I’m, ok? I think I’m ok anyway. When I did some reading of my weeks gone by and where my good and bad patterns come up, a clear picture emerged. Saturday through Tuesday midday I am ok. Tuesday afternoon to Wednesday morning I start to struggle. By Wednesday afternoon the batteries are getting pretty low. Thurday I crash, and Friday I fester. That doesn’t mean I don’t get any work done in the latter half of the week; I’m pretty consistant at turning out work no matter my mood. My mental health though keeps ending up in tatters by Thursday. If I were self employed the answer would be easy: work until 6pm picking up odd out of hours tasks, and call Wednesday a weekend day. Weekend Wednesday is pretty well explained by this video, but I can’t really do it in my current job as, well I don’t set my hours.
So what can I do failing that? In the short term, it’s hard to say, but I did find this morning a bit easier than the usual Friday. I keep talking as if you can see the time these posts go up, but you can’t; for context, despite this being a Friday, I’m typing this at 11:35am. That’s all my 1K tasks done and me in full on workmode now before we even reach the afternoon. I’ll always work every day, but on bad days I end up having to make up hours, less in my job, more in my writing as I end up hitting target super late. My new sleep routine has got to be a part of this shift, and odds are I am seeing the benefits at last of a restored routine of 8 hour nights with a consistant wake up time that isn’t 7am. But I did do something else differently today.
When I got to my desk, I found myself hungry. This has been happening more and more the last few days, which is weird as being hungry in the morning is not a sensation I’ve ever experienced. Sure I’ve had breakfast habits at times but they were always forced, always based on external not internal cues. Being hungry as a cue is new to me, and interesting too, as this is by far my earliest full slate in a while. Now to be clear, I’m not a breakfast convert just yet, but the idea is intriguing. I didn’t have anything super healthy: it was a cream tea but with coffee. I know, I’m a hethan and I can feel my cornish ancestors judging me. Still I’d be mad not to consider more experimentation here.
I added 1,550 words of content to TWO, so today was a very good day for writing. The scene I added introduces one of the biggest twists of the story too, and I’m reasonably happy with how it came out in the first typed draft, so much so that I gave the chapter the coverted “middling going on strong” label. That makes it one of only five of the twenty three chapters so far to get some variant of the ‘strong’ label. Of course that’s subjective, just because I think it’s strong does not mean the average reader would, but I’m pretty good at spotting my own weaknesses even if I don’t root them all out on the spot when I do. Always open to intense critique, but slow at times in fixing issues because I don’t spend enough time on editing. That is why I made this the ‘Year of Editing’, though I don’t think I posted that anywhere on 2Y1K so, I’m positing it now, almost six months late. But maybe I did, I’m too lazy to go back and check.
…Which kinda proves my point about not going back often enough…
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