2024-W05 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• Rushed to get MSC-04: ROBOT done as the first MRK Short Story Cohort critique session was Wednesday night. Wrote non-stop Sunday night, chased the last few scenes Monday (one before meetings, two afterwards, well into the evening). Knew it was a mess (thematically and plot-wise) when I submitted it.
• Reviewed everybody’s stories from the cohort Tuesday night. Yeah, so I’m definitely the least experienced and least practiced.
• Fooled around with 4theWords after shopping for other word trackers and finally gave up. I dropped $20 USD on a 2024 bundle. I don’t regret it, but I also don’t know if I’ll keep using it. I dunno.
• Was not surprised by the feedback/critique I got on Wednesday night. But I was relieved to hear at least two others found the ending devastating enough to cry about. So success on emotional manipulation.
• Caught up with Olivia. Proposed we think more on accountability. And then spent 3 hours journaling about it on Thursday morning. When Olivia replied on Friday afternoon, we decided to explore a potential podcast (for shaming purposes).
• This was the first FULL WEEK where I tracked all of my activities on the Timeular properly. It took two weeks of “practice” to get this habit back in proper order.
• Wasted way too much time adding more github posts to this website. I’ve added Live Commentaries (notes I take while I read books) and all the RPG Sessions with Rain City Reckoning. ALSO - wasted a LOT of Friday trying to figure out pagination in Hugo. What really fucked with me is that this theme I’m using was pulling content from the posts.html partial, and not index.html, nor list.html as all the tutorials directed me to add pagination code. Not being a coder, this was not intuitive to me. What’s more, the default pagination that comes with Hugo shows up as a vertical list, so you need to steal someone’s CSS to make it look horizontal, at which point, I learned about display: inline, flex, and inline-flex. And then… I spent more time customizing the CSS to maintain my site’s minimalist style. Really, this was all unnecessary NOT-FICTION-WRITING work. I hope by tracking all this weekly (and publicly as well), I can minimize it out of shame.

Project Status Dashboard

The following are ongoing fiction writing projects broken down to what stage they’re in. Legend in footnote¹.

Daily Tracking

This will be the future space for tracking either daily time spent, or daily word count.

EOW Time Tracking

The following is based on logged productive hours using Timeular. Parameters and definitions in footnote².

In Summary:

• F = 21%
• X = 27% <– minimize!
• C = 38%
• P = 7%

Doesn’t add up to 100% as it excludes the journaling done on Thursday. Not sure if I should include it or not track it or what. Arguably, it would fall under “X” which is already looking really bad.

Four Thousand Weeks

Was told by my optometrist I had early signs of cataracts after he dilated my pupils with drops. I won’t notice anything because they haven’t reached my line-of-sight yet. So it’s like (what I would imagine), branching lines on my irises that are currently growing ever so slowly, creeping toward my pupils? The thought of it unsettled me. It’s hard not to think of your mortality and aging when you start hearing things like this. Especially since, for some reason, they put my 16yo son in the exam room at the same time as me because I booked the appointments so close together. Later, my wife had to drive us to brunch because everything was so bright. Felt like an useless injured animal. Feeling my mortality alright.

Book Reading

• Realized I had seven days left on my loan of The Vietnam War: An Intimate History (2017) this week and I was only 45% in on Libby. So I burnt through a lot of it and got to 63%. Tried playing it at 1.5X while working out Friday morning, but it didn’t feel right. I was OK with doing 2X with Leonardo Da Vinci (2017) because Alfred Molina read it so slow, and Walter Isaacson paced it nicely… but Vietnam is history, and every sentence felt like an important detail, so I dunno. I want to let it all sink in at a proper pace. But I am behind, and had to extend my hold on A Promised Land (2020).
• It’s February and I still haven’t bought a single book, board game, or RPG in 2024. This is a huge success compared to when I wrote about Running Numbers. Of course, I’m also restraining myself because one, MRK’s Short Story Cohort is where I’m putting the budget… and two, I picked up a huge bag of books that had collected over the last three months at the Glausers. Books I had ordered from Thriftbooks. I’m talking at least 30 books. So yeah, I’m good.
• I am almost done Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Really want to move on to Jane Austen next. Feel terrible that at age 43, I still haven’t read a single Austen novel. Want to knock off all six this year. Also want to start Highsmith’s Ripley trilogy. Still struggling with Stranger in a Strange Land (1961).

Archive of all EOW reports here