2024-W10 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• Habitica. That is the highlight of this week. After struggling to hit my 45m/day session on Monday and not doing it, I have since hit my 45m/day every day. There is a streak worth protecting now. I have also kept up with my stretches. However – now that I’m actually sitting down and writing every day, I’ve noticed my carpal tunnel flaring up worse than usual.
• MRK SSC met up on Wednesday evening for an unlocking session. I think we might stick together. I hope so.
• Started Crichton’s Timeline on a whim. Just needed something easy and fast.

Project Status Dashboard

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

Mostly kept drafting prj: BECKY this week in my daily sessions. I’m back to the old habit of looking stuff up as I write. I’m on my reMarkable Type Folio without Internet access, but the iPhone comes out. I’m trying to minimize it and encourage square brackets. It’s a work-in-progress to write without looking stuff up. I got to scene two. It’s slow. I looked up architectural styles, hardware fittings, IRS revenue breakdowns, Big Data companies, etc. None of it is load bearing worldbuilding. They all could’ve been square bracketed and moved on from. I’ll keep pushing myself to do this. It’s hard.

Started prj: STAR last Sunday during MRK’s MMW. The prompt was randomly generated by Writer Igniter. A high school theatre kid decides to take down the status quo with a dark secret as a prop and a hiking trail as the setting.

And while this is a change, I’m including today’s (Sunday March 10) MMW session as well in the table above even though I haven’t done that in past weeks.

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 = 22% (not bad for a steady 45m/day)
• X = 17% (stayed the same as last week)
• C = 46% (lots of writing this past week)
• P = 15% (planning an exit for Osmosis)

Four Thousand Weeks

OK, so writing 45m a day and doing stretches everyday is great. But now my carpal tunnel is flaring up worse than usual. There’s no winning here.

Book Reading

• Finished A Promised Land (2020). Here’s what I learned: One, the 44th president of the USA does voices and impersonations… and he’s good at them. Except Merkel. He can work on his German accent. Two, why would anyone do this? Two years of campaigning, not seeing your family, to have another eight years of stress. You have to be a delusional idealist (thinking you can actually make change), or a sociopathic narcissist. Oh wait. Three, everything in Washington is just constantly compromising just to move stuff a few inches. Yes, I understand the slow progress of democracy is a feature, not a bug. Four, Obama kept talking about the polarization back in his first term. And I guess I was surprised. Were there a lot more bipartisan support for things and reaching across the aisle pre-2008? Was I really just that ignorant of politics? I guess it just got worse and worse the last fifteen years. Five, so much of politics is saying bland bromides (instead of what you really feel) so you don’t offend anyone because what you say could start a war.
• Started Timeline by Michael Crichton on a whim. I’m almost 200 pages in because, it’s a mass market thriller and you just get hooked in, the workmanlike prose becomes invisible, and all the characters are 2D and stand-ins to just move the plot forward. It’s just hooks and plot, go go go. I’ve forgotten how much fun these thrillers are.
• Almost done Stranger in a Strange Land. I’m skimming at this point out of frustration. Started Hero of Ages (2008) at 2.5X. I’m 7% in. It’s uh… it’s an extremely slow start. Haven’t touched Pride and Prejudice again for another week.

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