A few days ago, I was reading a blog post about writing, and one of the points was to avoid distractions. Today, I was writing again and after being done, I decided to think about how much of that time was actually spent writing. I was not using stopwatch or seriously tracking it (as it would be another distraction and would slow me down even more) but as some guess it should work well.

So, my progress was one chapter. Okay, 90% of it, I’ll need to finish its ending when I think out the details. Anyway, it was around 3000 words and took me something around 4 hours. How much of it was actually spent writing?

There is a bit of time lost when I switch to music player to add something to the playlist (I’ll probably make a blog post about my choice of background music at some point). But the main point is alt-tabbing to internet browser. I rarely prepare any facts I might need in advance and so it often happens that when I need to check something on the internet.

That can be something as simple as spelling or meaning of a word (I verify that by reverse translation and synonyms), something I used several times to make sure I use a word correctly (this is mostly when using a work I’m unlikely to use in daly life).

Most of my time spent not writing while writing is spent tabbed out to wikipedia. There were times when I was checking the usual habitat of a plant or animal just to make sure it is not misplaced.

Today, my search included various articles from felines through rodents and even seagulls as I was writing a chapter where several characters explore tropical rainforest islands. Eventualy it brought me to look up bow fishing (first question I had: is it even possible?), ability of birds to eat and eventually catch fish as well as some searches related to volcanoes (which are present on the islands).

I guess that of the four-ish hours I spent maybe one hour looking up stuff. By the way, capybara meat is supposedly tasty. I chose bow fishing over hunting rodents anyway.

Today was another of those days when I was writing a bit and something that I had a few times occurred to me again. It’s the moment when I am searching for the word to say something and somehow it comes to my mind even though I did not know I know the word. In reality, I did not even know such a word existed.

This happened to me maybe two or three times before, unfortunately I don’t remember what words they were and at this point I am not willing to scroll through 240000 words of text to find three of them. But I know what it was this time.

I was in the process of describing a frost elemental, which I decided that will look like a mixture of snow and ice, strangely mixed together. And then as I was thinking how to best say that, the word came to my mind.

Intermingled.

Wait, does such a word even exists? Seems that it does, because Word did not underline it red as a typo. Okay, step two, Google translate. Check, it seems that such a word really exists. Good.

In case of interest, here goes the elemental’s description as it is now in the very first pre-alpha version. Since the story is still in development, I removed character names from the excerpt.

[name removed] saw various elementals before. He saw earth elementals that looked like dried soil, flame elementals that looked like cooling magma and mistwalkers that looked like a bunch of mist taking on a specific shape. This frost elemental looked like irregular intermingled mixture of ice and snow. It had larger crystals of the same elemental ice he just picked up forming up the base of its limbs, the joints being made of what looked like tough, frozen snow. The torso looked like thin layer of the same ice encasing enormous snowball but [name removed] knew enough about elementals to know that inside this is the creature’s core, a piece of elemental ice with such power it would never melt on its own.

The elemental’s face looked like it was gently sculpted from a snowball and the creature even had something that could vaguely resemble a hair – thin strands of what resembled willow branches covered by thin layer of hoarfrost. Of course, in case of this elemental there was nothing covered, the ice just somehow kept that shape.

Note: mistwalker is what I call a specific kind of air elemental.