Sunday Summary – May 22, 2016

This week in writing

Wow, what a weekend. I’ve made some important discoveries about my writing. Namely in how much university weighs me down and prevents me from really reaching potential. During semester, I’ve tried to write what I could on my lunch break and read my book on the bus and during morning and afternoon tea. This gets my reading and writing out of the way during the day so I can concentrate on study in the evenings. I also worded my writing goal “Write every weekday”, which made me always feel like I could have the weekend off.

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This week, my last papers for the semester were handed in, and on Friday, rather than write and then log it in my Writeometer project, I would actually use the writing sprint function in the app and see what I could manage. Rather than the measly 250-350 words I could manage when handwriting on my lunch break, I wrote 750-odd words. Yesterday, I upped that two 1100. Today, I surpassed 2000 words, for the first time in the six months I’ve been actively keeping track of my daily writing.

With all that in mind, I have a couple of new goals I want to try to achieve in the coming weeks, at least until uni goes back (and even then, I might try to find a way to maintain this; after all, it’s only 25 minute sprints). As much as I enjoy handwriting, while I have the time to wile away at home, writing straight onto the computer is just so much faster and thus so much more productive. I can’t let that go to waste, so I’m going to do sprints at the laptop, and have my notebook in my bag in case I am inspired to continue throughout the day. I’m also going to try writing in the mornings again. When I tried it before, not only was I groggy, but I was also not feeling the writing. That’s not the case at the moment, and hopefully I can make this last. If I’m really keen, I could do a morning sprint and an afternoon sprint. But we’ll see about that.

This week in reading

I read The Poison Diaries by Maryrose Wood in one sitting on Friday. It was pretty good. And I will finish my current audio book, Disclaimer by Renee Knight, tomorrow.

I’ve been trying to make my way through The Last Days of Magic by Mark Tompkins, but it’s not really doing it for me and there’s no way I’ll have it finished by its due date on Wednesday. I’m returning it to the TBR, though, rather than putting it on the DNF shelf, because I feel like it does deserve a chance when I am more in the mood for something dense.

Tomorrow I will start The Kingdom of Little Wounds by Susann Cokal, which has a stunning cover, but apparently some very harrowing content. I’ve got my fingers crossed that like to get through it, though.

My goal of reading for at least half an hour remains the same, though I have been finding extra time now, which is absolutely divine.

This week in blogging

I made it to all the WWW Wednesday participants who visited my blog, plus a few others, and also to EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. of the WIPpeteers! Which was great, because I hadn’t managed to do proper blogging rounds for a while and I was starting to feel guilty.

My review of Rebel of the Sands went up on Friday, and I have scheduled reviews for both World War Z and The Poison Diaries for this week. It feels good to be a bit ahead with reviews again, rather than missing review days because I don’t have anything to go up.

I’ve also scheduled another book tag for Thursday. I’ve been saving the links whenever I’ve seen people post them, so I’ve got a few banked up to do.

Only goals for this week are to write the usual Wednesday post and to write and schedule a review for Disclaimer once I finish it.

This week in health and fitness

While I did alternate my meals a bit so that I wasn’t just always eating raw veg and hummus (that had been my plan, to kickstart a healthy eating regime, but it got boring really quickly), I managed to stay within my calorie goal each day, and I know this because I tracked it properly each day. The only days where I really indulged were Wednesday, when I had a giant spinach and feta roll with chips and salad for lunch, and today, where I had nachos for lunch and potato gems for dinner.

I walked after work on two days, and also returned to my Tuesday night dance class after a few weeks of absence. Still not quite up to the five days of exercise a week I’m aiming for, but getting there (and an improvement on the previous week).

Other highlights this week

This year, the Australian TV series, Playschool is celebrating its 50th Anniversary, and as part of that, the Royal Australian Mint has released 3 commemorative coins. We went along to the launch today and I got my photo taken with Simon Burke, who is technically also known for things other than Playschool, but he was a popular presenter when I was of viewing age. It was a morning of music and nostalgia and lots of fun.

That’s all for this week. See you soon!

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