10:34 AM Wednesday Morning

The title of this post is a placeholder, but it's a placeholder I kept because it reminded me of various forms of writing advice I've read and received from various educators over the years: fill the page.

Blank page syndrome. Writer's block. Staring at the cursor blinking on the screen, not sure how to start writing despite the buzz of thoughts and ideas filling your head. It's similar for artists staring at a blank canvas or a composer staring at a blank set of staves.

So, I'm performing a pseudo-experiment with this post. Aside from spelling errors and some minor tweaks in syntax, I'm going to try and "fill the page," without too much editing, just to show how starting when not knowing where to start can spark the flow of ideas. Doesn't matter if the beginning is trash; most people would edit before casting their ideas to the internet. But that's not the point with this site. Concept "art" to rough draft to the editing board to finished is what I'm interested in tracking.

Of course, the time of day also contributes to how well someone can articulate their thoughts, as well as energy levels. Right now, I would consider my reserves to be fairly low. Stringing thoughts together is a chore, and I'm more content to zone out staring at my stationary organizer.

It'll be difficult to return to this later and abstain from editing, but at least there are words on the page.

14:39 Wednesday

I realize now the redundancy of the blog post's title. That is one little nitpick that I would likely edit if I were to go back and do so. I'm trying not to read the rest at the moment to help thwart the temptation.

I am thrilled by my workout today, not because my accomplishment is anything impressive by any means, but it is a win for me. Up until the 13th of April, I was unable to perform any sort of push-ups unassisted by a resistance band. When I first began to train myself with them, I started on my knees, then graduated to using a heavy resistance band after a week or so, maybe longer. Over time, I gradually lightened the band to medium then to light, but I had reached a sort of plateau with the light band where I was unable to continue on to unassisted but where the band itself also felt a tinge too easy.

April 13th I successfully performed 3 unassisted push-ups. Today, I managed 8, just a little over a week apart. In between then and today I had managed to bump that number up to 5, so it was still an incremental increase instead of a massive jump.

If that news isn't exciting enough, Monday I jogged 5 long laps around my local park. Not an easy feat, lemme tell you. It took roughly 50 minutes. Unfortunately, Fitbit didn't track the distance from what I can tell, but the walk to the park, the 5 laps, and then the walk home equaled 10 km/6.2 mi total.

Recently, I also invested in a workstation treadmill because reaching a goal of 10k steps every day takes about an hour and a half if I'm just walking, which is quite a bit of time, especially when my workout from start to finish, warmup to final rep can take anywhere between an hour and a half to two hours. I'm actually using it right this instant!

Now, I know I could lessen that time by making the moves into supersets with only a 1 minute break in between moves, but I personally prefer the more leisurely pace.

As for my other accomplishments this week, I've transcribed roughly 15.5k words. Now granted, ~5.3k of those words were from a performance Cael had put on for someone and so they were already written. I just transposed them into the scene where the performance belonged. I have one more part to transcribe as of write this moment, and it's by far the longest of the set, clocking in at 72 minutes. On average, each part is usually somewhere between 30-45 minutes long, whether that be for one of our gaming sessions or for a series of side scenes. It can be soul sucking sometimes if they're longer than the average, because the file just never seems to end. I'm also the type who prefers to knock out each part in one sitting and tend to forget that taking breaks is an option.

I also wrote and edited Efial's journal only to discover that I had already written it once before. It was funny finding the first draft, because not much changed between it and the rewrite in terms of material! It's 700 words on the dot and details some parallels between how they felt when they first arrived on the Material Plane with their experience so far in the First World. (Spoiler alert: it hasn't been a great time.)

I'm in the process of porting notes for the 7th of Nudon into The Goblin's Notebook, which I know doesn't really mean much to a vast majority of people reading this, at least not yet, but that's been taking a bit. Nudon essentially = the month of May. Nope, June. I was wrong. To put it in perspective, the campaign essentially started on what we would consider March 20th, and if you'll remember, I'm writing a journal for every day as well as the notes.

I have a lot to catch up on....

I'll take a picture of the to-do list I wrote once I'm at my office desk, because it's a behemoth. It'd be disheartening to look at if I was fixated more on how much more I have to do as opposed to how much I've already accomplished. (Never fall behind on transcribing, folks. It's a nightmare.)

Seeing as how it's 15:23 and there are other tasks I want to accomplish before the afternoon's done, I'll check in again on this post tomorrow.

18:51 Thursday

Woo! Jogged another 5 laps today, and this time I have the distance because I used the C25K app to track it.

Don't mind the blue too much; it's the purple that represents the laps I ran.

I'd like to increase my running pace, and that's been one of my goals for a while now is to actually run 5 km in 30 minutes. I've succeeded a few times, but that was while I was still living in Japan and didn't have to contend with hills.

Hills are almost worse than stairs. I...loathe stairs. I really loathe stairs.

I'll be very curious to see how my Week 9 within the program improves after I've been jogging at an increased distance for a little while. Theoretically speaking, I think the overall pace will have improved from the previous time I completed the final week of the program, but we'll see!

Yesterday, after I wrote my final sentence for the day, I spoke with my fiancé, because I wanted to run an observation by him concerning last week's post and an idea for future posts.

To preface, I use productivity journals to track my progress, though I've amended the individual daily pages to be worded slightly differently and to change the section, "What will make today great?" to "Today's wins," because that feels far more uplifting. Too often I've written down what would make the day great, not accomplishing said task or even having said event that I was looking forward to canceled, which can be crushing. Daily wins at least force me to take a bad day and see the good within it.

Because of the nature of this particular post, where I'm writing about each day's progress the day of and I'm rather enjoying the process of it, I was wondering if I should produce a sort of daily blog of shorter posts. He and I had the same counterpoint in that it could prove overwhelming for readers to be notified of a new post every day. It would be a lot, even if the posts are overall shorter.

However, with last week's post, the whole week I felt this increasing stress and pressure of, "What do I write?" even as I was cranking out words and ideas. It was worse this week, hence this week's more lackadaisical approach. Like the productivity journal, writing a brief overview of the day's accomplishments every single day in which I work on something feels almost more liberating instead of trying to think of the week's "Big Topic." Writing the day of while the emotions and accomplishments are still fresh versus compiling bullet points for a day's accomplishments to write about at a later point would allow me to do what I'm doing now, pouring out thoughts and words without caring about whether or not I'm articulating myself well, which I can then clean and edit the day I post, similarly to my first two posts.

I may have to give it a try, because on paper, the idea is quite compelling. One challenge I can foresee, however, is whether to create interesting titles for each blog post or to fall back on a default, "Week of April 19th," which doesn't...say much about that particular blog post's focus or topic. I'm inclined to continue the former. Optimistically speaking, it shouldn't be too difficult to think of creative, zany titles.

Finally, to keep my word from yesterday, here is my current To-Do List for Skies Over Aefala.

Look at all those boxes waiting to be checked! As you can see, however, one of the two under Transcribe has been checked off. That was the side scene I've been plunking out the last few days. Total wordcount: 20,724. The only reason Session 84 hasn't been transcribed yet is because we haven't had it, since it had to be canceled this week as well, which is both a boon and a disappointment, because I've gained extra time and have until Monday to plug away at notes and maybe write another journal.

Notes-wise, the 7th Nudon and the 2nd Nudon on page 2 are well on their way. Since my fiancé works this weekend, I think I can finish porting one if not both into The Goblin's Notebook. I won't lie, it's a slog, but having everything organized will be well worth the effort.

I believe that's it for today. All that's left is a quick update tomorrow before I publish this post!

17:49 Friday

I nearly panicked, because when I opened the draft to continue writing this post, it was showing an empty screen. While that would have been a story in and of itself, it would have been equally disheartening! Thankfully, refreshing the page fixed the issue.

I wasn't planning on doing so, but I decided that I wanted to finish the notes for the 7th of Nudon today, and so I did, and that's what took me a vast majority of the day aside from my normal workout. Now, a single day can sometimes last multiple sessions, and for our group that's pretty common, since we seem to role-play almost every hour of the in-game day. The previous days I was finishing the notes for Session 82, which includes part of the 6th and also the 7th. Today, I was determined to pound out all of Session 83, which was the rest of that in-game day.

It was brutal, but I did it.

For reference, the objects before "Feeding the Masses," were created and filled out the other days this week.

"Feeding the Masses" through "Ritual of Soul Separation" was all today.

Even I'm a bit surprised by how much I wrote/ported over today. Part of that was still from Session 82 as well, up through "The Pool of Fate."

Not bad if I say so myself.

I'll have to find a way to reward myself for checking this off my mega to-do list.

Win # 2 is that I successfully completed 10 unassisted push-ups during my warmup routine for my workout. My arms were shaking, but I kept my form and pushed through it. Literally.

The final victory for today will be hitting that little "Publish" button and marking this post off as completed. I'm both dreading and looking forward to seeing how my language fluctuated depending on the time of day and my mood when I was writing. Primarily it would be around this time that I would be finishing up the final edits, but with this experiment, I wanted to make greater progress on my project list, since for this week I'm not editing at all.

Eventually, I'll get to work on polishing the website itself, because there's a lot I want to work on with it, but I need to ensure my posting remains consistent first. What's the point of gussying up the site if I can't commit to my own schedule?

On that note, here is today's obligatory cat post: Salad

P.S. I hope this post inspires anyone who may be struggling with some form of block to just say, "Screw it. I'll just fill the page and come back to it later for editing." It doesn't have to be perfect. Just get your thoughts on the page, and let it stink to high heaven. That's what the clean-up is for later.