So, in a blog post earlier this year, I said that so far in 2023 I'd been devoting at least an hour a day to writing and editing Wongery articles. This post having been made in early January, "so far in 2023" only covered one week. Still, during that week, I'd managed to get in an hour of work on Wongery articles every day.
This, unfortunately, did not continue. The following week I got distracted (which is unsurprising, as I am very easily distractible), and between then and last week I only managed to get up two new articles, and rewrite and dramatically expand one old one, which... isn't absolutely nothing, I guess, but sure isn't a heck of a lot, for almost eight months' time. I've put up more blog posts this year than I have articles, and while on the one hand it's good that I've been keeping the blog updated (if not quite weekly as I've several times said I would), it's the Central Wongery that after all is the main point of the site, and that more urgently needs to be expanded.
So, anyway. Last week I decided to set a goal once again of spending at least an hour a day working on writing Wongery articles. Not blog posts, not site layout, not coding (which I don't really intend to start seriously on until I finish those Udemy courses on Javascript and PHP), but articles for the Central Wongery.
And so far I've managed to stick to it. In fact, once I got into the proverbial groove (I feel like I've been seriously overusing the word "proverbial" lately, but I'm going to use it at least this one last time anyway), most days I ended up spending several hours on it. That doesn't mean I've gotten an article up every day, of course; as I've said before, it takes more than an hour to write an article. Still, over the last week I have managed to post four new articles and rewrite and expand two old ones, which isn't a huge number, but is twice as much as I'd gotten done in the previous eight months. (Although all of these were articles that had already been started, so I didn't write the whole things just this week.)
Why, incidentally, does it take so long to write an article? The articles aren't that long, after all; they currently average about fifteen hundred words, and the longest article—at the time of this post, language (seriously? That's the longest article? Huh)— is just under seven thousand words. Sure, that's not just a postcard-sized blurb, but it's not exactly the Mahābhārata either. Am I that slow a writer?
Well, I'm a reasonably fast typist, and I could certainly manage a few thousand words an hour if I was just typing them—if I was copying them from some other source, or just laying down a stream-of-consciousness river of verbiage without having to think about what I was writing. But of course I do have to think about what I'm writing; relatively little of the time I spend writing or editing an article is spent actually writing. I have to spend time thinking about the topic, developing ideas, making decisions about details. And often I have to do a fair amount of research—even for articles about wholly imaginary topics.
Let's take the latest article I revised, for instance, the roper clam, the new and expanded version of which article I just posted yesterday. (Well, it's also renamed; originally I called it the animal in question the "archer clam", but as I was rewriting the article I realized that its method of catching prey did not resemble archery at all, and that this name didn't make any sense. (So why had I called it the "archer clam" in the first place? I don't know; it was almost fifteen years ago that I wrote the article, and probably fifteen years before that that I had first created the creature and named it; and also I am stupid.) I then considered calling it the "gaffer clam", before I realized that that name didn't make sense either, and finally settling on the current name.) Now, of course the roper clam isn't a real thing; it's an invented creature. But I still had to do some research on real clams to figure out where to fit it taxonomically (it's not currently evident from the article—though it will be once I get the Automatic taxobox template working—but I placed the roper clam in the (real) superfamily Arcoidea), and also to learn about clam anatomy and reproduction, since while the roper clam certainly has some differences from real-life clams, I still wanted to base it on real clams as a starting point and alter it from there. I had to look up Greek and Latin roots to come up with the roper clam's binomial name, and the scientific names of the various subspecies. And I had to do a little bit of research about Dadauar itself, the world where the roper clam is found—just because I invented the world doesn't mean I remembered everything about it. I looked at the map of Dadauar when deciding on the roper clam's distribution. (There's no map of Dadauar currently in the article, but I do have a map of the world on my computer; I just haven't added it to the article because, well, as it stands it's not really polished and presentable. That's another thing I ought to try to get done before the site's hard launch, though.)
This last bit, incidentally, about researching the established material about the worlds in question, is one I maybe haven't always been as diligent about in the past as I should have been. I've already mentioned in a past blog post that the articles on Dadauar and on the Drithidian calendar contradict each other regarding the name of the first modern onirarchy—turns out it's even worse than that; there's a third article, on the continent of Eordi, that gives yet another name for it (and gives a different name from the Drithidian calendar article for the second modern onirarchy as well). Yet another thing to resolve before the hard launch.
Anyway, so hopefully it's understandable why it takes more than an hour to write an article. But why only commit an hour a day? And why should that be so hard to do so? An hour's not much, is it? Well, maybe not, but trying to find an hour a day to put in on writing and editing Wongery articles is still nontrivial, for several reasons. First, there are other things I also want to put time for every day. I try to get in some daily time learning languages on Duolingo. I try to spend some time every day working out (at which goal I have lately been notably unsuccessful)—I want to get in better shape, although my body seems very attached to the unpleasant shape it currently has. I want to spend some time each day on those Udemy lessons (another goal I haven't lately managed to meet). Each one of those things may not take much time by itself, but they add up. Then, too, there are other projects that I want to work on which, though I may not spend time on each of the projects every day, I still do want to get some work done on at some point, and on any given day I'm likely to put in at least a bit of time on at least one of them. And, of course, there's my job, which takes out a big chunk of the days when I'm working. Due to the nature of my job, there are often times when I have to be there and have to be keeping an eye on things but don't have to be so focused that I can't also be doing something else in the meantime, and so I can sometimes work on the Wongery when I'm there... but I can't give it my full concentration. And last but by no means least, naturally, there's the fact that I'm a moony, procrastinating goober with a very short attention span who is incapable of ever getting anything done, which definitely doesn't help.
But still. I have once more for the last week managed to put in at least an hour a day writing and editing Wongery articles. And this time I intend to keep it up.
Of course, I guess I also intended to keep it up last time, but eh... maybe it'll go better this time?
(I am seriously concerned that at the time of the hard launch in January the Wongery will not be much better off than it was at the originally scheduled time of the hard launch last year before I put it off because I didn't think it had enough to show, but... well, we'll see. However much I get done between now and January, I'm not putting off the hard launch again. It will be what it will be.)