procrastination<\/a>. \u00a0Due to a lack of clarity, my attention wandered all day on Sunday. \u00a0I think I wrote 500 words all that day.<\/p>\nMonday, I felt so bad about falling behind and freezing up, that I couldn’t even get out of bed. \u00a0I was depressed and angry. \u00a0I called in sick, and I didn’t go to band practice that night. \u00a0I thought about the story, and I privately moped in my garage.<\/p>\n
We all have days like that. \u00a0Often, they’re Mondays. \u00a0I let the bad emotions\u00a0have me for a day, then moved on.<\/p>\n
Tuesday, I went back in to work, and I felt a little bit better. \u00a0I was able to step back a little and get some\u00a0perspective. \u00a0During my lunch, I opened Scrivener and started figuring out what went wrong. \u00a0Why wasn’t I prepared? \u00a0What did I need to do to be prepared, so that I could move on?<\/p>\n
It turns out that I hadn’t given enough thought to my main character’s family. \u00a0The whole first act is going to be with these people, and I didn’t even know how many of them there were, or what their names were. \u00a0I knew their. \u00a0I’d figured out their genesis and their religion. \u00a0I’d done a bunch of world building in advance, but I didn’t actually know any of the people that my main character was supposed to interact with.<\/p>\n
Of course, I didn’t have time to write at all Tuesday. \u00a0I had to go straight from work to band practice.<\/p>\n
I thought I would have time to write tonight at a museum. \u00a0It\u00a0was the first night of a new writer’s group I found via meetup.com. \u00a0I thought we’d all be working on our Nano projects, but it turned out to be something else entirely. \u00a0They all seemed like nice folks, but it wasn’t quite what I was looking forward to.<\/p>\n
I’m probably not going to have much time to write Thursday, because I’m going straight from work to play a concert. \u00a0I have 2 or 3 improv solos, and I’m playing music I’ve only looked at a few times. \u00a0I’m a little bit nervous about the performance, but it’s not overwhelming.<\/p>\n
I did have a little bit of opportunity to work on my story today, when I took my son to the dentist. \u00a0I opened a new page in the Research section of my Scrivener project and started creating names that would be appropriate to my story. \u00a0They’re simple names, but it was taking me forever. \u00a0Now I have a list I can pull from. \u00a0I also\u00a0created a family tree for my main character.<\/p>\n
I’m feeling more prepared. \u00a0I’m frazzled and stressed and scared, but I feel like I have perspective now, and I think I can make up the lost time this weekend.<\/p>\n
Those of you participating in NaNoWriMo, I hope you’re off to a better start than I am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It turns out I wasn’t nearly as prepared as I needed to be. I was prepared enough to write a chapter, but when I tried to advance the plot, I found that there was too much I hadn’t thought of. Last month, I talked about procrastination. \u00a0Due to a lack of clarity, my attention wandered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=487"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":488,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions\/488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}