Tuesday, March 1, 2011

What I Really Need...

... is more NaNoWriMo-style months. I haven't gotten up early for weeks or months or sommat. Today, I get up, read my Bible a bit, and do two hours of editing. Got a little boring toward the end there, but I got it done. Finished just before tea. Read webcomics while I waited. Drink tea, read the paper. Go down, do school, watch recorded TV shows. Take shower. By ten o'clock, I've done just about everything I can outside of schedule today. I can just feel so dang productive when I get up early. I get my projects done and it even kinda helps with everything else I gotta do. If I could get up early more often maybe I'd get more piano practice in.

Wait, I've tried that. I end up playing video games. That's right... or I just don't get up at all. It stinks. I need a project to get up early. Project defined as "something I can psych myself up to excitement about." February was National Album Writing Month. You write like 14 songs in 28 days. Ouch. I didn't participate, in case you didn't know. But maybe I should get myself more of those. I have a recital coming up in June. Maybe April or May should be "National Piano Practice Month," or NaPiPraMo. I get up and practice piano for two hours in the morning. Or something. I would probably define it as 50 hours of piano practice in a month. Music majors typically do that in a week, by the way. I guess it could be NaInPraMo, for any instrument, but that's kind of hard to say. What about Python Month? Code a program in a month. You can figure out what program you want to write, but any flowcharts or whatever you want to do has to be done in the month. Or... Origami month? An origami model a day, preferably a new one. That'd be handy next time I want to sell them or something. I'd end up with 30 or so models on hand, which is plenty. The possibilities are endless, really.

The problem remains that one needs a support group. Extra people to at least cheer me on, preferably join in the madness. Code-a-website Month, Learn C++ month... I could find people to help me out with that, right? Right? Maybe not. But it's handy to have a spreadsheet. But how does keeping track of hours or programs really track my progress? I don't honestly know. How does keeping track of words show how good of books I've written? Doesn't really, I guess, but they do get written. Some of them aren't even vomitous masses. So we keep track of something fairly arbitrary to what we actually want done -- we track words, not chapters or reviews -- and yet the rest of it turns out ok. I guess tracking reviews on a first draft it too far into the future, but that's still what people try to do. They read through, they imagine what people think, but they're tracking the wrong thing. I'm not honestly sure what the right thing is. I do know that measuring the words of a novel doesn't tell you how good it is or how long it took to write (no seriously, it doesn't. People write 800,000 words in November sometimes. That's like 26,000 words a day), or even what it'll look like when it's edited and done. But I suppose at the stage of drafting that's about the best you can measure by. You could also measure in chapters, I suppose, but then when you have a bad day, instead of ending up with fluff that has to be removed later, you end up with scenes that are just barely there and have to be filled out later. I dislike going through and adding in things later. I can't keep straight what I've added and what I just thought about adding and whether it should be here or there or- yeah. I suppose that's a matter of preference, though.

Editing is going well, anyway, and so I'm hyper enough to write a rambly blog post. Yay. I should sometime start thinking about who, if anyone, gets to read this once I've decided it's at least a little fit for human consumption. I should get a list going I guess, and ask them. Yes. That'd be the thing to do.

Yoiks and away!

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