Time Today: 1 hour
Time This Week: 1 hour

Changing my header to record time just for this week, since I do not have an overall goal to work toward except finishing the book.

Mapped three more chapters today. Tomorrow should complete the book two gazetteer chapter maps, then I will need to combine those into an omnibus map as I have already done for book one. Still, I should be well into book three maps by the end of the week.

Time Spent: 1½ hours
Total Time: 8 hours

Mapped another three chapters today, which took longer because they were long chapters.

I remember writing these chapters in book two. I was flagging a bit. My preparation for book two had not been as thorough as I would have liked, but the real killer was that I lost my job half way through November that year and so I completely lost momentum. I needed something that would let me just write free.

So I added a section on one of the MCs being abducted and told more of the history of the planet they are one. This is important stuff from a cultural back story point of view, but the sad fact is that it's in completely the wrong place.

Still interesting to reread, though.

That also means I have made my time goal for the week. Five chapters left to map in book two, then on to book three.

Time Spent: 1 hour 2½ hours
Total Time: 5 hours 6½ hours

Didn't do anything yesterday; spent an hour this morning before work on mapping another three chapters.

Questions were raised about how old some of the characters actually are, what the time line looks like, and why someone whose house the traitors met at was only now being introduced into the conspiracy. It's quite odd.

Still hoping to spend more time on this today to make up for yesterday's slackness.

Update - mapped through some more chapters. They were fairly short in the main, so I have completed chapter nineteen of twenty seven chapters (not twenty five as I had written before - twenty five is usually what I have for my chapter plan, but I had forgotten that I added a couple to book two on the fly).

More tomorrow!

Time Spent: 1 hour
Total Time: 4 hours

Split time today, but completed maps of details in chapters eleven and twelve of book two.

It is interesting reading this zeroth draft of the second book of the trilogy again. It's not bad - needs a lot of work, but there is some good conflict seeds in there. Not enough letting them actually grow, though.

Time Spent: 1 hour
Total Time: 3 hours

It took a while to get to my writing time today, but I spent a little more than an hour this evening on the trilogy. I am adding this to time I spent on Friday and over the weekend to make it three hours spent so far.

What I am doing is mapping the territory. Writing the zeroth drafts of the trilogy books involved making up an enormous amount of stuff: characters, towns, animals, geographical features, cultural tics, predatory plants, and (of course) plot. The first big task is to put together a mind map which collects the details of the story.

last summer and mapped another three chapters of book two this evening - I've captured ten of book two's twenty five chapters.

More tomorrow!

I've been thinking about my writing and more to the point how little I have been doing of it.

Part of that is the season. After November's frenzy there is always a lull, then with Christmas and New Year and my wife's birthday there are few opportunities for solid work. But I have a very strong desire to actually get at least one book to a point where it might be submitted, or somewhere close to it.

So I need to set some goals.

One of the things about NaNoWriMo is that it has firm daily word count goals. There's a number of other places to sign up for word count goals even in the off season, but it's still about making words. Which, you know, is kind of the point of writing, but I'm not at a point where I am really making words - I am making sense of the ones I already have.

What NaNoEdMo does is to set a goal of fifty hours of editing in a month. Given the NaNoWriMo 50k word count goal this places a rough equivalence of one hour of editing to a thousand words. Given that that is about how fast I type then I have decided to at least commit to doing an hour's editing a day.

So that's what I will be posting about as I go on.

I recently finished Neal Stephenson's book Anathem (which is splendid, btw - much more science fictional than The Baroque Cycle) and one of the things that happens to the protagonist Fraa Erasmas is that he has The Book thrown at him (there is a spoiler here, since I describe the nature of The Book, but I don't discuss the circumstances of the throwing, so to speak).

The Book is a series of problems which are meant to waste the time and, more critically, the mental energy of the student. Some of them are just futile activities (learning digits of pi) while some are internally consistent but objectively flawed dissertations. It is used as a punishment, forcing the student to learn these wasteful things instead of doing useful or interesting work. The student is tested on their command of this useless material.

I feel a bit like Fraa Erasmas at the moment.

The work I am doing is generally fine, but there is a whole class of problems that I keep on tripping over which can only really be solved by learning the detailed idiosyncrasies of a particular piece of software, and it is almost exactly the kind of work that I dislike: not just because it takes time away from interesting and useful things, but because it fills up my brain with things I do not wish to know.

Well, back to The Book I suppose.