The Secret Is In the Timing

No great epiphanies this week I’m afraid, just some kinda interesting stuff going on. Probably more interesting to me than you, but hear me out and you can decide for yourself.

I actually spent more time reading blogs than playing games last week, and while it might not seem like much of an improvement (because I really should have been writing) at least there’s a chance I might learn something from a blog. There’s not much that can be learned from a game, other than the fact that on-line games cheat.

Anyway…on a whim I checked out a few of the early posts on my other blog, and by early I mean when I first started it ten years ago. Man, those were the days! The posts were short and random, and I had about three works in progress going at the same time.

One of those WIPs was something called “Magic” and I had no idea what it was referring to. Nowhere did I give enough detail as to what it might have been, just word counts and progress reports. And there was nothing titled “Magic” in my old files. It took several more posts before I finally had an “Ah ha!” moment that let me know what I’d changed it to and then all of a sudden I started thinking up all these details for the sequel that never got past the “thinking about it” stage.

So Friday, the illustrious Jamie had the day off (she had Thursday off as well, but the torpedoing of that day is her story to tell) so I challenged her to a word war. We actually did two of them, 30 minutes each, and I was pretty amazed at how much you can write in 30 minutes. The first one I started Magic 2 (for want of a better title) for 816 words, and the second I worked on Wandering Wizards for another 689. Pretty good for someone struggling to get her blog posts done on time, eh?

But Jamie and I both agreed that the secret is in the timing. It is far easier to accomplish respectable word counts when you tell yourself, “Okay, I’m going to write without stopping for 30 minutes” than it is if you set yourself a goal of X number of words.

That being said, I didn’t get any writing done on the weekend, but yesterday, despite being interrupted a couple of times, I still managed 526 words. And seeing as my daily goal is 500 words, that’s a pretty good way to start my day.

Of course that’s also why this post is a day late. Yesterday I sat outside on the deck for my breakfast, which kind of put me way behind everything else, and this post kept getting moved down the priority list. But, today I decided to get this done first, then do my word sprint, and now I’m done so off I go.

Look at it this way, I’ll finally have some words to report on next Monday’s post! ;-)