I put stars on the calendar (stickers) to mark days I wrote, as a little reward and as a tracker.
When on the same WIP, I like to put the same colour stars on day after day, so I can see at a glance: “I have made it this far on this story! I’ve been this amount of consistent! ….I know it feels like I ran out of words and lost the plot, but it’s only been 3 days. I’ve done that before and it’s come back. This month, even.”
(Or “I wandered off to that thing for 4 days, but came back. Then a week later, wandered to that… hmm, check my sleep and nutrition and am I eating enough calories.” Or “Right, this dry spell started right before his surgery. It’s been 3 weeks… Yeah, that’s about right for the last surgery. Expect words in about a week if his recovery progresses enough my stress levels go down, too.”)
So naturally, every time I start another WIP, I want a different colour (size is determined by the calendar).
Important note: If you get a metallic foil star sticker from an office supply sort of place, they come in boxes of many small sheets of 5 colours (almost 2,000 stickers total), or they come in rolls of 1,000.
It does not take 1,000 days of actually creating words for me to write a story. Even novels will be closer to 100 stars than 1,000. Therefore, to your complete lack of surprise, I have a lot of extra star stickers in my desk drawer.
For several months, I’ve had a metallic holographic set of “sparkle” star stickers in my desk; I picked it up from the Dollar Tree on impulse when out with C.V. Walter. It’s only 3 sheets of sparkly stickers, as you’d expect for Dollar tree, and each sheet has 7 colours. Which means there are only 14 stars of the same colour per sheet, or 42 of the same colour per pack.
I’ve used it for tracking those days when I’m writing down something to get it out of my head, knowing it’s not enough to be a full story. It’s great for that… right up until the “write something every day to get back into the habit, never mind it’s completely unpublishable”… became a coherent story.
As I’m using the same colour (blue metallic sparkle) for this story, I’m…. on the last sheet, and going to run out well before I finish the story. A reasonable person would look at the rest of the sheet, and switch to another colour of sparkle on the same sheet, or pull out any one of the partially-used rolls of stickers and use them.
I appear to be unreasonable. Indeed, in this I am not a rational person, but a rationalizing one. I hunted down this exact sheet set on Amazon, and bought it just so I wouldn’t have to change what’s working.
It’s completely silly, but it works. Just like I rough chapters out (like scene blocking on stage) in a single-subject college-ruled spiral notebook… the nice journals, composition books, or even 3-subject notebooks won’t do.
If it works, it works, eh?
What writing rituals de lo habitual do you have?
Mad Genius Club 
9 responses to “Ritual De Lo Habitual”
Ah, engineer brain churning. Muji has B5 (7.3 x 10) and I think A4 (8.6 x 11.7) refillable spiral notebooks.
Essentially they’ve got a 26-30 hole plastic spiral back, that you can open up to take out and as more pages into it, but otherwise works like a spiral notebook.
I don’t think the A4 size is nearly as popular, because I’m having trouble finding it, but this is their B5 one:
Loose Leaf Papers – Kraft Cover Binder | Japanese Stationery | MUJI USA
https://www.muji.us/collections/paper-goods/products/loose-leaf-papers-kraft-binder-naba0s?variant=40606680776894
Their paper works really well for fountain pens without being very heavy or expensive.
Jetpens.com sells similar loose leaf notebooks from several vendors.
Ah cool. I’ll have to see if I can find one. Got one of the 26 ring ones for the oldest, because she loves to draw and I could keep feeding blank pages into it, but didn’t have a solid lead on 30 ring ones.
if JetPens doesn’t sell 30 rings, they still might know who does.
I post my progress online. Locations have varied, but it got me on a daily basis better than anything else.
What she said…
Try to write something daily, even if it is “just” idea notes or a bit of “don’t for get this” for the plot. If I write by hand, an ultra-fine pen in black, and Levenger lined notepads. (I stocked up when they went on deep discount.) Music helps, but it is not a complete necessity.
I used to beat myself up about days where I didn’t end up with net positive words in Scrivener, until I started tracking my writing in an Excel based calendar, and realized that, well, the editing, formatting, blurb and book cover design stuff are just as important as the first drafting, and it’s okay to not be drafting the next book while that other stuff happens. Brainstorming – I feel like it’s easy and more fun than proper writing, but it is still necessary, and now I feel less guilty about those days where it’s the only writing related thing I do.
Like Dorothy, I track progress on a calendar, but in my case I use one in Excel. Like Mary, I post progress online, but it’s partially for those situations where I don’t have access to the Excel calendar (so that I can copy the information over when I do have access again.)
Like Harry and Red, I brainstorm in notebooks, but I prioritize cool-looking ones above refillable ones: for some reason, the luxury of choosing a Chiltern notebook or a Moleskine notebook that I like motivates me to fill the notebook up in a way that something more practical does not. Moleskine’s designs have gotten a lot less exciting in recent years, and I’ve bought or had gifted to me most of the Chiltern designs that I liked (Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Little Women, Great Gatsby, and Frankenstein), so now I’m learning to make my own: