Turns out, the weekend wasn’t as harried and pressured as I thought it’d be.
I sat down late afternoon on Saturday to write after doing not much on Friday except coming home, eating and passing out. I just had no steam left in me after a hectic week. Pressure takes a lot out of me. I can survive it, but I get really tired physically. Stupid, yes; annoying, yes; inconvenient, yes; but still true. Pressure, and hot weather.
So anyway, I finally got caught up on blogs and social networking crap Saturday about three, and then sat down to write the non-fic. I had a definite plan in mind, and I meant to carry it out no matter what.
I got a lot accomplished. I mean, a lot. Not as much as I hoped, but still, a great deal of progress.
After I pounded out a bunch of pages, I also got a spark of inspiration (I always feel God has revealed something to me at some point, because I know I’m not that smart). I could see how we should chop the book up better, move stuff to more appropriate chapters and reshuffle our book to get the material organized better. My loving wife, of course, does what she calls the “grunt work” for this book, and actively took it upon herself to renumber all the chapters, screen captures and re-do all the Word documents to prepare them for file upload (a second time). Everything after the sixth chapter got revisited. By the time it was all said and done the book became better organized and stronger in content. I pounded out about six new topics/tasks, and when the dust settled, I’d done about a full chapter by the end of the working night (late).
Then, Sunday, I got started a few hours earlier (more like noon), and hammered out another big chapter. I realized two things in doing this:
- I can get this done really, really fast if I need to (and might still make a July 10 deadline somehow), and
- I can’t figure out, for the LIFE of me, why this kind of fire and speed of process didn’t come until I’m behind the eight ball.
No matter the cause, no matter the outcome, I feel I can really hit this hard and get some stuff out the door now. The only problem remaining is, where am I going to get another 100 pages of material? I might, and I emphasize might, have to go back and add even more to the earlier section of the book. Which, of course, will mean my loving spouse will have the joy of renumbering all the chapters, pictures and re-doing every Word document so they can be uploaded a THIRD time to the publisher’s FTP site.
Yay me.
How was your weekend?
-JDT-
Copyright 2011 DarcKnyt, all rights reserved
DarcKnyt 
Glad you’re making progress! Me, I tried to work on the house an messed up my back so I’ve been lying down. I read my first Dennis Lehane novel in one day, beat a couple of bosses in Metroid, and did laundry. Lots of moaning and groaning.
I prefer moaning, but I’ll take groaning if it’s all I got. Sometimes, that’s all you got.
I don’t know this Lehane guy. I’ll have to see what he’s about I guess.
I wrote a big diatribe about wordpress.com not recognizing my gravatar, but then I realized I had the email in the wrong spot. *blushes*
Eh, whattaya gonna do? Get better soon.
Inspiration often comes at the end. I have no clue why, but at least it comes. Yay for trying to be an optimist. Anywho, I hope you (somehow) manage to make the deadline.
Oh, I’m feeling pretty confident I’ll make the new deadline. Not the one THEY wanted, of course, but the one I agreed to, yes. Now I have to get that on the contract somehow.
My weekend was boring. Didn’t even go to Borders, but I did spend the majority of my time trying to fix my sleeping schedule. It didn’t work, but at least I’m up before noon these days. That’s something.
A step in the right direction at least. 🙂 Hey, enjoy it while you can; eventually you’ll have a job and sleeping in is going to be a luxury.
The determination that comes from procrastination is an amazing thing. 🙂 Glad to hear you guys were able to plow though.
All the way to the end! I’ve completed and now it’s being sent off the publisher for the final time…until revisions, lol.
I’m best behind the 8 ball too. Don’t know why.
See, I knew you’d do it!
I even surprised myself with being able to cap it off. 🙂 Thanks for the support along the way; much appreciated.