rowyn

Come to think of it, I didn't write down my 2010 resolutions until January 12th of last year. Yeah, I am not real big on getting these timed exactly.

I'm just doing two again:

Keep an activity log

OK, so I was pretty mediocre about doing this last year, but I still like the concept and I've been keeping up on it since December anyway.

Do a significant amount of writing

I should define "significant amount of writing" in some more concrete way. I'm thinking "more than I did in 2011", except I'm not sure how much I actually wrote in 2011. But less than a year of writing Prophecy because agggggggh Prophecy. I'll get back to you about what qualifies as an A on this.

Since December, I've been following more or less this plan:

1) Write for at least 30 minutes every day.
* "Writing" here includes such activities as "writing down words of a story", "writing an outline", "game prep"*, "staring at a blank screen for fifteen minutes doing nothing else while you try and fail to think of what to write"**. Research counts for half. Having a window open to write in while you are playing Puzzle Pirates does not count.
* If I actually do manage to get some writing done while multitasking, I can count words instead of time: 400 words = 30 minutes of writing.
2) You can get ahead but you can't fall behind.
* The idea here is to give myself an incentive to do more than the minimum, but to avoid the trap of 'I'm so far behind I'll never catch up, I give up'. So if I get ahead I can slack of for a day. If I slack off too much, I can still get ahead again on the next day by just doing more than the minimum -- I don't ever have to sink in eight hours just to "get back to even".

This is not my plan for all of 2011. This is my plan for January. At the beginning of every month, I am giving myself the option of switching to another tactic, because after all of these years I may finally realize the importance of giving myself an out. However, this plan will auto-renew monthly unless I do switch, because I also realize the importance of giving myself a default.

* Game prep counts because if it doesn't count, I won't do it. And I hate feeling badly unprepared for the game. ("Ordinary unprepared" is all right. It is not actually possible to be well-prepared for a game, so that would be a totally unrealistic goal.)
** My experience has been that my brain, when faced with a choice between "Either write something or BE BORED ", will almost always come up with something to write. I think I am pathologically afraid of boredom.