwise …
Well, in any case, I haven’t been doing anything for a while and that’s why I haven’t updated, though I’m sure if you’ve been following me for a while you’re pretty used to this pattern. I wonder how predictable it is, like maybe if it happens during certain parts of the year or something. But this is the plan going forward, and I know that I can do it, and I want to do it, so I’d better get started.
I want every resolution to work. They tend not to last. And I’m pretty tired of that.
Vevacha 