Hi squiders! I have some sort of especially annoying respiratory sickness (not COVID, I tested) that is making it hard to sleep (and also apparently making me snore), so that’s been fun.
ANYWAY
The revision is going–well, not great, but not terribly either. I’m getting 400 to 800 words a session, when I’m getting writing time, which is still much less than I’d like. (And not likely to change in the near future, but maybe by April.)
(Though it does somewhat feel like things are conspiring to keep me from it. Today the larger, mobile one somehow accidentally embedded a pencil in his hand during school and I had to take him to the hospital.)
And while I am working on it, I am still spending an exorbitant amount of time working up to writing, which often includes checking all my Discord servers to see if someone is saying something interesting, checking phone games in case something has happened since I last looked at them, and reading back over what I’ve already written, which takes longer each time.
So, since this is an Issue, I decided it was time to look for a solution.
Something that can be helpful when you find your brain will not settle down and focus on what you need to do is to designate a trigger object. The idea is that this object becomes associated with whatever it is you want to be doing, and over time your brain will move easier into the right frame of mind when it sees said object.
This is something I’ve used rather successfully for many years by putting on hand warmers and/or writing gloves when it was writing time. However, I’ve fallen out of the habit because I outgrew it, and I’m finding it’s not necessarily working as well as I would like at the moment.
So I bought a new trigger object.
He’s a reversible plush turtle, with one angry side and one happy side. The dual expressions appeal to me, because somehow–not sure yet–I feel like I can use them to enhance my writing sessions, whether that’s reflecting the mood of the story, my writing mood, or signaling whether I can or cannot be disturbed.
He’s smaller than expected, but that’s probably actually a good thing, because he’s more portable this way.
So the plan is to start to use him in my writing sessions here and hopefully we can get everything moving a little easier than it is at the moment.
However, he needs a name. So many options, but I thought I’d see if you guys had any thoughts. So give me your best writing turtle names, and we’ll see which one sticks.
See you Thursday!
