A BRIEF INTRODUCTION: Hello there! I’m Tess, and you’re about to read an experiment of mine. The experiment is to see how long I can keep a decent log of my writing life, and to see whether that log has any entertainment value. It’s sort of like a captain’s log, but almost definitely less exciting. Hope you enjoy!
8/1/2019
1506
Damn, Thursday! Finally feeling a bit back to fighting form, though it took a while. The funny thing about writing is that sometimes it will feel like it’s going terribly, and you’re just barely putting one foot in front of the other, and then all of a sudden you’ve written 1500 words and you can’t actually remember when the rocket ship took off.
8/2/2019
593
Friday is still friend-hang-out time, but I’ve been feeling the need for a bit more alone-time this week, so I said up front that I would get there until after 7pm. And then I wrote nearly 600 words, and got in a small work-out to boot. Felt pretty good about the whole thing. Nearly forgot all about the soul draining office-work-day that preceded it.
This is near my office building. It offers me cold comfort.
8/3/2019
503
Low for a Saturday, but that was somewhat intentional. All I needed today to hit the weekly goal of 4K words was 300, so that became the goal to hit, and I surpassed it. And then I did some necessary but evil work on ads and admin, including recording the results of the fairly successful recent email list promo.
I’m more behind on sending out emails to my own email list than I would like. I’m hoping to get into a better rhythm with that over the next year.
Weekly total: 4,268
8/4/2019
787
Today was a bit of a clusterfuck, but not due to any direct human shortcoming--no, today’s clusterfuck came courtesy of technology and capitalism. Of course.
Today the agenda consisted of finalizing some admin cleanup and excel sheet updating, and recording another podcast (remotely, with my podcast partner.) The first issue was one of capitalism: though Microsoft allowed me to renew my O365 license, it didn’t actually give me a new license key, and I have no idea how to find the old one. I bought it via Best Buy, and unfortunately, Best Buy’s online customer service is bullshit. I wasted a ton of time explaining my issue to a chat bot that kept insisting it wasn’t a chat bot, then asking me weird personal questions while it was supposedly pulling up my account, then eventually telling me it couldn’t help me and giving me a number to call. No case number to prove how much time I’d already wasted, of course. Where’s the profit in actually making your customer service work, when you’ve already got their money? Side note, I’m not sure there’s actually a faster way to get to the customer service number, since I couldn’t actually find one in the email or the website. That’s why I agreed to talk to the damn chat bot in the first place--it was the only option.
I did end up calling in later, and after spending a few minutes trying to articulate my issue to the machine that answered the phone, this now my third customer service machine of the day, I realized it would probably be a million times easier just to cancel my subscription and buy a whole new one, thus securing a new license key, than it would be to keep trying to deal with this bullshit.
Turns out, I was quite right. I believe the lesson here is...never renew anything with Microsoft. Well done, Microsoft!
The next technical issue came courtesy of Apple, though, so I don’t really know what to tell you. The podcast partner and I had been recording for about 20 minutes when she realized that the software she was using on her iPad had simply stopped recording at about 5 minutes in, with no warning or explanation given. Then she couldn’t get it to start up again. In the end, we decided she had to do a whole update so she could install a different and, we hope, better software. So, unfortunately, recording had to be set aside for the day, but we’ll resume again the next time we’re both available...in about two weeks.
Alas.
8/5/2019
894
Had an unusually productive Monday, despite the fact that the cat woke me up at 5am and again at 6am, meowing very loudly and insistently about how bored she was, what with all the humans who were supposed to be paying attention to her laying horizontally and not moving for hours instead. Honestly, how dare we?
I did manage a semi-nap after I got home from work. According to the alarm I set, it should have been 25 minutes of napping. In reality it was more like 10. Ah well.
The ‘blep’ of a guilty conscience, no doubt.
8/6/2019
731
I’ve decided to set aside 20 minutes a day a few times a week to study Italian, which I haven’t given serious time to since college. I suppose I’m considering this a promise to myself that eventually I will visit Europe. Eventually.
I ended up studying Italian for more like an hour, so I think I’ll have to start setting an alarm.
8/7/2019
228
I’m exhausted and I have to plow through a scene that doesn’t excite me. Ended up doing a bit of a breakdown of what needs to happen.
Date night tonight, so even 228 words is pretty good.
Current weekly total: 2640
8/8/2019
1022
Got in a pretty good workout, which I started right at 4pm, leaving me a decent amount of time afterward, and fortunately I wasn’t too tired to work. I’m still trying to figure out the perfect balance to get both good workouts and a decent amount of writing in. Today was pretty successful, but it does rely on me being able to get going right at 4pm, and on my dinner being relatively easy to pull together.
8/10/2019
465
Made it in, just under the wire. Today was pretty rough all around, so frankly, I’m mildly astonished I managed the weekly goal. It had seemed all but a sure thing yesterday, then...the morning was bad, the afternoon was kinda bad, the evening was okay, and at the end of the night, I clawed my way to the finish line. Weird triumphs sometimes.
-Tess
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