January blog

This month, and Christmas break last month, I focused on working on my outline for my book. I did a lot of work on it. I began by narrowing down the list of potential chapter subjects that I worked on in November. After I tediously went through about 50 various potential topics and narrowed them down to only about 20 topics, I began to focus on subtopics for each chapter. I listed about 10 to 15 subtopics for each and then narrowed them down to five to eight in total. From there, I dug through my case listings and began to build a list of various possible cases to support each chapter, subchapter, and the arguments within each. This was quite a bit of work and it took me a long time. I got approximately 75 some hours this month and over winter break so I put a lot of effort and time into finishing up the outline. And then something terrible happened. Something absolutely horrendous... My laptop's hard drive decided that it was a good time to die. I had to wait about a week or so with no laptop and with getting no work done. Eventually, I did get a replacement hard drive and installed it. And as I was working on transferring my backed up files I realized something. I did not have my outline backed up. It was unfortunately lost to the aether of my dead hard drive, never to be retrieved again. I panicked. Luckily, everything is okay because I have enough handwritten notes and little tidbits strewn around my Google Drive that I can rebuild my outline, it was just a lot of lost work.
I think that I really showed a lot of initiative by working extensively throughout Christmas break. I put in several eight and ten hour days in order to get my hours up and my project advanced. Before break I was behind in hours by almost 20 hours, now I am 30 hours ahead.
A highlight of my month was (even though it made my lose my outline) getting my new hard drive. My computer works so much nicer and faster now. I know it is not necessarily directly connected to my Apex project, but getting the new hard drive has made digging through PDFs of files a lot easier and faster.
This month I learned to always always always always make sure that my work is backed up. And if I think that it is, I should double check, triple check, and quadruple check just in case. And maybe check once more after that. Jokes aside, I am now doing all of my work on either external hard drives with two copies in two different places or on my personal Google Drive. I cannot believe how stupid I was by not backing up my outline. I thought I had, but I did not. I am going to make sure I am much more careful in the future. I am lucky I write a lot of my thought process down on paper before I put it on a document because if not, I would be entirely on stage one now and I would be royally screwed. I am just really lucky and glad for my tedious thought process.
For the main challenge I faced this month, I would have to say it was my lack of wanting to work after I found out my outline was gone. Believe it or not, it was not even the outline missing that was the issue. It was my frustrated giving up on the project temporarily that was the main hurdle. I eventually overcame it by forcing myself to sit down, collect my notes and my thoughts, and type out the outline slowly even though I did not want to at all. I am not quite done with the outline, I am about halfway done with it, but I am done with my frustrated procrastination when it comes to the outline. I really want to begin the actual writing of the book. I have so many cool ideas for it and I do not want to waste any more time on the outline than I have to.
Like I said previously, I am looking forward to actually writing the book next month. I know I have been saying that a lot in my previous blog posts but I really am looking forward to it. I love writing and I am getting burnt out on the preparation stage.

This is the current form of my second outline.