*eyes desktop warily*
My 4-year-old HP desktop is acting unhappy lately. It’ll boot up, I’ll start doing something, and two minutes later it just randomly shuts off and goes into the reboot cycle. O.o Or it tries to boot, then freezes and I have to do a hard reboot. *sigh* I really really can’t afford to replace it right now, so I am going to sacrifice a goat later to see if that appeases it. >.> Or maybe I’ll just run a few more diagnostics and pray really hard. Heh.
In the meantime, though, I’ve been using Rachel Aaron‘s method of fast writing, and I am floored with how excited I am to sit down and write every day. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way, so this has basically revolutionized my life.
One thing Rachel Aaron does is track her productivity, which I had always done in a desultory sort of manner. I used a spreadsheet to track how many hours I wrote and how many words I wrote each day, but I hadn’t bothered tracking much else. I do know that spending 5 hours at the Barnes & Noble cafe always means a very good writing day for me — often between 5-8k words. But I hadn’t done too much specific tracking. So on June 30 I started a spreadsheet that tracks Times (of Day) Written, # of Hours, Word Count, Words Per Hour, Location, and Medium (meaning longhand, netbook, desktop).
Since June 30 I have written for a total of 23.51 hours. In those hours, I’ve written 28,091 words. Most of those words have been written at home, many of them on my netbook, which has a new lease on life thanks to Xubuntu and LibreOffice. A lot of those words have also been written at Starbucks, where I go for two hours once a week to write. During that time, I’ve had 9 days where I was unable to write, for various reasons.
I confess, I haven’t read Rachel Aaron’s books, but she is officially one of my new favorite authors, simply because of what she has taught me. As soon as I have money, I plan to buy all her books.
