Days 1& 2: Treading that Boundary between Good and Wimpy Self-Excuse

Huge...task...set for myself...this weekend, involving these Monday night deadlines. Which means yes, I'm significantly ahead as far as personal word count goes, but I have the great desire to manufacture several more days' worth of time between now and tomorrow night.

Anyway, let's focus on the positive here. As of the twittering-birds'-time when I went to bed this morning, I had written 3646 new words on 3 different projects, revised 3 pages and submitted one conference paper abstract. That means that as far as these personal goals for this contest I'm ahead by about 2000 words, which puts me on par with NaNoWriMo word counts after 2 days. But...lots to do yet for those pesky external Monday deadlines.

This having a word count and a goal is a fabulous way of pulling out and evaluating the success of my writing practices, as well as becoming intensely aware of all the things inside me that try to resist getting stuff out there on the page.

On Friday night I tried the "reading my notes right before I went to sleep thing" and that seemed to work well, as did the "keeping my notes in mind before jumping in the shower" thing. Caffeine also seemed to work well, and finally later in the evening, pulling out my classic paper-writing movie--Lord of the Rings--as a backdrop really kicked me back into gear.

But listening to music? Not so helpful yesterday. Neither was the 50% off Halloween candy (sugar high only followed by crash and guilt--not so pleasant). Playing piano helped quite a bit, but wasn't the thing yesterday that had me running back to the screen and back to plowing out more pages again. However much I hate it, I think I just needed a break in the middle of the day yesterday for my mind to think things over.

Sometimes I wish I could overcome such simmering times. I'd get so much more done more quickly. Sadly, sometimes they're needed, both for academic and creative projects. One can jump among the projects when one gets stuck, and therefore pick up some productivity that way, but at some point I tend to hit a wall on all projects so my mind can get one figured out. Thus it always has been.

Hm, I think it's good that I'm trying to push myself. It's helping me differentiate between what's a real barrier to getting work done and what's the kind of wimpy excuse I tend to buy from myself because that other part of myself's such an excellent rhetor. :) There's still a lot of gushy ground, though, maddeningly, between the two...