I used to have a 600+ day streak on 4thewords. Then, I went on a holiday through Canada, checking out the Maritimes and East Coast. Had a ton of fun, didn’t do a lot of writing towards the end (or much work really).
When I got back, I went right into editing Celestial Cataclysms 1. Lots to work on there, the editing was necessary and expansive, so I had to keep my head down and focused. There were some other things going on, so I just kept editing and some writing to get Hidden Dishes 4 (Sorcerous Plates) done.
All of which meant that when I remembered, my streak was broken. There are mechanisms to allow you to recover your streak, but it only does it for 30 days, and I was outside that window.
Ooops.
I nearly did the same with my Duolingo, though thankfully, I still have that streak of 1,000 days. Pretty cool use of gamification to keep us working…
Except.
I haven’t stopped working. I keep writing, I keep editing, I keep learning. It’s not as though I NEED to gamify it, and now that my streak is ended, I’m not even interested in going back to 4thewords again.
In fact, now that editing is done; I’m not just writing again, I’m hitting 3-4k words a day. Sometimes 5k. That’s incredible and huge, and there’s no real reason for that than the fact that I spent so long just editing, I’m feeling the urge to write and write and get the stories out again.
Freed from the shackles of my routine, I can write more.
That’s the thing about this business – creativity requires a certain degree of freedom. If you bind yourself too tight, you can output work; but it’s slower. You’re struggling against these same chains of discipline you put on yourself.
Freed, after a while, you can burst ahead. Run forwards, doing a ton of work, putting words down with careless abandon.
Problem is, eventually; all that giddy energy goes away and you need to get back to the grind. At least, I do, because that’s how I pay the bills.
On the other hand, if you (I) didn’t have to worry about paying the bills at all? About outputting work, so that my everyday costs and a potential retirement fund is paid for, would I work this hard?
Maybe. It might be more scattershot, it might be whatever tugs at my creative juices at the time. I might set aside the really hard work, the ones that require me to grind the words down, to figure out plotholes, to come up with creative new solutions to a problem for more fun, easy work.
Do more beginnings than ends.
Or maybe not. I do like figuring out endings.
Anyway, this was just more a rambling work on routine, on breaking free of routines so that you can get these bursts of creativity and work needed. Not actually anything useful, in terms of numbers/etc.
I might talk about that in a bit.. sighs But I really am snowed under actual word works.
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