{"id":1009,"date":"2014-11-03T21:42:56","date_gmt":"2014-11-04T02:42:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/?p=1009"},"modified":"2014-11-03T21:42:56","modified_gmt":"2014-11-04T02:42:56","slug":"on-taking-breaks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/?p=1009","title":{"rendered":"On taking breaks"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m a writer. One of the things that writers do \u2014 the most important, really \u2014 is write. To that end, I had mulled the idea of getting into a daily writing habit for several years. I had several false starts, if you can call writing every day for three months a false start, but I finally found a tool that could motivate me to get my butt into the chair and spit words\u00a0onto the page. The tool? The Magic Spreadsheet<\/a>, created by Tony Pisculli and popularized by Mur Lafferty. It\u2019s worked well for me: since I started using it, I\u2019ve written the first draft of a novel, twenty-one short stories, a thirty page outline for a trilogy, and countless opinion pieces (which I\u2019ve mostly kept to myself, but I\u2019ve put some up here). <\/span><\/p>\n

While slapping down the words required to continue my streak on the spreadsheet comes easily, I find that I want to concentrate on getting a second draft of the novel done. The spreadsheet accommodates editing phases, but I found that it just wasn\u2019t working for me so I\u2019ve decided to take a break. <\/span><\/p>\n

Today is my five-hundredth day of writing, and I think that\u2019s a good milestone at which to pause and take stock. I\u2019m not quitting, just taking a breather. I admit it\u2019s a funny time to do it, but I think that the impeding start of NaNoWriMo helped push me into this decision; I didn\u2019t want to start something new with my other novel still bouncing around in my head. <\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s been fun, it\u2019s been trying. I\u2019ve met great people through the spreadsheet, and I look forward to being back on it, just not before December, maybe.<\/span><\/p>\n

(In a similar vein, I\u2019m taking a social media holiday too so you won\u2019t see my witticisms on Twitter\/Facebook for the month either. I still have notifications on, so if you want to get in touch with me, I\u2019ll be \u2026 surprised?)<\/span><\/p>\n

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I’m a writer. One of the things that writers do \u2014 the most important, really \u2014 is write. To that end, I had mulled the idea of getting into a daily writing habit for several years. I had several false […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[83,82],"class_list":["post-1009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-amnotwriting","tag-magicspreadsheet","uentry","postonpage-1","odd","post-author-berry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1HpGK-gh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1009"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1011,"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1009\/revisions\/1011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bojnberry.ca\/~berry\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}