hahahahah thursday you are not the boss of me I am the boss of you
Thu 2017-10-19 17:06:21 (in context)
- 731 words (if poetry, lines) long
So I did pick another fictionette to revise today and eventually submit for reprint/podcasting: "What Dreams May Hatch." The original draft of this piece happened when a daily writing prompt said to rewrite a fairy tale or nursery rhyme in the voice of another author, and I picked Humpty Dumpty and Peter S. Beagle. The released fictionette went a bit beyond that, though, and the results of today's revision crystallized things further still. I may tweak it a bit more before I submit, but for the most part I'm happy with how it reads now.
It is, by the way, another of the Fictionette Freebies, the one for September 2014. It seems to be a trend. I'm not doing it on purpose! I'm just searching my database for all manuscripts of a certain length that also count as a reprints. For some reason I've lit on these two. I suppose it's not really a coincidence; I tend to release as freebies whichever of the month's fictionette I'm most pleased with at the time. It's not surprising those would be the ones that sit up and go "Pick me! Pick me! The editors would love me!"
Anyway--two good workdays in a row, how'd that happen? Maybe that painfully introspective post on Tuesday helped me focus. I mean, it's never safe to say, "I'm totally over this unidentified mental dysfunction that keeps me from getting work done," and who knows what tomorrow will look like, but it can't not help to examine the process and get a better sense of what works and what doesn't. One thing that works is to make concrete and clear decisions about the day's schedule early on. Decisions like, "I will start my morning shift at 10," or "I will get to work on that flash-fiction revision at 2." I didn't actually get started at 10 and 2... but knowing I'd intended to, I kept myself within half an hour of the targets.
On that note (and because I'm still always justifying things), the morning pages are a great place to work out those decisions. If I get nothing else out of them, I get a great opportunity, first thing upon waking up, to plan my day. In excruciating detail. Sometimes it backfires and I get so intimidated by having made all these Great Monumental Plans that I immediately run away. But if the plans are more like Moderately Decent and Feasible Plans, then I'm less likely to flee.
Look at that. It's not even 5:00 PM yet. I don't leave for scrimmage until 5:30 (first whistle isn't until 7:00, but when you carpool with a coach you carpool early). It's a great feeling to go to scrimmage knowing that I have no work waiting for me at home because I already did it and I can just play. Or read! Or go to bed early. Whatever I like! I may be a little giddy and energetic tonight, knowing that.