Posts Tagged ‘writing schedule’

Monthends

Thursday, August 9th, 2012

or, Schedule-Based and Task-Based Structures

So a month or two ago, I spent a fair amount of time working on a really fancy time-tracking idea. The idea was to carefully track how much time I spent on various things throughout the week, assigning point values to time spent on each such that, if I performed the right amount of work on each one, all of the point values should be the same most of the time. At any given time I could look at the relative point values and quickly see which thing – reading, writing, coding, what have you — I needed to shore up. I tried it for a week, and then I dropped it. It didn’t work. I felt a bit guilty, as one of my good friends is a bloody wizard with Gdocs (erm, Gdrive now, I guess) spreadsheets and spent some time helping me doctor it up. It really was a beautiful spreadsheet.

The interesting thing is, the reason I originally put it together – encouraging me to allocate time wisely, and the clever point-balancing thing – ended up being entirely secondary to a minor feature I just sort of threw in there, which was a cell that tracked how much free time I had remaining in the week, based on some things being overbudget on time or having already used portions of my free time. That was fantastic to have, and it was very motivating as the week went on to look at that amount of free time and think, “I want to save most of that for the weekend, so I’ll work on . . . erm . . . programming for a little while.” It was also nice to see the number go up when one of my unavoidable time expenses ended up taking less time than budgeted.

The point is, it was a very nice spreadsheet. It took a fair amount of work to keep track of where all my time was going, though, and by the end of the week, I could tell I was on the wrong track. I didn’t need to mandate exact time periods for all of my goals, but I definitely needed to keep tracking my free time. So I immediately went and didn’t do that.

Like I said, it was a bit of trouble to track where my time was going that closely.

Still, it got me thinking. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years trying to find ways to organize my time so that I have more of it. (It’s a zero-sum game. It seems like every time I manage to get an extra hour in a day it goes somewhere else, and I can’t seem to break 24 hours per day. I keep trying, though.) I often fall into a pit trap I’ve heard called the cardinal sin of productivity, in which I spend time fiddling with my productivity tools when I really, really should be spending time, you know, being productive. Nonetheless, it’s become clear to me that I need some sort of structure to build my life around if I’m going to get anything done, and it’s similarly clear that the structure(s) I’ve been using aren’t cutting it.

So there’s an idea that’s been floating around in my mind for a while. It started with my general irritation at months and weeks not lining up properly, an irritation I’m sure I share with a great many people who are payed biweekly and billed monthly. I mean, yes, it does mean you occasionally get months with three paychecks and the usual number of bills (. . . is this one of those months? It is? Hurray!). But on the other hand it makes it irritating to set up regular . . . hang on. Is this just me? Is this just me being weird? Does this actually bother other people? Sometimes I can’t tell.

Anyway. Idea. It goes something like this: “When I am a self-employed writer and can set my very own schedule, I will totally take monthends off as well as weekends.” In this context, the definition of “monthend” varied, but generally meant the end of the month after the last week of the month, except that the weeks don’t line up properly so sometimes the last . . . the point is, I decided that the way to implement this that would irritate me the least would be to throw out any correlation with the days of the week and just arrange my schedule according to the days of the month. So my first workweek would be the 1st through the 5th, with the 6th and 7th being my weekend; then the 8th through the 12th; and so on, until after the 26th I took an extended monthend, lasting from the 27th to the end of the month*. (75% of Februaries have a monthend the size of a weekend, but I’m not too worried.)**

Well, the natural next step was to just go ahead and implement it, since, you know, I’m trying to be a writey-type person right now. Sure, I can’t arrange my day-job schedule that way, but I can arrange my writing and chore schedules. So last month, about halfway through, I did that. I went through my Remember the Milk tasks and set most of them to repeat according to the monthend-based schedule; daily writing goals, for instance, repeat on the 1st-5th, the 8th-12th, the 15th-19th, and the 22nd-26th. Certain weekly tasks (like thoroughly cleaning each room of the house) repeat on a particular day of what I’ve come to call the taskweek: cleaning the kitchen, for instance, is a Monday activity, repeating on the 1st, 8th, 15th, and 22nd. Then I got to work.

Now, I immediately fell behind for various reasons, most of which were that I kind of just threw myself into it. However – and this is the important part – I’m now in a state of perpetually catching up with my enormous backlog of tasks stretching back months and months, whereas my previous state was one of steadily feeling guiltier about how much said backlog was growing. Most days I get most of my tasks for the day done, and some days I get all of them done, and the really important stuff is actually getting done reliably. For now. This could all go to crud at any moment, if past experience is any cue, but I’m really trying.

My big takeaway from this (or at least, one of the big takeaways) is one of those stunningly helpful self-realizations that turns out to have been obvious to your significant other for a while: I’m not good at schedule-based structure. I’m not good with planning out my day and saying “At five thirty PM, I will write.” It just doesn’t happen. I’m not much better at saying, “I have three hours of free time tonight, which will be evenly split between reading, writing, and programming, in whatever order I choose.” It’s a bit better, but not great. What I’m good at is task-based structure: I will get 1500 words of prose written each “weekday,” and I will read eight chapters a day, and if I fall behind I’ll catch up tomorrow or on the weekend. And if I get all caught up, well, there’s nothing stopping me from working ahead.

*As I write this out I realize this is kind of a large-scale implementation of the Pomodoro technique, in which you use a timer to work for short bursts interrupted by 5-minute breaks, with every 4th break being longer. Interesting.

**Another unexpected benefit of building my schedule around virtual weeks based on the actual day of the month is something I expected to be a detriment, namely that what days of the actual week my weekends fall on varies from month to month. Now that I’ve experienced the shift once, though, I actually really like it. It keeps is fresh. One month my weekends might overlap or even line up with Saturday and Sunday, when friends and family are off; another month (like this one) they might overlap with Tuesday and Wednesday, when Kat and I are off. It’s working rather well, really.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Life, Writing | 1 Comment »

General Updatery

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

Hopefully it will come as no surprise that my NaNoWriMo push this year is about where it was when I mentioned I’d try for it.  I did allude to the insanity of the plan, after all.

What surprises me is the backup I found the other day.  I was looking through my flash drive backups for something else entirely, and found a backup of nothing but my programming folder — which was, it should be noted, the only significant casualty to my flash drive dying earlier this month.  It was an up-to-the-day backup, too.

This borders on being a religious experience.  I think Great Cthulhu wants me to continue work on that roguelike.

In other news, life is pretty awesome.  Things are looking up in general; my kid is doing great (save for some acid reflux and colic), and has begun occasionally sleeping as much as four hours at a stretch.  (This is actually better for Kat than for me, as I sleep like the dead.  She doesn’t.)

And, I now have a signed copy of The Gathering Storm.  A friend of mine got it for me and shipped it down, for which I am now eternally indebted.  I’m reading the book now, and of course it’s great.  It also has me thinking.  See, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson have a funny place in my writing/reading history: they’re the two writers who, more than any others, got me writing.

I’ve wanted to be a professional writer for a long, long time.  My earliest major writing project would have been when I was about ten, when I decided to write a sci-fi trilogy.  For years, that project (called Trikan) was the largest body of cohesive text I had managed to assemble.  (I’m looking it over now, and it’s . . . er, not as bad as I thought it would be, actually.  It’s also eight thousand words long.  Go, younger me.  But it’s still never seeing the light of day.)*

After Trikan, there was a lengthy period when I didn’t get any really significant writing done.  It was Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time that inspired me, the summer before I left for ASMSA, to get to work on a big project again.  That was when I started the project formerly known as The Storms of Heaven, and when I wrote most of the novella Ghost Ship — which astute readers (and people I’ve trapped in conversation long enough) may recognize as the work that formed the basis of Derelict.  If I hadn’t read The Wheel of Time then, there’s a pretty good chance these would never have gotten written.  It was a pretty influential work for me, to say the least.

Fast-forward to last year.  Having heard of Brandon Sanderson via his connection to The Wheel of Time, I picked up the books of his that were out at the time (Elantris and Mistborn: The Final Empire — I didn’t spring for The Well of Ascension until it came out in paperback.)  I read them.  I loved them.  And they inspired me to write again.  If I had to pick a single influence that got me started on Derelict in its full novelish glory, I would pick Brandon Sanderson.

I didn’t make these connections until recently — not as such, anyway.  The knowledge was there, in the back of my mind.  The reason it comes to mind now is because now I’m reading The Gathering Storm, which is by the two authors who have influenced and inspired me the most.

I wonder what’ll happen this time.

*Interestingly, the science vessel from which the characters of Trikan hail was named the Blue Star, and the salvage vessel from which the characters of Derelict hail is the Blue Star IV.  I was not aware of this, and to my knowledge wasn’t aware of it at the time that I wrote Ghost Ship.  Funny how the mind works.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

I keep telling people I’m not insane

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Well, what with having a new job, a new kid, assorted bills, and a novel to revise, I’ve decided that this is a great year to give NaNoWriMo a shot.  Last year when NaNoWriMo arrived I was about ten or twenty thousand years words into Derelict, and still calling it Ghost Ship.  I briefly entertained the idea of trying for fifty thousand new words on Derelict that month, but ultimately decided not to.

You may remember me saying a few months back that I would take a month off from Derelict and start drafting Wings.  That didn’t happen — something about moving taking time or something — so I’m starting fresh with drafting it now.  And when I’m done drafting Wings on a given day, I’ll move on to revising Derelict.  I figure I can find the time to do all this in the period I’ve been catching myself playing Civ IV.

(Then I’ll find time to play Civ IV when I’d normally be eating.  That should work out about right.)

Unfortunately, I’m already a couple of days behind, so if you’ll excuse me . . .

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

My Writing Process — Such As It Is (Part I)

Friday, July 24th, 2009

I don’t know what my writing process is – or rather, I do, but it’s constantly changing. I have yet to settle on something I like that works for me in both the short and long term. Part of that’s probably due to my schedule – which is about to change – but not all. Since I’m putting Derelict in a drawer for a month while I start my next book and work on Zosias, I thought I’d talk about how I write, have written, and plan on writing.

I think it’s worth mentioning, at this point, how Derelict got its start. (It’s kind of funny, I’ve always thought.) In the summer of 2004, I was enjoying my last summer vacation before moving to Hot Springs for the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts (ASMSA). I had recently acquired the first computer I could call my own, an Emachines laptop (because I didn’t know any better). There were two main reasons I wanted a laptop: because I figured I would need one at school, and because I wanted a laptop to write on. I had done some writing on the family computer in the past, but for some reason the static environment in the computer room just didn’t do much for my muse. The fact that the computer was running Windows 3.1 probably didn’t help a great deal.

At the time, I was on my first read-through of The Wheel of Time. It got me thinking. I’d always wanted to be a novelist, right? What better way to get my start than a massive multi-volume epic like the one I was currently engrossed in? (I got better, I promise.) The first chapter of the story (entitled The Storms of Heaven, a name that sounds a heck of a lot like Jordan’s The Fires of Heaven) went great. But after that I found myself suffering from a pretty big problem: the second chapter. I concluded that I needed to develop the world more to continue on the main story, and started up a short story called Ghost Ship in order to do just that.

Around the time Ghost Ship hit 10,000 words, I accepted that maybe it was going farther than the so-called “main story.” In retrospect it wasn’t that bad: the original draft of Ghost Ship reached 11,783 words, while Storms reached 8,803 words, 7166 of which were in the first chapter.

In retrospect, my problem with Storms wasn’t what I thought it was. I kept trying to come back to it because I loved the characters in it – I still do, in fact. They’re neat characters, with a lot of potential, even if the old version of Rose does trip some Mary Sue-sensors in my head now. And I’m happy with the premise. The problem was that a bunch of neat characters, and a means for getting them in the same place, isn’t enough to carry a novel – much less a series. What I needed was a plot, and that, in a nutshell, is why Ghost Ship beat the socks off of The Storms of Heaven. Going into it I thought, “I need a clear idea of what this story is about, so I can get it written at short-story length.”  (Look how that turned out.) And if most of the characters were cardboard cutouts, if literally every other scene was solid exposition, well, at least the thing got written. By the end of that summer it was too late for Ghost Ship to fit into a short story, but it could have been a decent novella. I was almost done with it as such when I left for ASMSA. It was probably within three or four thousand words of the end – and there it would stay, because by golly, ASMSA keeps you busy. What time I wasn’t devoting to schoolwork (and hanging out with large numbers of fellow geeks for the first time in my life), I was devoting to the process of meeting and falling in love with my then-future wife. I would occasionally pull out Ghost Ship to tinker with, and I made dozens of false starts on other works, but it would be quite a while before I got serious writing done again.  Years, in fact — because the next serious writing I did was when I picked up Ghost Ship and began expanding it into the novel that is now Derelict.

Let me back up, though, to that summer before ASMSA. I think it bears studying, since the hypothetical topic of this post is my writing process. Let’s look at how I worked during that summer that I got so much done.

First, I didn’t have anything resembling internet. I had access to it at school and the public library, but not at home. I had plenty of books, but I don’t really think of those as a distraction from writing – ultimately, they tend to work as inspiration. (When I’m reading a lot, I want to write. When I’m playing a lot of video games, I want to create them. When I watch a lot of anime, I want to write, score, and animate one. For the sake of my sanity and that of those around me, I try to do lots of reading.)

Second, my schedule was essentially free. Most days I stayed home all day while my folks went to work. Sometimes, probably about once a week, I would go into town with them. But most of the time I just stayed home. Given a completely free schedule, I would usually settle in to start writing at the kitchen table with my laptop around the time my parents went to bed – about 8-10 PM. I would write until my mother woke up at four the next morning, spend some time with her in the morning, then maybe write another hour or two before going to sleep for the day. I’d wake up in the afternoon, often with an hour or two to spare until Mom and Dad got home, and I’d pretty much just do other stuff for a while, often involving hanging out with them.

And I got a lot of writing done. In retrospect, given that this process went on for around a month, and I got around 20K words written, that means I wasn’t actually churning out words at a very rapid pace – writing anywhere from six to ten hours a night, I got less than a thousand words a day in general. It wasn’t my typing speed – I was easily in the mid-60 WPM range at the time, and I’m not any more. It was mostly that I just dawdled around in my writing. Didn’t stress out about it, didn’t try to force it, had all the time in the world to write however much I wanted to and pretty much took my time. For years, I would look back on that summer – my last free one – with longing, as a sort of idyllic time when life was good. In some ways, that represents my ideal writing process: write by night, sleep by day, perform some human interaction in the afternoon, get paid enough for my work to not worry about anything else.

I didn’t expect this to take so long. Possibly because I didn’t think about it too much, who knows. Either way, I’ll save the rest of this for next Friday. (Look at me, I have a buffer!)

Current music: Better than Ezra, Greatest Hits album. I have it because of their song Desperately Wanting, which is rather nifty. As it turns out, it’s not the only one.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Progress is fun to write.

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

I’m about halfway through my scheduled four-hour writing block right now, and as of right now I’ve got 1735 words done.  I’m not done, either.  The writing schedule is really working out for me.  I find this mildly odd, seeing as how I’m normally not one to work well on a schedule (. . . at least I used not to be), but I’m not complaining.  I love writing.

Especially stuff like this.  I just wrote two bracket scenes for a sequence later in the story — two characters teaching each other new skills, and bonding in the process.  I still need to fill out the space in between, but writing the scenes at either end of the sequence was a lot of fun — in a way they’re mirrors of each other, but I enjoyed showing how much they’ve progressed in between.

And I just wanted to add, that 1735 words?  Feels really good.  I might break my record today — we’ll see.

Okay, break’s over.  Back to writing.

EDIT: Writing’s done for the day.  2,402 words isn’t quite a record for daily progress, but it’s pretty fine nonetheless.  I don’t always feel comfortable sharing my word count with the world — oh no, they might see how much of a slacker I can be! — but I’m comfortable saying that today’s writing brings me to 86,058 words — about 344 pages.  Of course, that’s only the rough draft — I’m anticipating at least two more, with a break for alpha readers between the second and third drafts, and at this point it looks like the rough draft is more likely to hit 120k-140k, with the second draft losing probably 10% of that.  So there’s a lot of work left.

Current music: Evanescence, Imaginary.  Fallen has always been one of my favorite albums, though looking over it now I see that I had a few of the song names wrong.  This one, for instance, I thought was named Paper Flowers.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Writing | 1 Comment »