It was another Jeckel and Hyde day.
I started by getting my hair cut, which is always pleasant. It does cut a chunk out of my morning, but I’ve been pretty good about just jumping right back in on these days.
BUT…then apartment stuff kicked in until mid-afternoon and I was looking at the fact that I had done no work otherwise and my day was already half gone. Ruh-roh. I’ve had so many days like that recently, and not been able to recover and get at least *something* done.
Today was different. I rallied and scratched and clawed and resisted drooping eyelids at 7:30pm and managed to finish the rest of the day on track and WITH my writing done. Booyah!
I also had a little mini-breakthrough today when I changed my font size for my novel document from 12pt to 10pt. WTF? you might very well reasonably ask of me. It all comes down to the “3 pages a day” that’s really set this whole thing off for me, this sudden success at doing something that can be so hard to get done: writing.
My original plan was to write 3 pages a day for 100 days, and that’s pretty much a novel, give or take a week or two. Well, 2/3 of my way through, at around 200 pages a few weeks ago, I did my word count (which is what publishers look at, obviously, not how many fucking pages your manuscript has) and I would be woefully short if I finished my story at 300 pages. Like, 100 pages short of a reasonable word count.
So, after that realization, I’ve been simmering and simmering over the proper way to handle the problem. Obviously, there’s going to be another month added onto the escapade, and that’s now unavoidable (and totally fine, by the way). But even four months at 3 pages a day would still leave me short. That’s when I came up with FOUR pages a day about a week ago. And that was going fine, except that I’d just so fell in love and rhythm with 3 pages. It just felt more natural. So…what did I think of today that I know feel like an idiot for not thinking of sooner? Just reduce the font-size, jackass. Then you have more words per page. Make it the right size so that 300 pages, give or take, hits right at the correct word count.
Bam.
10pt font. Courier. Double spaced. Normal margins. I’m a genius.
A stupid genius, but a genius nonetheless.
It’s now time for the sleeps. I ordered a new iPad case today *finally* after all this time. It’s a suped up super version of the case that I’d been looking at for a long long time, and it’s going to be grand. I wanted to wait until next month, but then I saw that Amazon started selling them today, and hello, 2-day shipping! Plus a much better return policy than when I ordered a case directly from Belkin. I was sold. Obviously.
Oh! And I had a telemarketer curse at me today! He was about to launch into his schpeel and I knew he’d be wasting his time, so I told him literally, in these exact words in a *totally* nice tone: “thank you so much, but before you launch in, I can tell you we’re not interested. We just don’t do anything like this over the phone.” He responded by saying “you don’t even know what the hell I’m selling!” and then hung up the phone.
I wasn’t mad at the guy for a second. That’s a shit job and I interrupted his pitch. I get it. It’s just never happened to me before 😛 I feel initiated now. And, hopefully, didn’t ruin the guy’s day too much. I definitely wasn’t trying to make it upsetting, I just didn’t want to waste anyone’s time. I’m never going to buy anything from a cold call over the phone. It’s just never going to happen. I don’t even order anything that I already know about over the phone.
Anyone else out there been yelled at by a telemarketer? It has to happen somewhat on the regular. It’s such an old-school job…
That’s all for tonight.