Drawing from the Well
This week did not go as planned (but when does it ever, am I right?). I had the entire week off last week to move my wife’s office from its old location to a bigger office in the same plaza. It was a big job, but I thought I would have time to write. Well, there was an element of that equation I failed to count: energy. The moving process sapped my energy leading to three zero days last week. I already had one this week too. You might ask if I’m having so many zero days (that’s 5 this NaNo now), am I failing?
Not by my definition.
I just crossed TWENTY THOUSAND WORDS last month. That is a huge benchmark for me, as every 10k is. I’m still behind, but I’m not letting that get me down. I’ll get into my focus method below in the discussion, but I’m staying positive. You can see in the image below that I broke 3700 words IN ONE DAY last week. I can keep going and catch all the way back up to pace. The important thing, as Meg LaTorre always says, is to keep writing. So that’s what I’m going to do.
Filling the Well
Miraculously and by some fluke, I finished a book this week. Chosen Champion by Elise Kova is done and definitely changed a lot of things right at the end (as far as scope and immediate direction, not important stuff like lore or tone). I’m already well into Failed Future, Book 3 in the Vortex Chronicles, and it’s starting to pick up. Because of where CC left off, FF had some new setup to do. That feels like it’s behind me so now we can get into some meaty details. I’m excited to see where this and Books 4 and 5 go.
86/100 for #ProjectBookworm2021
Well Chat
Talk about sprinting, the Pomodoro method, and the power of short-term focus
3,772 words. That was my best last week and this month so far. That sounds like a lot of words and it is. It’s 126% more than the daily goal and 7.5% of the entire month’s goal for NaNoWriMo. How’d I do it? And why aren’t I doing it every day? The short answer is sprints.
You may have heard a lot of authors on YouTube or your favorite author podcast talk about the power of sprints. These are short (10 to 30 minute sessions) of dedicated, undistracted writing time. They’re golden for me. When I’m in flow and know what I’m writing, I can bang out about 650 words in 15 minutes. Yeah, it’s that powerful. If you’re doing the math, yeah, my high day took me only an hour fifteen to complete…in theory. This is where some of the personal minutiae comes in and it comes in with a tomato.
I ascribe to the Pomodoro Technique for focus and task completion. “Francesco Cirillo coined the term “pomodoro,” which translates to tomato, in the late 1980s after the tomato-shaped timer he used as a university student.” [Source] The basic technique is to set a timer for 25 minutes and only do one task without distractions for the entire time. No multi-tasking. No checking your phone. No checking computer notifications. No talking to your kids (within reason, of course). You do one thing for 25 minutes. And then you stop for 5 minutes. Then you go again. After four rounds, you take a longer break from anywhere between 15 and 30 minutes.
I used to do a whole 25 minute sprint when I was heavy into this. Approaching NaNoWriMo, I realized I haven’t drafted in a really long time…I just checked and I finished the Book II first draft 19 months to the day before NaNoWriMo ’21 began. So yeah, I was out of practice. 25 minutes seemed daunting to start with. Granted, it lines up nicely because, with breaks, you get two sprints an hour. I liked the roundness of that. So I worked out the math and figured out that, with 5-minute breaks, I can get three 15-minute sprints in every hour, so I decided to try it.
It works like a charm.
So, I sit down, load yWriter, assess where I’m going to start for the evening, put on my writing playlist (check it out here), activate my Pomodoro timer, and jump into the Happy Tomato Zone. I’ve done all my planning so now I get to unplug my conscious brain, for the most part, and let the words fly. You can see in the Drawing section above how my recent sprints went: 627, 537, 642, 534, 562, 256, 614. That makes 3,772 words. Yeah, it took me 7 sprints. I was at the computer for more than two hours, but how would you feel if you sat down to write and two hours later had approaching four thousand words? Pretty good, right?
The cool thing about the Pomodoro Technique is that it isn’t specific to writing. You can use it for housework, schoolwork, tasks at work, whatever tasks you need to complete. You can work on something for 15 minutes, right? Don’t worry about getting it done, just make some progress. If you can make progress every 20 minutes, eventually you’ll get done. So join me in the Pomodoro Happy Tomato Zone and go get some words!
Next week, we’ll talk about a recent existential crisis I had and how I beat it. Be well.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG