Before I get going: read my poem (and all of the other stories and poems) in the summer issue of Kaleidotrope.
On Tuesday night, I spent about 3.5 hours working in Scrivener and Aeon Timeline to verify dates for a story against a 35,000-year unity of time cycle, and I’m working in 3 different calendar systems — Objective Count, the Nåkeva Tveshi Calendar, and the Standard Count Tveshi calendar.
I knew I’d overextended myself when I reached 10:00 PM and thought to myself that I had burned the candle so long that there was hardly any wax left. It was the tail end of orientation season where I work, and the semester started on Wednesday. This weekend, I’m finishing up writing an academic article based on a conference lightning talk I presented this summer — due on the 7th.
On Tuesday, despite being fatigued, I pushed on until 10:37 PM simply because I was so deep in calendrical conversions that I didn’t want to spend time figuring out where I had left off. When I turned off my music, I felt fuzzy and hollow. Spent.
August and September are the most hectic periods in the calendar for most academic librarians, with additional rushes in October, December, whenever spring midterms happen (typically early March here), and late April/early May. Late August to early September — I declared in my bullet journal — is a month of organizing and completion for me. Rather than starting new projects, I’m using it to tidy up.
Being the type of person who commits to things and then finishes them means that I have to really watch not overextending myself early on, and Tuesday night is an example of a time when I was pushing myself a bit overmuch. I keep having to remind myself that I have all of September ahead of me to get things done. The first thing I did after considering what I need to do between now and December 31 to reach my goals was to make a document called Large Writing Projects and print it out so I’d know what’s on my plate and my estimated times to completion. It’s taped to the wall above my desk now.
I finished writing a shareable draft of A Matter of Oracles and sent it to a few close acquaintances and friends on my “hey will you read this?” list on Sunday night. Coincidentally, everyone I asked to read it works in libraries, and it’s about far-future library science. Then, I put a smiley face over its section on Large Writing Projects. After being on a panel at Conbust for several years about the depiction of libraries in speculative fiction, I decided that I really wanted to see what it would be like to write something (admittedly on the fantastical side of speculative fiction) that drew on my professional librarian background and created a realistic information environment. You can also see a bit of that in Epiphany, but not as directly; episodes/entries 18 and 38 have a lot of realism. There’s another episode in which a database Salus uses for work has an update that completely overhauls its interface, and that’s common, too.
Right now, I’m putting The Raised Seal in more explicit first person omniscient — updating it to be consistent with what I’ve decided to do in the rest of the epic has been smoldering in the back of my head. Tackling this will free up mental space for projects I want to focus on later in the calendar year, so it’s game on. I’ve just reached Chapter 15 out of 21, which plot-wise is where the shit hits the fan. Many of my longer works are like a Mono piece or one of Rachmaninov’s piano concertos in that they build slow-ish and then the climax happens and stays put.
Otherwise, I’m migrating some of my plain text worldbuilding, character, and story notes into Markdown (using MWeb) and LaTeX (specifically Overleaf). While I use Scrivener for single-story character sheets, locations, and the like, when I’m working on my epic, I need the same things over and over. My conlang documents are so nice and squeaky, and they’re a total breeze to consult when I’m in the middle of writing.
I’ve co-taught file management workshops and practice what I teach, so the worldbuilding notes are straightforwardly arranged — I can more clearly see where I can refine what I do to fit my workflow a bit better. It actually might not take as much time as I thought to fix all of this up.
I shared these stats on Twitter (from which I’m taking a hiatus; social media is very stressful, and I can feel my chest tightening and shoulders knotting whenever I log in), but this is what August looked like for me.
One big change is that I discovered that RescueTime premium has a lot of features I want to use to track my time, so I started using it to look at the amount of time I was spending in Scrivener and other writing tools.
I said this on Twitter, but I’ve seen people mention that it’s hard to feel productive when there isn’t a word count to measure — RescueTime helps me with that because I can see that despite not having written many new words this month, I’ve been doing a lot of revision. What is not included there is the time I spent reading/annotating some of my work using an app on my phone. That’s another few hours, which would bring the total to 58-60 hours for my creative work.
So those are a few quick updates. I’m doing a lot of stuff, #Lexember will be upon us before you know it, and there’s a thing I will talk about excitedly in a few months, but happy September, and may Demeter and Kore bring you the blessings of the harvest season. 😊