Indeed, when my five week practical training period started in late January, my daily schedule was genuinely tight. This meant that I had very little free time once I had managed to get my daily things done during the day.
By that I mean is that once I came back from work at 5.30 pm, I had roughly five hours time to make dinner, play piano, rewrite the book and exercise before I had to be in bed. This didn't seem easy at first and required a lot of discipline from me.
Thankfully, even though I had my doubts, during this period I managed to keep all my projects going. I managed to rewrite my book and play piano pretty much every day, even though I was super exhausted at the end of the work week.
Progress-wise, considering that I wrote every day, you might assume that I finally managed to rewrite the book from start to finish and have sent the manuscript to the publishers. Certainly one would think that three more months was enough to get the job done.
In reality though, even though I've written more or less every day during these last three months, I haven't completed the rewrite. I still have one and half chapters to go - out of nine - before the book is going to be in a 'good enough' shape. '
Rewrite-wise, during the latter half of the book I was surprised how much rewriting many of the scenes required. Even though I had the right idea about how the scenes were supposed to be written, they still required a lot of polishing.
Indeed, individual scenes had a lot of pacing issues that really hurt the flow of the story. I had to get rid of a lot of sentences or paragraphs that didn't work (dialogue or description) and fix them in a way that would keep the reader immersed in the story.
Fortunately, considering my patience and the hard work I've done with the book, it looks like these setbacks haven't been to severe. My estimation is that the book is going to be finished before my summer vacation starts, which is less than six weeks away.
Music-wise, I've managed to keep my routine going too and have managed to learn three new songs. These are 'The Last of Us' theme, Tom Chaplin's 'Somewhere only we know' and the super popular 'As it was' by Harry Styles.
The good thing about practicing advanced versions of these songs is that they've once again helped to improve my basic technique. Even though the progress is almost unbelievably slow at this point, I still get better as long as I patiently practice playing these songs.
In that sense, when you consider all the things that I've done lately, I think it can be said that I've been pretty active with my projects. I shouldn't be too hard on myself just because writing the book has taken more effort than I had thought at first.
After all, even though I'm most definitely getting tired of the whole thing and that I'm also tired of getting my school work done, I need to keep pushing. I need to keep working diligently because I'm not that far from getting things finished.
In that sense, whatever is going to happen once I'm done with the book and have received my degree, I can worry about that stuff later. I can worry later about whether the book is going to be published and what I'm going to do next semester with my new degree.
