cracking the ice and climbing back in
Tue 2015-04-28 23:43:24 (in context)
- 5,391 words (if poetry, lines) long
Today was the first time in mumble-mumblety weeks that I managed to squeak out some work on the short story revision. Finally! That's what I call literary excitement.
It had been so long that I was honestly daunted about coming back to it. (Not that the project is anything less than daunting at the best of times, mind you.) I spent more hours this afternoon than I care to admit simply putting it off and putting it off. Which meant that everything on the day's agenda slated for after work on the short story was also getting put off.
Finally I just opened the darn project and read what I had written on the new draft so far. This, as always, magically led to me making notes in the margins and tweaking the text. For the better, I hope. Cleared up a logical progression here, headed off a potential point of confusion there, stuff like that. When I put it away this evening, the draft had progressed only two paragraphs or so beyond the point where I'd left off mumble-mumblety weeks before, but the overall word count had dropped by about 100 words. And of course there's simply having cracked the ice on it today, which means it shouldn't take me all day long to get into it tomorrow.
Which is good, because tomorrow I have volunteer reading in the morning and roller derby in the evening. I will need to be exceedingly on the ball about getting my work done in between those things. Hooray for the Pomodoro Challenge Timer! Despite its being studded with Default Dudes, it does help.
It has recently been upgraded, in fact. It now has a feature called "Don't judge me." If you check that, it stops nagging you. That is, it doesn't repeatedly whistle at you if you don't hit the button immediately. It just whistles once when it's time to start your next work session, and then it leaves you alone. Also, activating this feature deactivates achievements and rankings, so that you don't get messages about having been demoted for taking a week's vacation (or a week's trip to Indiana in order to live, breathe, eat and sleep roller derby, which is like a vacation only much less restful).
Of course I immediately checked it. Sometimes I have a darn good reason to be a minute late coming off my 5-minute break. Also, once, when I started up the app and opened the WORK screen, but didn't immediately click START POMODORO, it began blowing on its coach whistle non-stop while I scrambled to shut down Bluestacks. This was embarrassing. With "Don't judge me" checked, that is unlikely to happen again.
On the other hand, with "Don't judge me" checked, if I remember to click SKIP BREAK but then forget to click START POMODORO, well, there I am without a timer and not knowing it because the app isn't going to let me know about it. This is a thing that happened. I think I actually worked longer than I would have otherwise, though. "Gee, aren't 25 minutes done yet? ...oh."
I don't know. I may yet deactivate the feature in the end. For now, I'm happy to have the app's timer functions and stat tracking without its "motivational" nagging habits (which I honestly don't find that motivational).
Anyway, I'll be using the app a lot tomorrow.