First, the failures of the week from the plan:
– I did 8h of saltmines instead of 16h
– I did not get my computer built.
– I missed a Spanish study on Friday.
– I missed 6hr 45mins on TheFleet on Christmas.
– I let writing go way overtime on Thursday and imo produced a shit article anyways. ((This was the review of An Outpost of Progress. The reason it is terrible is it’s almost a plot summary. I didn’t intend it to turn out that way, but I used too many quotes from the book to support my thesis. Then at the end, poof, a plot summary was born. I spent hours trying to massage it to be more of a review, and I think it just became an ugly beast that ate a lot of time.))
I am content with my progress with The Fleet. The progress came partly from ditching saltmines time and using one of my writing sessions to write about my plan for the project. I am enjoying the project and consistently look forward to working on it.
The other item put to the side (literally) is the computer. I will either go tomorrow or use one of my saltmines days to do a run to Santa Cruz to get a magic potion that removes the thermal paste. As discussed, anytime I plan to build or assemble anything I need to make sure I have all necessary tools+consumable and have a technique for undoing and redoing steps.
My writing progress oscillates. The article on Thursday was poor, but I was satisfied with my article about my thoughts on shrysr and asciilifeform. Writing about this topic a few weeks ago would have spun me out for a month. I’m looking forward to the new write-every-day but publish every-other-day strategy. Hopefully I won’t need to go overtime to produce something decent.
The lesson from the article-massage experience seems to be quite straightforward (not new either, but here it is): don’t waste time with massages-on-words. I get it that you didn’t end up with what you wanted but the way to get there is by writing more, not by polishing/massaging. Basically polish is skin-deep, while the thing you dislike about what you turned out there goes way deeper than that. Let it be as it is for now, look back at how it got better than it used to be anyway and use that time better to write the next article.
Comment by Diana Coman — December 30, 2019 @ 9:08 am
Makes sense, no amount of adjusting can fix a shaky foundation. I read my summary of your article and this one side by side. It’s a bit of comparing apples and oranges, but the later is clearly better. The problem with it is that someone who hasn’t read the novella may be a bit confused.
Comment by Will Haack — January 1, 2020 @ 3:29 am
Let others’ confusion be, what’s it to you? For one thing there will *always* be at least “someone” who will get confused, no matter what you write, for another thing if they are confused they can use that comment box to ask and for yet another thing, it’s not like you don’t have enough of your own confusions/troubles to see to and fix, no need to load on others’ too.
Comment by Diana Coman — January 1, 2020 @ 9:49 am