Month: January 2013

Thursday has Friday-envy

I tried to sleep a little late this morning, a decision I actually came to a little late this morning — however much I try to fit the impulse to hit the proverbial snooze alarm — but it didn’t quite work out as planned. I thought I’d get the 8:15 train, which gets me to the office a little later than I like, but which means another hour of sleep. But I wound up on the 7:37, which is just slightly later, but also kind of annoying. It doesn’t go to Hunterspoint, but to Penn Station, where the subway’s less fun, and this morning it crawled along a snail’s (or Long Island Railroad’s) pace. Plus I had to stand.

Tomorrow, I think I’m going to either be on the 7:20 again or oversleep properly.

Meanwhile, still writing. Tonight, the single page of short story was a lot harder to produce, but I finally managed to pull something together. And it’s something that actually moves the story forward in a good way, so there’s that. I’m going to give myself permission to not finish the story tomorrow, since I don’t think that’s possible, or even advisable. I don’t know if that will extend as far as not working on it at all tomorrow evening. But it’s pretty clear this isn’t going to be done for a February 1 deadline.

Speaking of which, how in heck did it get to be February already?

Wednesday

We had a team meeting this morning all about digital products like e-books and companion websites.

And I did some writing, both in the morning and the evening. The short story is progressing, I think, but I’m increasingly convinced I’m not going to make Friday’s deadline. I’ll continue to try, but I’m currently at 15 pages, a few hundred words shy of 4,000, and I think it’s going to need more than just another page or two. And that’s just to be finished, not polished. That might be better, since I want to finally submit something to the Online Writing Workshop — a month and I’ve done nothing there — but I’ll need to bring it to some kind of conclusion either way.

Tuesday

Believe me, I’m not going to spend every day for the rest of my life (or the rest of this blog) talking about how I did or did not do morning pages. It’s just that the exercise itself is still so very new, and in conjunction I’ve been struggling to meet a deadline on a short story that morning pages really seems to be helping me with. So it’s been on my mind a whole lot.

I’m a little less optimistic about meeting that deadline, since it’s this Friday — and I just realized, with some shock, it’s not this Saturday — but I’m still going to plug away at it. I can always try to do something else with it if I miss The First Line‘s cut-off.

But for now, let me just say this: yesterday and today both, I did my requisite three pages in the morning, and I pulled together a page of short story each evening. Which, as I think I’ve said, is very good for me. I’ve had productive flashes before, but I am usually a painfully slow writer. The 17,000 words I wrote over a long weekend for 2011’s 3 Day Novel contest were a sleep-deprived, Canadian Rockies-influenced anomaly. (Also, while incredibly fun, probably not my best writing. Though I keep thinking I should do something with it.)

Beyond the writing, there isn’t much to report. I worked from home today. I think my brain may explode from trying to figure out political psychology. It rained a lot this evening. I’ve recently discovered Bunheads, which is filling that Gilmore Girls-sized hole I didn’t even realize I had in my life. (I still haven’t watched that show’s last season.) And that’s about it, really.