July 6th, 2021 – 1,014

~ Sam Shuttleworth

I got my FitBit in April of 2019. So 27 months later, I have now walked 3,007 kilometres, the length of Japan according to the notification on my phone. Given a 30 minute walk a day is about 2.5km at most, that’s almost a thousand extra kilometres than I would have done if I’d just done 30 a day. That’s, impressive and confusing, as I am pretty sure I got close to zero steps some days of lockdown and my ankle injury, and of course I have walked to work, but only for less than half of that window thanks to working from home. I’m, impressed? I mean that seems good, but I don’t have anyone to compare it to as I refuse to use the social functions of FitBit.

MAL moved another step towards completion over yesterday since posting here and today. I did a thorough read-through, cut a chapter, merged others, and fed the results into my story beats calculator. Thanks to that, I was able to make a tiny tweak to the opening chapter and boom, Theme Stated is now right where it needs to be. Yes beat-placement isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of a good story, but it’s satisfying to get those markers where they need to be, and it means I can now work on making each of them stronger too. I’ll probably not do too much of that pre-‘putting it in a drawer’, but it’s nice to make sure I haven’t over-bloated any given section.

I made a note in my bullet journal a few days ago to look into a creative non-fiction course. I love writing fiction, but I read far more non-fiction than I do stories. I read a lot so I still get my fiction-fix, but I have been itching for a while to learn how to structure, research and publish a more factual book. I wish my grandad on my father’s side was still with us. I’d love to ask him about the process he went through to write his own book, Trying British Politics, a book I’m actually using to plausibility-check MAL. Honestly I wish he was still around just because. It’s been five years as of a few days ago, and I still sometimes have to remind myself I can’t just speak to him anymore.

That was a bit of a blue note to finish on, so I have something a bit brighter to sign off with instead. That being, it’s 12:16 as I write this, which makes this yet another day with early target and all my eggs in order in the daylight hours. May to July is rarely a good time for me – almost as if I don’t like the warmer weather – but I’m hoping the worst of it is past me. Still, I need to tidy the flat, and I need to try and hold onto the current stability. Holding on, I’ve found, can be much harder than getting back in sync for me. That’s counter intuitive, and worthy of me looking more into. Food for thought. Speaking of, time for lunch.

Published by Sam Shuttleworth

I’m Sam, and I live to write. I spent most of the first 8 years of my adulthood trying to balance writing with a large amount of crap in my personal life, until towards the end of 2018 I threw everything out and started afresh with just my writing. I built the new me around one goal: I have to write at least 1,000 words a day. I called this goal 1K, and it changed my life. So long as I write a thousand words a day, the day is a success, and atop that I've managed over time to build the life I wanted all those years. My greatest flaws as a writer is I still use too many adjectives, adverbs, connectives as openers, accidental passive voice and I don't force my work down people's throats enough on pain of extreme and unusual torture. My greatest strength is I know my greatest flaws and I'm working on them.