I just did a victory lap around wooden columns in my kitchen and demanded high-fives all around: Against Superheroes is done. Well, technically it just topped the first hurdle. Core writing is complete at 100,801 words. I will now do two editorial passes and then send it to my editor for clean-up. Finally, I’ll get some feedback from my wife before sending it out for independent review.
I try to write according to a daily schedule but I have historically been an inconsistent worker. I track everything using a spreadsheet and it doesn’t look pretty:
Note the long gaps. The gaps are problematic for several reasons, not the least of which is that I have to go back and read everything again to return to form. The gaps arrive with excuses, then get amplified by more excuses, then get massaged into to-do lists, and then always get resolved by unknown forces. Maybe they are unknowable.
The one consistency that I have found is that I always start strong and finish strong, bursts of enthusiasm for the project arriving with runner’s high on the trail, or while waiting in traffic. The plot thickets open to luxuriant fields. When I’m in the gap periods I distract myself too easily, finding the deep research topics an easy way to justify an additional pause of days, then weeks, sometimes months.
I guess I should resolve to find my triggers and work to overcome these tendencies, but I’m not certain that it matters. There is no rush, and those exuberant starts and ends are perhaps enough of a reward that no deeper optimization of my soul is needed.