Slow and Steady

Hello, readers. As you may have noticed, I did not exactly get back into my proper posting schedule. I really, really wanted to, but it just didn't happen. You see, I have a big editing project to tackle now and on top of that I took a job, so my life is busy. I will try to get something up here once a week, but I can't make any promises. If this post is your first experience with my blog, please check out my many other (hopefully) useful posts in the archives.

However, I'll leave you for now with a brief thought:

“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”
― Anthony Trollope

This is really thought-provoking. For example, if you write 250 words per day for 365 days, you'll wind up with 91,250 words. That's almost two rounds of NaNoWriMo, and it's a heck of a lot more manageable. Yes, it's every day, but it's 250 words. That's nothing. That's a little shorter than this blog post is. So this whole "small daily task" thing is actually quite encouraging to me, since I have a document of about 500 pages to edit (12 pt font, double spaced, 1 inch margins). I have committed to working on this project for an hour per day, every day. It doesn't seem like much, but an hour of editing is actually pretty exhausting, at least for me. And this isn't the "easy" kind of editing, either - I'm not just checking for grammar mistakes. No, I'm making sure that the whole thing flows properly, that there are no plot holes, that my characters always act in character, plus I'm rewriting the entire opening.

As a point of reference, it takes me an hour or more to compose one of my standard blog posts, so you can see why the editing is getting priority over blogging. I set myself a goal of getting through at least half my big document before the end of the year, so I can't procrastinate on the editing thing. Combine that with my new job (which is really stressing me out - I hate being 'new'), and you have a recipe for not blogging very much. Combine that with higher stress directly corresponding to higher absent-mindedness, and...

Yes, I really am writing a post full of excuses for not writing my blog. Shameful, I know.

But anyway, the point is that a small daily task beats an occasional sprint - think the tortoise and the hare. It's an old fable, but it's stood the test of time for a reason.

(By the way, this post is 458 words, and it took me around thirty minutes to compose it.)

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