Ugh, again, as my wife so eloquently puts it.
It’s another week where I am writing stuff, but it’s nowhere near as much as I need to be doing if I want to catch to the productivity of the past two years.
I was hoping for a week where I got at least 4,500-5,000 words written minimum. That sort of weekly productivity is well within my wheelhouse. Instead, I ended up with this last week:
Writing statistics for the week ending 11 May 2024:
3,252 words written.
Days writing: 5 of 7.
Days revising/planning: 1 of 7 for 60 total minutes.
Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of planning/revisions): 6 of 7 days.
Well, it’s not nothing, and after a long dry spell, I finally made more progress on my new book The Yank Striker 2 during the last couple weeks, but it’s certainly not 4,500-5,000 words like I hoped.
As anyone who attempts to read these writing journals over the years might guess, I post them with the idea of analyzing what works for me and what doesn’t, and what I can do to improve productivity in particular1. During the past couple of months, I’ve begun questioning what type of effect constant travel has had on me. In my mind, while the actual act of traveling hasn’t had a direct impact on my productivity, the inconsistency of where I have been staying from week to week due to circumstances beyond my control, the sheer amount of time I have been driving across this state from place to place, and the growing amount of time I’ve spent away from home has slowly and surely worn down my mental stamina and ability to focus on writing for extended periods. Thanks to my unwillingness to stop writing and my wish to keep my blogs up and operational with new material, I never totally stopped writing for extended periods back years ago as a younger man, but I am absolutely not satisfied with what I have been doing.
The best news, however, is my last extended stay in a hotel room for some time2 will be the night of May 22, and then after my last day of work at my old school district, I’ll be winging off to Fort Madison permanently. Afterwards, I’ll have a whole two months and a fortnight at least to concentrate on kicking tail on writing and being super-productive. And when autumn rolls around, I’ll have a job 20 minutes away from my place, which means a half-hour less per day of traveling on the road, and no packing and unpacking in hotel rooms.
Thinking about it now, it seems like a vacation ahead of me, although I don’t want to assume anything. Anyway, I’ll look to keep writing as this week goes on.
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- I also want to make what I do public because I want to hold myself publicly accountable for not writing when I claim to be a writer. ↩︎
- “Extended” being the operative word. I’ll be headed onto a couple trips during the first couple weekends of June, but those will only be for a day or two at a time. ↩︎