Elf Queen 3 Weekly Update 1/15/23 + Time Blocking Tips

Hey, it’s JM, here for the weekly update! Since it’s a new year I thought I’d share some time blocking tips that are absolutely making a difference for me that you might take inspiration from.

Plus an update on Elf Queen 3 obviously towards the end. If you have no care for my tips or my life updates and only want Elf Queen updates just scroll down.

Anyway, I found that I absolutely need a schedule to get done what needs to be done. I home school my daughter and my son is 3 so they’re always home. My hubby is now home and it’s been kind of an adjustment. Our previous schedule from when he worked went out the window for a kind of whatever whenever and it was affecting my writing time.

I found myself on social media more. I’d wake up and check my socials, emails, watch youtube videos while the kids played, until my husband woke up about an hour later then we’d chat, and I’d procrastinate. Then I’d come down to my office to write and just wouldn’t feel it. I found myself sitting down to write and then getting back on youtube for inspirational stuff or business related videos, excusing this as work.

It’s not.

It’s like I already had so much going on in my head it was hard to get into a creative state. I’d think, ok I have to do a school lesson for my daughter, the bathrooms need to be cleaned, the living room looks like a tornado went through it. I need to do more advertising. What am I going to make for dinner? Dishes…

And my husband helps a lot with the cleaning and kids now but I’m so used to doing a lot of it while he was at work that it’s hard for me to give like half of those things over and off my plate.And I realized this week that this chaos isn’t working.

So on Wednesday I sat down with Travis and said, we need a schedule. I’d been saying this for awhile but neither of us took action. We just agreed and went about our business. So I used the white board on the fridge that’s a “menu” but it has every day of the week on it. ( I used it for meal planning for about 2 weeks lol)

Anyway, I wrote down everyday tasks for every hour of the day.

Monday – Friday

Me write from 8 am-10 am

School 10-11 (home school for a kindergartner doesn’t need to be very long)

Me workout 11am-11:30

Trav work 11am-1

Me business or write 2pm-4

( also wrote down certain things like clean bathrooms Fridays, gymnastics for kids Thursdays, etc)I started waking up at 7:30 and going straight to writing. No picking up the phone, no checking anything while on the computer. This time is only for writing!

When I tell you this is a game changer– trust and believe. I’m a semi procrastinator/ “wing it” with many things in my day to day, like I usually never know what I’m going to make for dinner etc. doing just time blocking made me so much more productive and took away from wondering when I was going to get other important things done.

I break down my marketing business stuff even further to like make tiktok/instagram post. Which can take me an hour to come up with content. Or I do gratitude journaling or the courses I’m taking at this time as well. I may start writing down my ideas for the next couple chapters during this time as well.

During this week I figured out I’m averaging about 2k words in the morning which is about 1k an hour give or take. I could likely write faster if I didn’t do a lot of discovery writing. But I sit down not knowing what’s going to happen next most of the time other than following my loose outline. Unless I was thinking about it when not writing, and have an upcoming scene already planned out in my head.

Elf Queen Update

So as of today I am at 37k words and on chapter 17! I got this progress tracker from another author (pictured) and it’s oddly satisfying to color in a diamond each time I get a thousand words. I’m not sure why there is money everywhere when it’s a word count tracker but whatever.

I’ll give you a little teaser with a sneak peek at Runevale…

Hel thought back to the day he first met her all those centuries ago when they were gods, untouchable, and of the belief that nothing could ever destroy them. How wrong they’d been.Bright stars winked in the dark sky Hel stared into. Of the three moons of Runevale, Nuna with her golden rings, Luna with shades of soft pink and crimson center, and Fennor silver and bright, only the sisters were visible.

…

SWAG!

I don’t have much more to update other than I got some samples of the T-Shirts and I approve of the quality, and they’ll become available soon! The sweatshirts will come shortly as well. And a poster of the map! I ordered the size 11×16 and it was great but if we want bigger, let me know. I’ll post when all these things are available in my Etsy shop! Until next week!

JM