This 'n that

I actually wrote this post last weekend, but decided to save it to post mid-week, because I knew I'd be busy at work and fall behind on my blogging. I just didn't realize how busy. *sigh* Not a lick of writing done. But got lots of thinking and plotting done. It looks like the stuff I have currently written is going to be scraped or sliced up in for a revision/rewrite. *sigh*

Jordan mentioned that her writing productivity, thus far this year, hasn't been what she'd like. Ditto for me. I bought a laptop months ago in a bid to wean myself off the net. Had some success with that, but not as much as I'd like. I quickly found the laptop wasn't easy to lug around, and the keys and lack of regular mouse are a pain. But it did indeed cut down on the online surfing.

Recently, I pulled out the Quickpad again. I don't like the fact I can only see about four lines of text on its screen, plus the screen isn't backlit, so that's a bit hard on my eyes. But it's easy to transport, it turns on and off with a push of a button/key, the AA batteries last for hours, and the narrow screen forces me to 'write', full steam ahead with no edits. Also the lack of backlit screen, means I'm comfortable writing during the commute to and from work, without worrying my fellow commuters are reading over my shoulder. Oh, and it has a regular keyboard, which is much preferable over the laptop.

I also broke the current ms up into separate documents by chapter. Normally, I'd do this anyway--just an extra precaution re crashes and corrupted files--but this time I was working in one document because of the relative brevity (100 pages) of the work. For a constant tweaker like me that was a Big Mistake.

Every time I opened up the manuscript document I would do a read through to get back into the mindset and tenor of the story, but then ended tweaking and revising, over and over, what had already been written--from the very first opening line-- with very little time spent on writing forward with new material. Now I can only tweak from the opening of the current chapter doc opened.

I also changed the font and spacing of the current chapter to single space/ NTR12 from standard MS formatting. It's much harder to tweak and revise in this formatting, and pretty much forces the eye to skim a bit.

These small changes have helped me, so I wrote this long boring post, in case anyone else is floundering out there and looking for ideas to get un-stalled with their own writing.

Now if only my workload/stress at the office would ease up....