This week I got a humbling lesson about consistency. I’ll explain more below. Life has been a lot of moving parts lately and writing fell down on the priority list because of it. I didn’t even get a blog written last week. Granted, that was because of the Fourth of July holiday, but consistency hasn’t been my strength lately (not that it typically is). So let’s get into the easy details and we’ll have the hard chat below.
Drawing from the Well
I did get some writing done lately, if in fits and starts (I know you’re surprised). That said, I finished the Red Edit on the second arc and moved into the third. It doesn’t sound like massive progress, but it’s a minor milestone so I count it as a win. Here’s where that leaves us:
Page 133/276
68,912/144,696 Words
Filling the Well
Reading saw some success these last two weeks too. I’m right on pace and past halfway to the goal for the year. I finished three books since the last blog: Into the Still Blue, Broken, and In the Shadow of the Gods. Okay, I didn’t finish that last one. That’s my first DNF since Ulysses back in 2020. I just couldn’t get into the book. Part of it was absolutely the audiobook narrator. Nothing against him. His accent just wouldn’t let the words stick in my head. That’s a me problem. Into the Still Blue was a good conclusion to the Never Sky trilogy and Broken was a clear, hard look at American corporations and how to be better employees and bosses. Currently, I’m listening to The Vagrant which is good if a bit dissociative from the protagonist. I’ll talk more about that after I’ve finished it.
55/105 for #ProjectBookworm2023
In other news, my wife created a new game for us to find unseen movies. I’m calling it Movie Roulette. We use an online random letter generator to grab a random letter (duh!) and then we go to Netflix and find a movie neither of us have seen that starts with that letter. It’s only failed us with X so far. Because of that we watched Woman in Gold and The Highwaymen, both of which I had never heard of and were excellent. Beyond that, World of Warcraft’s 10.1.5 update Fractures in Time launches today with tons of new content. Should be a fun time.
Well Chat
V.E. Schwab, my favorite author, has said that we shouldn’t measure our progress against anyone else. We are on our own journey, in our own book, and we should keep our eyes on our own paper. This was a mantra for me a few years back. As long as you keep making progress on YOUR project, you will eventually finish and have a completed book.
As long as you keep making progress…
That’s the key. For me, this comes down to consistency. When I write regularly, especially at similar times of day, I become increasingly productive because my mind holds onto where I am and what I need/want to do in the story more easily. It’s like putting the book in my computer’s RAM rather than it’s storage memory. If long stretches go by without me writing, it takes an inordinately-long time to get back into it.
And that’s exactly what happened a couple of nights ago.
Two weeks had passed since I had even looked at my manuscript. I had the itch to write, badly. I sat down to write, opened my manuscript, and was lost. Word didn’t remember my place and neither did I. Then I opened my ReMarkable software and it didn’t remember either. I looked at the last edited chapter and I disagreed. I would have sworn I had made it further. Then I checked my word count spreadsheet which confirmed that I WAS further than it looked. It felt like I had done work that hadn’t saved.
That’s when I saw that the auto-save, auto-upload feature of OneDrive was checked off. I clicked it on and it wanted me to save a copy. “Well, that’s not right.” With a little more digging, I found that the OneDrive auto-upload feature was off! That’s definitely no good for me. I got that restored and all my changes came back, thankfully. It still took me another hour to find my place in the various documents so I could start writing. I wrote that night a little, but when I returned to it last night, I picked up RIGHT where I left off, both in the document and mentally, and made a bunch of progress.
What an adventure, huh? The moral of the story is this: stay consistent in your creativity to keep that metaphorical pump going, otherwise it’ll rust over.
And make sure your work is saving in multiple places. You don’t want to lose your blood, sweat, and tears.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG