Writing is easier when I turn the TV off

Last year NaNoWriMo was a breeze. I had a really fast start and was always ahead of the game. There was a reason for that: last November started on a Saturday. My system last year was to write 500 words each day M-F, then 5000 each on Saturday and Sunday, which was 12500 words per week, or 50,000 words over November. Friday at midnight I started by writing 2000 words. Saturday I wrote 5000, and Sunday I wrote 5000. So by the end of that first weekend I already had 12000 words, which meant that when I did 500 words per day on the weekdays, I didn’t feel like I was falling behind.

If you write 1667 words per day, you wind up with 11,669 in a week, or 50,000 in 30 days.

This year, November starts on a Monday. I will have 2500 words by Friday, and be 9000 words behind already. Psychologically, this will of course be devastating. I don’t know if I’ll be able to surmount it, but I also don’t know if I can write more than 500 words in a workday. Maybe I should take November 1 as a vacation day and try to write 10,000 words?

Best TW feedback ever

Over at the dayjob, SMEs are feverishly trying to get documents back to me all marked up, in preparation for the release that's supposed to happen the week I'm back from VP. Today's best comment: Unfortunately not true. SMEs, they're so cute.

What I read: January 2024

"Morgan is my name" by Sophie Keech. Office book club selection. It gets exhausting to read about plucky young heroines who are terrible at needlework all the time. I should probably read some Jo Walton. I mean, you can be good at needlework and other things too! I didn't find this book very surprising. The first half was kind of boring, but it got better towards the end. LHC #233: "The Shifter" by Janice Hardy. I read her writing advice website regularly, so I thought I should maybe read an actual book to find out if she was worth it. Oh my, the voice of this book grabbed me immediately. The worldbuilding seemed shady but the voice was solid. It wasn't very subtle, but I might not be the target audience. LHC #234: "Ragnarok: The End of the Gods" by A. S. Byatt. At this point with my library account, I'm just guessing. I know there was something by Byatt there? I suspect there was. I did not know what to make of this book. Strange, but it w

What I read: March 2024

LHC #240: "Vita Nostra" by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko. Translated by Julia Meitov Hersey. All I knew going in was dark academia. This was a neat thing to read after A Deadly Education last month. The students can leave this school at summer and winter break, but maybe they shouldn't. Also, interesting education method, providing Sasha with a CD player and punishing her if she leaves it in the mode where it plays all the tracks in sequence. "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman. When I finished Ragnarok by AS Byatt (last month? January?) I was thinking it might have made more sense if I had any knowledge of the subject matter. The boy had left this lying around, and it was not a tough read. LHC #241: "Science on a mission: How Military funding shaped what we do and don't know about the ocean" by Naomi Oreskes. I deferred this once because it was so long. History of science is challenging for me to read, because of the need to get a grasp on dispr

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