Given that I didn’t move far from my office chair, and played a game, and watched other people play games, I actually had a reasonably productive day. More or less.

After six days in a row of work, I decided to go full lazy today–and you should never go full lazy–but then I ended up tinkering in a notebook.

As I prepare to start National Novel Writing Month again, I’ve found myself, against my better judgement, scribbling out ideas for a science fiction novel. My goal this time is to start from scratch which, in all fairness, is the intent of the event. The two times I’ve done NaNoWriMo before I tried finishing works in progress: the first one I didn’t finish; the second I did finish, but it nearly broke what’s left of my sanity.

There are a few problems. As I’m world building, I’m also scribbling random bits of dialogue and scenes which may cause me to write sections I can’t, technically use as part of my 50,000 words. (I vow here and now not to use them unless I’m really desperate to finish.)

I also find myself becoming more interested in world-building related research than the actual characters. This is a form of procrastination that gives the appearance of working without actually requiring work; kind of like cleaning your desk and checking your email before you write.

The last problem is that this blog has remained a daily project despite my intent to make it a few times a week project. Unfortunately the daily habit has set in strongly enough that I find myself trying to think of topics after supper and, for some reason, avoiding the list of topics I made a long time ago. Also unfortunately, it hasn’t set in enough for me to do any prep before supper to make the writing easier.

My goal is to start the NaNoWriMo process on Monday. I will, but first I have some research to do.

This post is 18 posts too early–I’d planned to do it at the thirty month anniversary–but this blog dominated a good portion of my day.

My head hurts because of this.

I spent part of the day sorting the posts on this blog. It took longer than I thought and I only got through about twenty percent of them. (The whole time I was asking myself “why didn’t you do this as you went along?) (Answer: because.)

The sorting involved going back through all 529 posts, starting with the earliest, and assigning each a category or two. This seems simple, but it’s a time consuming process that often involves rereading a portion of the post. In a couple cases, I assigned a category based on the title and the lede. Then, just in case, I reread the post only to discover it was in the wrong category.

I also kept having to add categories, including a category (random) that is more a cop out than an actual category. (I might as well have stayed with “unassigned” the default category.)

The goal is to sort out the Japan related posts so that I can start cross-posting them at my once and future old website and to assemble the best ones as a book to give away when I relaunch the old website.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to edit a couple typos and clarify a few bits.

Along the way I’ve discovered a couple moments where I sort of, almost repeated sections (I think of those “call backs” and not as mistakes or self-plagiarism) and I also found a few passages that I didn’t remember writing. Luckily I enjoyed them.

One of the problems with looking back at your old work is there are only a few possible reactions:

1) Man, I really sucked at this but I’m getting better.
2) Man, I used to be good at this but now I suck.
3) Man, I really suck at this.
4) Remind me again: why am I doing this?

Mostly I’ve noticed the way the tone has changed. I’ve had recurring jokes that I eventually dropped (something like that) and jokes that changed (“something like that” started as in-line text and then became parenthetical). There were also themes that seemed to dominate the blog for a while and then disappeared.

I still have a stack of possible topics that I’ve been putting off and a list of photos I plan to take “some day” in order to add them to reviews. First I need to sort the posts. After that, the goal is to modernize the other site.

The problem then becomes do I do two posts each day or recruit guest bloggers for the other site?

Knowing me, I’ll fret about that so long I won’t actually update the old site. Problem solved, except for the worry.

A couple posts ago I passed 500 posts on this blog and recently they’ve been hurting.

Part of it is that I’ve been doing this long enough it’s become both a habit and a compulsion. This means I feel compelled to write even if I have nothing to say. Unfortunately, because of the habit part, it remains something I do right before I go to bed which is not always the best time for me to be doing it. Despite my notes and lists of possible topics, I still find myself staring at the screen at 10:30 at night trying to think of a topic. At times I’ll just start writing and see what happens.

This resulted in posts like Spelling in Translation (in my defense, I’d thought of the idea earlier in the day) and The Bad Timing of Wishes. The latter was an especially desperate topic which will, of course, result in a follow up post once the work is done.

A few times I’ve decided to do a topic only to suddenly shirk at the extra work involved as bed time approached. This is especially true of any posts involving pictures, which have to be posed, taken, retaken, uploaded, edited, fretted over, reedited, uploaded to the website and then surrounded with text to justify them. This sudden rush of laziness happened twice with yesterday’s post about the T-Kawai folder which was put off for “a couple days” and then “for a couple more days” whilst I thought about taking more pictures of it.

I also feel I’ve been shirking on the posts about Japan and life in Japan. I consider posts about work to be cheating as work tends to go through the same cycles and all I can do is put “it doesn’t suck as much as last year” or “it totally sucks more than last year” spins on them.

It also might hurt any “plausible deniability” I might need in the future.

On occasion my plan to move the writing to earlier in the evening has been a success, but then I slide back into my old habit of “Crap. I need to write a post but, Crap, I don’t have a topic.”

Heck, I’d even planned to do a 500th post post and then forgot what post I was on. I also had some doubts about doing one as I also consider the self-referential posts to be cheating.

That’s how bad things get around here in my head. I’ll tell you more about that on post 1,000, or maybe post 548 when I reach the 1.5 year anniversary of this blog. Or maybe I won’t. I won’t decide until the last minute.

I don’t know if it’s stress or the weather, but lately I’ve been falling out of habits.

I’m not falling back into  bad habits (although I do catch myself chewing my eponychium every now and then) I’m just suddenly not doing old ones. I’m also suddenly unable to start new ones.

For example, for over a year now I’ve been writing 10 ideas a day as part of daily practice to keep myself writing and, on occasion, come up with some good ideas. However, this week, and maybe because it’s June, I suddenly find myself three days behind my entries. What’s odd is this hasn’t been a result of procrastination–Look at notebook; I need to write my 10 ideas; I don’t feel like it right now; don’t write 10 ideas. Instead I haven’t been thinking about them at all. I only think about them when I see the notebook in the morning.

Similarly, this past week my daily log became a diary, which is exactly what I wanted to avoid when I started the project. Rather than make entries during the day I suddenly find myself making all the entries in the evening in one made rush. In fact, I’ll do that after I finish this post. I haven’t been checking the weather during the day and, by not making entries as I go, I find I use the same non-useful language for my entries. (Okay classes; Lazy evening; Etc.)

It’s the mindlessness of it that I find fascinating. Something I’ve done for several months suddenly doesn’t enter my thoughts. This blog remains a habit, although it’s crept back into the personal and focuses less on my hobbies, but I haven’t been able to move my writing time to a more reasonable hour.

It’s almost as if my psyche and my physical system both suddenly decided to reject the new habits by completely ignoring them.

This means tomorrow’s challenge is 30 ideas. If I think of it.