A BRIEF INTRODUCTION: Hello there! I’m Tess, and you’re about to read an experiment of mine. The experiment is to see how long I can keep a decent log of my writing life, and to see whether that log has any entertainment value. It’s sort of like a captain’s log, but almost definitely less exciting. Hope you enjoy!
8/11/2019
1594
I wanted to hit a high water mark on this opening Sunday, because I’m going to try for a stretch goal of 5K this week, just to see if I can hit it, and how much pressure I feel that puts on me.
Full disclosure about today: today was a tough day in its own right, but I’m feeling proud of where I managed to get, all things considered. It was more about bouncing back than anything else.
The past week got more and more rough as it went on, in part because a variety of things conspired to keep me from sleeping through the night...pretty much every single night this past week. And then for various reasons, my usual Saturday morning sleep-in got pre-empted, and after all the sleep lost from the week, I was in a pretty fragile place. One quick emotional disappointment later, and I ended up spending almost my entire Saturday picking up my own emotional pieces.
Then today, I recovered. My podcast partner and I did attempt to record our fourth episode (nope, we have not released even the first one yet.) But the universe saw fit to throw some pretty serious technical issues our way, so we made a plan to move forward and rescheduled for next Sunday. Then I wrote 1500 words.
Stealth goal for this week: 5K
8/13/2019
1118
Didn’t write on Monday, but I did accomplish quite a lot of marketing admin tasks, like filling out my tracking sheets and setting up a new list promo. Also started focusing a lot more on the handful of audio editing classes I found on Skillshare, and worked through a few of them, and recorded a short little test audio session (wherein I read from the book The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers.) Despite our technical issues, I can feel our momentum starting to build for this podcast thing.
Although honestly...I am dreading the moment we have to start trying to promote it. That’s a whole new field of marketing, and I don’t wanna learn any more about marketing! Ahh!
Idk maybe I’ll just coast and hope we somehow go viral organically. Podcasts go viral, right? Sigh.
So, anyway, I finally got more words down on Tuesday. Over 1k is definitely a good number for a Tuesday. I nearly let myself stop about 700, but then I remembered the stretch goal, and I pushed on. And lo and behold!
8/15/2019
813
Wednesday was date night, and it was also the night that I prepped a new blog post with the next chunk of these log entries. It’s not a terribly hard process, but it always ends up taking more time than it should. Inevitably, I have to go back and clean it up a few times, and there are just enough things to remember that I occasionally miss something. This time, I forgot to set the post to push through to all my social media accounts. But that’s okay. I’ll just do a Facebook post linking to it early next week.
I also realized right before I went to bed last night that I may be dealing with a pretty low-level virus right now--I got a charming earache as I was trying to go to sleep. That might help explain why I’ve continued to feel pretty low energy this week, despite starting to make up some of the sleep I missed.
Of course, the sleep I missed could also be *why* I’m feeling a little under the weather. Why are bodies like this?
8/16/2019
433
Coming in for a quick Friday word count! Man, I always feel great when I manage to slip in a couple hundred words on a day I don’t normally expect. Heck yeah, Friday!
Plans for the evening are to head to a friend’s house and watch the old X-Files movie. I diiiiiid consider wearing my Scully wig over, buuuuut it’s just too warm. Wearing wigs requires patience, and I’m outta that.
Current weekly total: 3958
8/17/2019
1096
HIT THE STRETCH GOAL!!!!! New weekly total: 5,054. SUCK IT, NUMBERS!
This was a moderately decent Saturday, thought it was very nearly thrown off by my partner’s and my joint terrible decision to get donuts first thing in the morning. They were great but good LORD my body did NOT know what to do with itself for the entire rest of the day. Even after I forced myself to do a workout, which you better believe my body screamed about the whole way through. But I did it! I did the workout and I did the word count. Go, Saturday, go!
I sleep now. Now is good for sleep.
8/18/2019
Did not hit a word count today, and I suspect the next two days might go without word counts as well. You see, kids, we successfully recorded the podcast today! And we have reason to suspect that our technical issues are in the rearview mirror. And that means...it’s time to get Real Serious about audio editing.
I did do some more marketing and admin today, including actually scheduling the blog post to push to Facebook. Sometimes I’m glad my writer accounts have so much maneuverability, like the ability to schedule when posts go live, and sometimes I just hate social media so much I could scream.
8/19/2019
Wrote an update email for the email list. Still got some upkeep to do there that I haven’t done yet. See, I send out regular emails to the main list--which here means the people who signed up “organically,” aka via the sign up link at the end of either of the books. But I have a whole segment of the list that came through a different means, and I need to figure out which of them actually wanna be there and which probably don’t, and move the ones who do into the main list. Seriously, there is just...no end to the work I should be doing.
Anyway, wrote an update email and scheduled it. Then finished off another Skillshare class on editing...and actually tried my hand at it! I edited the test recording I made for such a purpose! Whoohoo!
Also did some more admin. Like I said. No end.
8/20/2019
Another no word count day, HOWEVER...I edited the first episode of the podcast today! Unfortunately, not the whole thing...because I worked on it for 3 damn hours and only got through 1 hour of podcast. And unfortunately, episode 1 is definitely the easiest one, because it’s the only one we recorded entirely from the same location. The others have been remote, over Skype, and were, by necessity, cut into multiple parts.
Still, the one pretty great thing I’ll say about audio editing is that despite the time it took...it’s super easy and fun. Little known fact about me (little known if you didn’t know me during a very specific period of my life, that is): in college, I had a job doing videography and audio and video editing. And working on this podcast, I can just...feel it all come right back. Most of the stuff we did was pretty simple, although, like this, it was time-consuming. But the technology has clearly improved in the meantime, and...I kinda had a blast doing it. I’m not sure I’ve had that much fun working in a long time. Granted, I do love writing, but writing is just...not as simple and clear-cut. In writing, there’s so much room to second-guess yourself. There’s much less room for that with this.
Oh, another thing I’ve been fitting in this week: consuming the new season of Attack on Titan...and reading up on the Titanomachy of Greek mythology. For the podcast, of course!!!
I’ll try to write a post specific to the podcast soon.
-Tess
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Alternately, if you’ve never heard of The Choronzon Chronicles before, but you think you might check it out, you can find the first book right here: Shadow Summoner.