My Actifit Report Card: March 18 2021

I have hopelessly confounded my sleep schedule at this point. Between random things popping up during the night, a noisy neighborhood, procrastinating writing I should have done during the day and trying to cram it in before I get to bed, and a handful of other things I’ve started a rather painful process of choosing between fixing it or adjusting to it.

I probably should fix it. This is the downside of having everything online and at my pace, especially since the shift for daylight savings’ time has actually not had any effect on me at all.

But that’s not terribly relevant.

I got a lot of steps in today, and I think it’s partly because I’m so sleep deprived that I’m mildly hyperactive. That doesn’t correlate to productivity, and I’m going to be going to bed with somewhat less than my ideal amount of writing (~2500 words out of 3000 I was hoping to get).

Still, I wrote more than I thought I would if my poor sleep would have been to blame.

One advantage of this is that my mind is free-associating in weird ways, though I could always just have some dairy products before bedtime if I want to have surreal dreams and that vibe often carries through into the day (and can be emulated with things like music anyway).

On that topic, I’ve started work on a new short (or very-short) story. It’s post-apocalyptic in theory, but it’s actually got some rather deep mystical undertones that I’ve been revisiting after some time of being detached from my past understandings of things.

I know that makes me sound very New Agey, but I think the whole COVID thing has really hit me psychologically in ways that I both understood and didn’t pay attention to. I hate being around people in masks for a variety of reasons, some of which I can work around for short periods of time and some of which I can’t, so I’ve basically avoided all face-to-face social interactions for the past year.

The cost of that is not negligible, and while I’ve got a lot of psychological strength to draw upon I’m still subject to my own limitations. I can certainly say that I don’t always live up to my own moral principles when I’m isolated, and one reason for that is the reduction in empathy that I get for other people. I’m introverted and disagreeable to begin with, and while I strive to be a joy to be around despite that it’s much easier to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war as it were.

Anyway, back to the story, I think it’s interesting. I’m really trying to refine my semi-stream-of-consciousness approach hoping to use it to revise my MFA capstone novel, which uses that format. One piece of feedback that I got I was hoping to avoid (but also knew I probably wouldn’t) and centered on the idea that the various characters feel too similar.

If you were me, you could see the differences instantly. But that doesn’t cut it. A lot of the small things that happen in each character’s voice are little craft things, and that’s nice in the sense that you could basically take a couple paragraphs of text and I’d recognize the distinction even if I had somehow forgotten what part of the novel the text was taken from.

But all the characters are too focused on the present, as a general rule, and when they’re focused on the present they overlook a lot of what would actually be interesting to them as people. I am fairly articulate (or at least “fairly rambling”), and my characters all inherit that from me. They need to have a few more rough edges.

Also, I’ve hit 15k steps today, which is great because I was wondering if I was going to see myself go above the 10k amount like I used to. It wasn’t entirely intentional, because I’d hit 10k by lunchtime (such as it was, given my odd sleep schedules recently) and then I just had other stuff to do that kept getting my count up. I’m really trying to do a prodigious amount of reading since I’ve got the time during this section of my classes and I’ve got the advanced copy of that book that I’m hoping to write a review for.

This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io

Walking