2024-W22 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• Back in the game, yes. But stuck on not moving forward on actual plotting and drafting for MINOS. A lot of world building. See this week’s GFP episode. Still trying to get back into rhythm after the crash last week. Mon and Wed was in the evening. I think I need to reduce audiobook time, and add 15-30m breaks at work, and also find walking times… I need BOREDOM time so I can let my brain actually work subconsciously.
• The biggest advantage of this full-time contract is there are clear work hours and I don’t feel like I’m always “catching up”, “behind” or “need to grind to get more projects” as a freelancer. But it’s also a marathon that takes up a set number of hours and doesn’t leave a lot of freetime. I don’t go and binge shows anymore. The latest Outlander season is on Netflix now, and I still haven’t gotten to it. I watched 30m of it on Friday. Point is – it’s forcing me to drop bandwidth, mindspace, or whatever for any other hobbies so I can hyper-prioritize fiction. But even that might need to be re-adjusted. Maybe I drop the monthly goal to 2 novels and 2 history books? As I said in the point above, I need more “not-stimulation” time. OK, adjusted my habitica. Maybe even work on focusing the reading. Why did I listen to the Crusades lecture series last month? Because it was there and available? Why not focus on the Renaissance stuff that I need to for the series I want to write?
• I found myself waking up early naturally this weekend but feeling exhausted. I know I’m really pushing myself during the weekdays now. I think I’ll need to balance things better for June and moving forward after this three month marathon.

Project Status Dashboard

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

Stuck on worldbuilding as per this week’s episode of Garage Fiction

EOW Time Tracking

In this section, I track daily actions (axn) and emotions (emo), aiming for just 30 minutes of fiction work a day. If time permits, more is done. AXN emoji legend in footnote².

• CURRENT STREAK: 0 Days
• LAST STREAK: 5 Days (May 31, 2024)
• BEST STREAK: 18 Days (May 10, 2024)

Four Thousand Weeks

Feel like I wrote more than enough in the highlights this week. Today’s schedule was slightly derailed. Was going to wake up, do GFP, then MMW, and probably take care of the lawyer client stuff. But ended up helping a friend process some personal things, very much like how LK helped me last week. And then by 10AM, everyone was up and then we went out together. The two older ones went to separate malls to loiter and hang out with friends, and my wife and I took the youngest to a third mall to hang out a bit, have a Japadog, coffee, shop. Got home at 2, made a late lunch, then crashed, then made dinner. Point is – both today and yesterday I woke up early naturally, but was le tired. I’ve also been having a lot more dreams about work this past week. Anxiety, worry, I don’t know what. My job still isn’t clearly defined, but it’s also kinda something I should learn to accept as part of my position. I think some of the lack of boundaries are bleeding a bit too. It’s a marathon, I don’t know when to stop exactly. Both Thursday and Friday I stayed until five or six, ten hour days. I just have a long list of things to do. I know as long as a “add value”, I will have job security. There is an adjustment period here. I don’t get to just “take off” any afternoon and just “not work” like a freelancer. There are clear PTO hours now. I dunno. All the while – I’m not getting enough time to write fiction and solve this prj: MINOS problem. The plot, the plot, the plot. I need to figure out the plot. I need to figure out plots in general so that it becomes second nature. I need to stop wallowing in the MECH. I need to give equal energy, bandwidth, and practice time to PROGs. It’s frustrating. It’s like when I was told I had no rhythm in high school and then I spent years working on it until I could play with others. It’s like this ONE crucial missing element.

Book Reading

• Finished Sense and Sensibility (1811). Comments here. Was disappointing compared to Pride and Prejudice (1813). Moving on to Emma (1815) next in my goal to finish all six this year. Also finished How the Crusades Changed History (2013). Was OK. Started P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn (2021). 110 pages in… not blown away, still wary and cautious.
• Moved onwards to Alison Weir’s Mary Boleyn (2011)… and just looked it up to nail down the subtitle and what’s this?, there are two subtitles? One is probably a super clean one for the Americans? “The Mistress of Kings”? And the other one is for the rest of the world who is mature enough to handle a subtitle like “The Great and Infamous Whore”, which, by the way, is an actual quote from an contemporary I believe? I’m still having trouble retaining all the facts with history stuff on audio… but I think the intent is to drown via osmosis so I could at least subconsciously feed my brain with history. But anyway - tangent - back to the fact that there’s a boring, clean subtitle for the prudish Americans, and a more delightful and offensive one for everybody else amuses me to no end. It’s like the The Sorcerer’s Stone (which makes absolutely no sense and in attempting to making it more easily understood actually ends up confusing the matter) versus The Philosopher’s Stone which is load-bearing to the plot and actually is the name of said object in alchemy. I just don’t get it.
• Still listening to BBC’s version of Hamlet (1601) with Michael Sheen. Same philosophy as listening to the history books and not retaining everything. One, I’m just letting the language seep into my brain. Two, I can look it up later for more careful study. Three, dense beautiful prose, or dialogue in this case, is way more interesting in the car over “feed it into my veins workmanlike prose” a la Crichton or Sanderson.

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