2024-W24 EOW Report
Highlights This Week
- The MRK Prime Cohort meeting on Friday went well enough. Critique on Nigel and Abby’s stuff. I got an unlocking session help. I’m fairly clear on where to go next.
- Managed to get up and not be exhausted on Saturday and took care of client work at Starbucks. That was a win, but it was also a make-up session since I didn’t work on said client’s stuff during the week when I was dealing with the full-time contract. Frustrating though that I did sit at Starbucks surfing for jazz piano lessons for a good hour in my escapist habit of thinking I have “time” for all the things. I do not have time to take piano lessons and learn how to improvise and do jazz runs and harmonies and polyphonic chords. Dafuq, Jinn.
- So idle time continues yes. More intention. But also – started three books this week (see Book Reading below). And also, broke my 20-day streak on StoryGraph. Things are getting a little floofy around here. But also - I’m fine with that. A lot of these goals I set at the beginning of the year just don’t serve, well, the only goal and priority here. Writing fiction. Or more specifically finishing stories. FINISH STORIES. That’s the ultimate goal here.
Project Status Dashboard
The following are ongoing fiction writing projects broken down to what stage they’re in. Legend in footnote1.
| P | prj | st | fd | ed | rv | xd |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | MINOS | 2/11 | 2/27 | X | X | 2 |
| 2 | SAVED | 3/12 | 3/25 | 4/28 | X | 3 |
| 3 | BECKY | 1/7 | X | X | X | 1 |
| BACKLOG | ~~~ | ~~~ | ~~~ | ~~~ | ~~~ | |
| SATSU | 1/21 | X | X | X | 1 | |
| ROBOT | 1/28 | 1/29 | X | X | 2 | |
| YOKO | 2/18 | X | X | X | 1 | |
| STAR | 3/3 | X | X | X | 1 | |
| BELLA | 3/10 | X | X | X | 1 | |
| AURA | 1/6 | 1/6 | X | X | 1 | |
| FIRED | 1/14 | X | X | X | 1 |
Stuck on CHARACTER now for prj: MINOS. Grr. This is what slow, tortuous (and torturous) progress looks like. Moving by dribs and drabs. But I’m moving. No, it’s not as fast as I’d like. No, I’ll probably not hit any of my goals. No, not even the updated ones in Habitca, but I am moving forward.
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.
Y’know what? I’m not tracking this week. I’m not tracking because I’m not actually tracking daily. I should track daily but because it’s in this unnecessarily complicated markdown table template, I haven’t. There’s a good chance I should just kill that template and/or find an easier way to track. I’m thinking the former makes more sense. Just kill it because it doesn’t actually SERVE the prime directive: FINISH STORIES.
- CURRENT STREAK: 0 Days
- LAST STREAK: 5 Days (June 14, 2024)
- BEST STREAK: 18 Days (May 10, 2024)
Four Thousand Weeks
| Wks Lft | HP |
|---|---|
| 1740/4000 | 43.500% |
As I mentioned in the highlights above re: sitting at Starbucks and daydreaming I have time to learn jazz piano, and starting three books this week, and also see below for going down the rabbit hole of solo TTRPGs… it’s clear to me what’s happening. I have grown somewhat comfortable again, I’ve managed to stabilize somewhat, and my head is going towards all Seven of Cups again. Look at all those wonderful possibilities, the branching paths, the potential! Look at this, look at that, look at all the things I could try, and experiment, and learn, and do! I have infinite energy and time and bandwidth! I want to do all the things.
Except I don’t.
So stop it. Get back on track.
Book Reading
- Finished P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn (2021). Comments here
- I have started way too many books this past week. Shannon Chakraborty’s The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (2023). David Graeber & David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything (2021), and finally, Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England (2010). The middle one because Libby/FVRL. I’ve had it on hold for 5 weeks now. The latter because of Libro.fm and me feeling I need to work on the actual 16th century history I purport to be interested in. The first, because, fuck, I dunno. It was available on Libby/FVRL and I wanted something on my phone. I also broke my streak of 20 and I’m back to 0 again on StoryGraph.
- On Saturday evening, I went down a rabbit hole. I haven’t been down rabbit holes in a while. That night, I explored solo RPGS. This was partially because Nigel mentioned it as a way for me to hack/trick my brain to developing characters. Well, little did he know about my infamous rabbit hole ventures where I had to know every fucking thing about something. I ended up downloading and reading ALL of Ironsworn (2018) by Shawn Tomkin, and this morning, I bought The Machine (2020) by Adira Slattery and Fen Slattery, and Castle of Memories (2021) by Adrian Lumm at Purple Moon Games. This rabbit hole was made possible by the fact that the originally planned Rain City Reckoning session was cancelled that night.
Archive of all EOW reports here
LEGEND for Project Status Dashboard
- P = priority (limit to 3 projects at any given time)
- prj = project codename
- st = start date
- fd = 1st draft completed
- ed = edits (before beta/crits) completed
- rv = revisions (post-feedback) completed
- xd = current draft being worked on
The most important objective of the EOW Time Tracking is to ensure that hours dedicated to fiction writing actually move stories forward for just thirty minutes a day minimum. It is also to ensure “fiction-related” activities (like consuming more craft education, excessive world-building research, and working on marketing stuff) doesn’t count.
LEGEND for EOW Time Tracking
- 📤 “outbox_tray” = submitted
- 🗒️ “spiral_notepad” = drafting
- 📋 “clipboard” = editing & revisions
- 💀 “skull” = did not do anything fiction related