It used to take me that long to get in a groove. To get warmed up. Then I'd slip into that feeling and ride it for a couple hours, coming out the other side feeling productive. Lately it feels like this series of jerky starts and stops, and from reading what I've got so far, I can tell that's how it was written: a half page of one thing, a half page of another. How I'm going to smooth it all together when I don't have time to look at more than a few pages at once is going to be a challenge, but one I'll deal with later.
For right now, I'm going to try a few things. For phase one, I've hidden my gameboy. I have a game of Animal Crossing going, and every day when the baby goes down for his morning nap I think, "You know, after last night and this morning, I deserve to play Animal Crossing. I'll play for 20 minutes and then I'll still have time to work on my edits/wash the dishes/write a blog post after that." This has the benefit that I can also listen to a podcast while I do it. However, it has the problem that my baby is magic. He can detect when I turn off Animal Crossing, and he decides that he's taken a long enough nap. This is bad not only in how I didn't get anything done (except maybe in my game, where I bought a bonzai I didn't have yet or replanted a perfect apple tree), but also in that the baby takes only a twenty minute nap and is a diminished kind of sunny until recharging at his afternoon nap.
...I honestly can't remember what I do during his afternoon nap. It's probably something boring like cleaning or eating, but it might also be that I'm abducted by aliens on a regular basis. This is a little disturbing.
So the gameboy is hidden somewhere I can't find it. (It's in my sock drawer.) If I get everything done on my to-do list, I get to play it in the evening. (There's a post-it on it that says the date of the last time I played so if I need to time travel I can.)
Phase two has to do with Camp NaNo. Camp NaNo is like National Novel Writing Month, except it's much more relaxed and it's camp themed. It's coming up in April and I'm getting a bunch of e-mails about it. I did really well during NaNo in part because this was back when the baby would nap while I was at the coffee place, and in part because I could tell my husband I had 300 more words to write and he'd give me the space I needed after the baby went to sleep. Since then my goals have gotten less concrete, an people have trouble supporting abstract goals.
"I didn't get as much done as I was hoping."Compared to
"How much did you want to get done?"
"I don't know. Just more."
"Welp...Sorry about that. Want to watch Agent Carter to feel better?"
"I wanted to write 345 more words today."Concrete goals!
"Oh, how long will that take?"
"Like twenty minutes."
"Well, you should do that. Then we can watch Agent Carter when you're done."
The problem is that I'm editing right now and doing more rewriting than writing new stuff, so NaNo wouldn't be the best fit. However! Camp NaNo is so lax that I have no problem being a full out rebel. I'm changing all the rules. My goal for April (as opposed to writing 50,000 words) is to edit for 50 hours. That's about 1.667 hours a day or an hour and 40 minutes a day. For every hour I edit, I'll tell the Camp NaNo site that I wrote 1,000 words so that I can use all the cool metrics to keep track of my progress.
Now, there's a big jump there from 35 minutes a day to an hour and forty minutes a day, so I'm going to ramp up and find places where I have more time. I'm writing 45 minutes for the next few days, then an hour, then an hour and fifteen minutes. I might have to ramp a bit during April, but this is a good start.
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