Novel Editing

Life has taken me by the scruff of the neck and put me firmly in my place. I won’t accept it forever, but I think for now I just have to listen to my body and mind and take a break. I am calling the project before finishing Chapter 17, but I want this to only be a temporary respite from the stressing out I am doing to myself. As always however, I’m still going to reflect on the process as a whole.

Things I knew before going in:

1. I had come off the back of not working on it for six weeks, and I do poorly with breaks.
2. It was going to be difficult due to my inability to properly judge the quality of my own work
3. I had managed to get my sleep schedule under control, and I needed to keep it that way
4. Consistency, consistency, consistency

Problems:

1. I suck at consistency.
2. I suck at quality assurance.
3. I don’t like editing (still don’t)
4. I have a tenuous relationship with sleep.
5. My body. Apparently.
6. My 92 year old grandmother will be around for the entire time, and require care and attention. (I love her though.)

What I did to try to alleviate these things:

1. Got back on stimulant medication to manage my ADHD symptoms as they relate to working.
2. TRYING TO NOT BE HARD ON MYSELF WHILE EDITING
3. Alarms to go to sleep.
4. Went to the doctors for a couple checkups.

Successes:

1. I managed to be relatively consistent. Issue is I need a lot of time to build up for a session of editing, and am easily distractible if I start too late in the day. Now that I know this however, I know that if I want to do this consistently I’ll have to do a few things to change my lifestyle.

2. Don’t. Backtrack. - I’ve noticed that it is very tempting to try to go back and work on the same thing over and over to try to let my perfectionism take the wheel. - THIS IS DEADLY FOR MY PRODUCTIVITY.

3. Knowing I can. Honestly, the longer I work on this project the more I’m realizing it MIGHT be achievable. I MIGHT be able to actually complete this. Eventually. While not losing steam.

Now, I did learn a lot, I did a couple things, but there is a few things that ruined the end of my project. That’s just life, and I need to try to not be as depressed over it as I am.

I had to get surgery once for something ‘relatively’ benign. I then found out that the issue I’ve been having with not being able to breathe through my nose can only be resolved through surgery, so I had to schedule that and work through that.

Medical things always put me way down, and kill my energy for a couple days, not sure why, but I’m sure I’ll get there. Looking forward to the last update on this project when I finally finish editing Chapter 17.

So I had a lot of life stuff happen really recently.

During this DK30, I’ve had to have one surgery already, and I am now scheduling another one for a separate health condition. I’ve also had a set of emotional days that have kept me from keeping up any semblance of good work ethic. I don’t feel guilty about not thinking about my project during those days.

I am however, not cancelling this project until I AT LEAST, finish Chapter 17. I am taking a crack at it tomorrow. Probably. Friday at the latest if tomorrow’s appointment turns out to be another harrowing experience.

Finished editing Chapter 16, but I’m not fully happy with it.

I wish I had the choice to be fully happy with it, but I really need to actively stop myself from getting into a revision loop where I obsessively work on the same thing over and over and neglect other things. I have 40 chapters in total, if I did that for every chapter I probably wouldn’t finish before 2030. And I want to be done with Draft 2 somewhere next year. I still have a lot to go.

Somehow it’s been a week and I didn’t write an update?

So, I’ve had a lot of “life” happen this past week. I had surgery on Thursday, which made it uncomfortable to sit down for around two days. Then this weekend was insanely busy, and marked my much dreaded 30th Birthday.

I’ve tried to make some headway into the project again, and managed to do about three paragraphs on Sunday before having to stop to prepare my D&D campaign.

I always struggle with mondays, but today I’ve had “a day”, which is to say some weird feeling of sadness or melancholy that I don’t really know how to deal with.

HOWEVER, in the past week I’ve been playing around with Rimworld a lot and its really made me want to start something new. I am currently trying to figure out how I want to use this creative drive while not neglecting my novel editing, and am probably going to experiment with WorldAnvil a bit over the coming two weeks to distract me from editing.

Cower before me! For I have progressed!

Today I managed to tame my Autism and ADHD and use the positive sides to hyperfocus on the task at hand, Chapter 15, for three hours.

It feels so incredibly good when you start a task and manage to hyperfocus on it and CRUSH the goal you set yourself for the day. However, it is also very draining, so I will now be taking a nap.

I am ecstatic.

FINALLY the first part is done.

So, Chapter 14 was … Not very good. It had a lot of issues with tenses, the narration… Basically it was crap. There was a good core, but it needed heavy expansion to be serviceable.

The original chapter had 1462 words, the new one has 3014 - just to give some context for the amount of editing this single chapter needed. I think it’s now in a good spot though, but I am NOT doing anything else today, and starting Chapter 15 tomorrow. Hopefully.

I have motivation issues and am suffering from sleep apnea. This is not a good cocktail for productivity.

Turns out I was overly ambitious. Somewhat.

I don’t think my original goals were realistic, but I’m realizing they weren’t theoretically impossible. I have identified some challenges in my life that I need to overcome in order to get on track, but I would rather downscale the project than feel like I failed.

Furthermore identified that most of my issues right now are stemming from what kinds of edits I need to do.

For those unaware I have two “styles” of chapters, and while one of them requires significantly less work, the other requires stylistic overhauls, tense overhauls, rewrites and a lot of other more time-consuming issues.

If I can get one chapter a week done, assuming they are all the same work (which I know factually is not quite true) I will be really happy with myself.

So… I really struggled today.

I initially couldn’t get back into it, sitting there for about 30 minutes not doing anything before giving up. What I did next was a bad idea: I started up Brotato.

That game sucks up my attention like a sponge and before I knew it hours had passed. So I did the only thing I know when I get stuck writing: Stay up way too late until the blockage vanishes. And so it did. I would not recommend this method to anyone. It is fundamentally unhealthy. But for me it works and is a brute force way through writer’s block.

I am now halfway through editing chapter 14 (which turns out was the chapter I had left off at, not 13) and am feeling confident that I can continue writing tomorrow!

So I spent the past three days opening the documents I needed, staring at them, shutting down my PC and repeating that process.

I always struggle getting back into writing after a long stop (6 weeks in this case), so it’s been difficult. Reading back into what you were doing, getting your head back into that space that universe and letting it seep into basically every waking thought is a process. I’m hoping that today and tomorrow I can actually start on the writing.

I know that once I start, that’s the largest hurdle to this project overcome.