Argh. A paltry 534 new words after two hours of work, because for some reason I chose to work on a section that required a lot of flipping through books and looking up information, thus not giving me a lot of actual word yield for my time. I should have chosen a topic and just brainstormed on it for a few pages instead. Bad planning on my part. Even taking into account the fact that Monday’s work put me a few hundred words ahead of the game, I’m now officially three hundred words behind where I needed to be today.
Off to run errands with ai731. I’ll have to work tonight after Liam goes to bed, which is generally a bad thing because now that I’m up at six in the morning running around with the boy, my brain dies around seven o’clock in the evening. This can’t become a regular thing.
You can do this. A minor work slowdown after the phenomenal progress you’ve made thus far doesn’t even register as a setback, you know. Yes, you’re behind where you need to be, but you were doing valuable research, which isn’t easily quantifiable as progress, because it doesn’t come with a pretty research-o-meter you can post online.
Strength.
Yeah, yeah, and this I know. But I should have known better. I was too out of it when I sat down to start working to even notice that what I was about to do was research, stuff I can do sitting in bed at night with a pen and notebook, and not what I should be doing during actual writing time.
In short, I fumbled the play because I wasn’t thinking clearly. What this means is that now I have to sit at the computer and write when I would otherwise be researching. And I deliberately schedule research to be done post-seven-PM when I’m less productive because it doesn’t require the same kind of focus.
I dropped the ball. It has less to do with the angst about research not adding words and more to do with I shouldn’t have been doing research then at all.
Okay, by Royal Decree (hey, I’m the King of Canada’s brother you know), you’re allowed to beat yourself up once with this book – is this that time? ;)
Seriously though, learn from it and move on. You know this, too.
Is doing research tonight, too, in order to fully familiarize yourself with the subject, a possibility? That way you’re back in your schedule with only a day lost, renewed and reinvigorated to apply that knowledge, rather than cranky and irritable from not having slept enough/relaxed enough/written enough/etc enough?
*HUGS*
Seriously though, learn from it and move on. You know this, too.
Yup, I do. Already moving along.
As for the research tonight, no, not really; I need to get another 1K or so words down in order to quell the exasperated should-have-known-better and be back on track for Friday. 1K is easy. 1K I can do, even if it’s a paragraph here and there. Besides, I want to wait for a couple of books I’ve ordered to arrive in order to fully research it instead of doing half now and possibly having to rewrite later. Having only three days a week to write means I can’t afford to do that.
Meditations; I’ll work on meditations. That will be nice and relaxing, and help me feel accomplished both quantity and quality-wise.
Love you.
xoxo
Oh, one K. You’re right. Not a big deal.
You could probably add that to your bibliography, knowing you. ;)
OYT