Sunday, September 19, 2010

you can catch a sight of angel eyes, all emptiness and infinite

My no-wasting-time-on-the-internet vow from last night was a very hard thing to keep up in the cold light of day, but it was worth it; despite going through the shakes as I kept reaching for my phone to check twitter or the news and reminding myself that I wasn't supposed to, I managed to write a whole lot of words today. Even though I didn't get out of bed until almost ten and then proceeded to blow dry my hair in a blatant act of procrastination, and even though I made both lunch and dinner, and even though I called my parents and talked for an hour and a half, I still managed to write over four thousand words. And those were real words, not just a copy/paste hack. Yay me.

So clearly cutting off access to things like Twitter and the New York Times was v. beneficial. As mentioned, I woke up this morning, got ready for the day, and made myself lunch (I perhaps stretched the definition of the word 'cooking', since I just reheated some chicken that I cooked last night, sliced it up, cut up half an avocado, and made a wrap -- but as that's slightly more effort than a peanut butter sandwich, I'm going to count it). Then, I relocated to Starbucks, where I knocked out a couple thousand words while drinking a big mug of earl grey tea; ever since I discovered that I can get tea in a real mug if I'm going to drink it there (which was not that long ago, as it happened yesterday), I've been v. excited about drinking tea there. I refuse to drink hot tea out of a paper cup, since I swear that I can taste the paper in the beverage -- but a big mug of tea is the perfect accompaniment for writing about British people drinking tea and having sex, right?

My battery started to die, so I came home and talked to my parents while it recharged. Then, even though it wasn't even six p.m., I made dinner (linguine with a storebought tomato sauce that I added chicken to) -- I'm on a mission to cook more, both in an attempt to be more frugal and in my push to eat healthier, and this weekend I was quite successful in my endeavors. After eating, I went back to the same Starbucks, got another mug of tea, and wrote another couple thousand words. The story is humming along quite nicely now, and the issue now is that there just aren't enough hours in the day (during the week at least) to keep making this kind of progress. But at least this week I worked on the book every single day regardless of what was going on -- I just have to keep that up, and keep trying to increase my word count, so that I can finish the book before it kills me.

When I came home, I had been productive for over five hours, which is about five hours longer than anyone should be productive on a Sunday. So I decided to reward myself by watching last week's finale of "Top Chef" (verdict: I was happy enough that the person who won was the winner, but the season overall left me feeling kind of meh). And, dear reader, I will admit that I caught up on Twitter while watching "Top Chef" -- it seemed fine to read a whole slew of tweets while watching tv, since it's not like tv is a great use of time either. But as long as I can keep up my discipline during the day and only check twitter at the end of it all if I've accomplished good things, I'll still consider this week a victory.

Now, I suppose I should go to bed so that I can get up and drag myself into the day job, where I will endeavor to feign enthusiasm until it's time to go home and write again. Goodnight!

Daily word count: 4360 (218.0% of goal)
Productive time: 5.75hrs
RescueTime productivity rating: 1.56 (global average: 0.28)

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