Writing tricks

Finally, I have figured out a way to make myself write!

As probably happens to many of you, I frequently sit down at my computer with the best of intentions. I open up Word, I crank up something I can write to in iTunes, I flex my fingers, I place them on the keyboard...and promptly go haring off to Firefox to surf the interwebs for hours, because actually writing? Aahahahaha, don't make me laugh!

So I pretty much stole the Pomodoro Technique, which is mildly popular at work. I started by setting a timer for thirty minutes and giving myself a goal of 250 words by the time the timer went off. Then I toggled Apple's full-screen button in my Word window (similar to Scrivener in that it blocks out everything but the document, including time/date/menus up at the top). Then I stared at the screen until blood came out of my forehead until the timer went off. Eventually I got bored enough with staring at a half-written fic that I started writing just for something to do. Lo and behold, I managed more than 250 words by the time the timer went off.

Admittedly, I do cheat now and again because I'm a frequent thesaurus user and sometime I just need that synonym for "glance" or "annoyed" or whatever RIGHT NOW, but it does seem to be circumventing the worst of the avoidance methods. At any rate, in the past week I've added a couple thousand words to the not!drawerfic, bringing the total up to 27,000 words. It feels, oh, maybe a third done. I hope. I feel like it's been going on for a while, but actually it's only taken me three months write 5,000 words shy of what took me A YEAR when I was working on my space pilots. (I'm still going to go back to it! Once I've gotten this one out of my system! Which, if I can proceed at the same pace, should be by the end of the year, oh I hope I hope...)

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In other fandom news, I...well, I don't really have any. I finished watching The Americans a while ago, and while it was enjoyable, I just don't have anything to say about it. Sometimes that happens, I guess. I'll probably watch the second season when it comes out.

Orphan Black is still on my to-watch list, but I think I'm going to save it for the long weekend over July 4th. And at some point, rowdycamels and I are going to get back on the stick in regards to nx_rewatch. We're so close to the end! Just distracted by other things lately...

Skates!

My skates came in today!

( Cut because some of you probably don't care )

( Pictures )

As far as class goes, today we put our crossovers together. Well. I should say, we attempted to put our crossovers together. Neither of us actually managed a real one. I can do a sort of stumbling, shambling attempt at a crossover, although at least it is equally stumbly in both directions. My bigger concern is getting them to go in a circle instead of an ever-narrowing spiral. Perhaps the mystery behind that will be revealed next week, since we didn't put them on a circle until right at the end of class today.