Workload and process musings
Nov. 9th, 2025 02:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gs_silvaI probably won't get to my daily comic today, because I'm working on Draft 3 of the book and I have a clear road ahead of me for a few pages, but it involves a lot of grinding, tedious touchup.
I say "a clear road ahead of me" because I want to say "my work cut out for me" but it seems like the meaning of that idiom changed while I wasn't looking. Now it seems to mean "to have extra work piled on." I want it to mean "to have a well-defined workload." Did it change over time, or am I misremembering?
There was a scene where Jon talks Maurice into coming with him to see his old team play. Jon was on the University soccer team, and he would've graduated already if he hadn't gotten injured, but several of his old teammates are still on the team. So they show up, and Jon's soccer buddies whisk him away, and Maurice ends up sitting on the bleachers with Ren where they have a philosophical discussion about sports that only two rural kids from Cow Country can have.
(Well, not really. I'd cut the dialogue way down before I removed the scene entirely.)
Now the soccer scene is gone, gone, and the scene preceding it, where Jon and Maurice are chatting, is still there, but now I'll rewrite it so instead of soccer, it leads them to writing novels.
We're still gonna write novels here! Novels about novelists is a time-honored tradition.
But I got sidelined by my mother needing help with this and that, and with my fatigue in general, which is very high today. I did a few things that wore me out. I'll need another day to recover. I don't have another day to recover.
I have some thoughts on tropes that I'd like to write out, but I should be drawing. Sometimes the tedious touchup is just the level of work I'm capable of, especially when everything else requires brainpower that I just don't have. But even at those times, it's exhausting. Only because I need to put a time limit on the amount of tedious work I do in one sitting, and I never do that.
I say "a clear road ahead of me" because I want to say "my work cut out for me" but it seems like the meaning of that idiom changed while I wasn't looking. Now it seems to mean "to have extra work piled on." I want it to mean "to have a well-defined workload." Did it change over time, or am I misremembering?
There was a scene where Jon talks Maurice into coming with him to see his old team play. Jon was on the University soccer team, and he would've graduated already if he hadn't gotten injured, but several of his old teammates are still on the team. So they show up, and Jon's soccer buddies whisk him away, and Maurice ends up sitting on the bleachers with Ren where they have a philosophical discussion about sports that only two rural kids from Cow Country can have.
(Well, not really. I'd cut the dialogue way down before I removed the scene entirely.)
Now the soccer scene is gone, gone, and the scene preceding it, where Jon and Maurice are chatting, is still there, but now I'll rewrite it so instead of soccer, it leads them to writing novels.
We're still gonna write novels here! Novels about novelists is a time-honored tradition.
But I got sidelined by my mother needing help with this and that, and with my fatigue in general, which is very high today. I did a few things that wore me out. I'll need another day to recover. I don't have another day to recover.
I have some thoughts on tropes that I'd like to write out, but I should be drawing. Sometimes the tedious touchup is just the level of work I'm capable of, especially when everything else requires brainpower that I just don't have. But even at those times, it's exhausting. Only because I need to put a time limit on the amount of tedious work I do in one sitting, and I never do that.