March 17th, 2023 – 1,633

~ Sam Shuttleworth

“What activities do you lose yourself in?”

To the surprise of no one, writing comes first here. There is a reason why I love 1K, and it’s not because it gave my life the structure that I’ve been actively trying to figure out since my pre-teen years. I wrote because I love to lose myself in stories, and when you write them yourself you can go anywhere you like. I love others’ stories too of course, so second is reading, whether that’s ebook or audiobook. By hand, I can’t, because the paper hurts too much to touch, and if I’m honest I think the problem is getting worse. I found out a while ago if I use Vasaline on my fingertips it helps, but it stains the pages, and I would rather be in pain than damage a book on purpose. There are certain games – Day of the Tentacle, Magic Arena, Stardew when the mood strikes – that I can lose myself in for hours at a time. Pokémon is one too, but I find that harder of late. Actually, I find all but DOTT harder than I used to to lose myself in. I think that’s the burnout. A nice walk at 2am, cooking when my pain levels are lower, and Tumblr are all also big ‘brain off-switch’ activities, and well, solitaire. I don’t count solitaire as a game but then that’s just me being grump.

So almost every day of late when I’ve done my edit, it’s been chapter 3 of TWR. Specifically chapter 3, and I have in total added a little under 300 words. Granted, edits aren’t like target, one word changed is enough and sometimes my edits are to cut things, but that chapter is still a good 1K short of where I like mine to be, at about three thousand words. I don’t like long chapters in my own work – I like having bite-size chunks, and if there’s no ‘break’ after a few thousand words I just feel lost – but I do like relatively consistent lengths. And yet, I feel if I add another thousand to this one, it will drag. Makes me wonder if that’s a red flag that I’ve got too little going on in the ‘present’ of that story. Still, it’s nice that I can dedicate almost a month to one chapter and still be getting stuff done elsewhere.

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.