First: The Theme
As of this month (and I guess technically every month after) this will be my longest period of time I’ve ever kept up some sort of periodical writing that wasn’t fiction oriented, and I gotta tell you it feels weird. I used to have a Livejournal back in the day, which I nuked in a fit of peak sometime after joining Facebook back in the day. Back in the day. Facebook. Those are two phrases that are getting ever more synonymous and I’m not sure how I feel about that. Anyway I nuked my Livejournal and up until that point it was my only effort at a blog. I’ve slipped a bit in my delivery, but I’m still cranking these things out at the start of every month, whether it’s on the actual 1st or a few days later like this one.
The theme of the month is Consistency.
Second: The Work
I’m sitting in my hotel room at 6:45 AM at Norwescon as I’m writing this. My family are all asleep and I’m watching planes landing at SeaTac Airport outside the window. It’s pretty, and it does a bit to distract from the fact that my work progress this past month has been… not great. As far as themes go, Consistency is more aspirational than executed upon, and so this part of the newsletter is going to be a bit more of a meditational on why than it is on what I’ve gotten done, because I’ll tell you, it’s not much! March was full of either travel or family scheduling, layered on top of people getting sick or having various other crises which made it much harder to nail down regular times to get work done and just execute. Accordingly, as family has always come before everything else for me, I had to put down a lot of the plates I was carrying and recognize that they were probably going to be a bitch to get spinning again once I had the chance to pick them back up.
I’m several days into ‘let’s make the damn plates spin again already’ and it’s going… well, it’s going. Broken Vessels is halfway drafted, which sounds impressive but also it’s a long damn book and that means that as impressive as that first half feels, I’m also staring down the second half with its barrel roll of plot twists and emotional beats that have been in my head for a very long time. On the one hand this means that I’m excited to get to them, but on the other hand spending years excited about getting to do a thing means, for me anyway, agonizing about whether you’ll get it right when you finally get to that part. I’m about to get to about a dozen of ‘that part’ and the pressure is building at the back of my neck so finding a way to not let the stress eat at me is important. When I figure out how to do that I’ll try to bottle that solution and use the royalties to retire to a mountain fortress or some such. Ah who am I kidding. I’d go insane in hermitage.
The other projects, surprisingly, are coming along… okay? It’s very scattershot talking about those because as far as the creative process goes I am very much in the phase of ‘throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks’ and so one concept that I mention in one issue of this newsletter may be fully trunked a month later. Accordingly I’m getting careful about how I talk about those projects because I don’t want to build expectations around things that may or may not even happen. That said they are percolating. There’s some cool irons in the fire, and I have a lot of ideas that are rotating like blorbos in my head.
As always, picking a direction and just going after it has always been one of my Achilles heels. Indecisiveness and executive dysfunction is the curse of ADHD. Add Bipolar and it’s just a shitshow.
Suffice to say things are still getting done! I am doing them! Not always to my standards, but those standards aren’t always possible some days.
Moving on!
Third: On Craft
Boy it sure feels apropos to ruminate on the writing process when you’ve dropped all the balls this past month, huh? Really if I’m honest it should be as simple as musing as “You can’t get stuff done when there is no time to get stuff done” but it’s never actually that simple because if that were true, none of us would get any writing done at all, and we’ve been doing that despite infinite distractions for a very long time. What’s more accurate is that the universe is kicking me in the head with a horses hoof labeled ‘develop better time management skills.’
I am trying to listen, Universe.
I actually wish I could give more concrete advice on this, because if I could hack anyone’s brains other than mine, I’d be able to help quite a lot of people, but alas most of what I’ve got is individual solutions that have only mostly worked for me, and the answer for me has so far been ‘protect your damn writing time.’ In my case, this is even more specifically ‘Protect your damn writing time from yourself.’
I’ll try to explain.
At any given time I have about a hundred things running through my head. My ADHD is that particularly pernicious, 1000-thoughts-per-second version, and that means that boredom is one of the scariest things I can experience, and that because of that I am extremely vulnerable to any sort of stimulation that simulates that rapid brain movement bullshit. And that means that social media is my kryptonite. I have to turn it off when I’m working, or I’ll be incapable of scribbling more than a few words before rushing back to see what the internet is saying. It’s a vicious cycle, too, because being active on the socials is the currently-agreed-upon way to boost your visibility and become more Known, which theoretically leads to more people reading your books.
(I am sill not convinced that this is true)
I’ve recently downloaded an app called Freedom, which is basically just an app blocker that shuts off custom lists of apps and websites for set periods of time. I started using it to cut down on my doomscrolling before bed and first thing in the morning, and it worked so well at lowering my stress by proxy that I’ve started turning it on when I’m working. I’ve only had a few goes at it, but the early results look promising so we’ll see.
My other solution is much more simple and that’s just “designating time during the day when I am not morally allowed to do other things.” This works… okay? I don’t love it because attaching a moral weight to whether or not I am accomplishing enough hamster wheel running is a good way to start up the guilt cycle, but it does at least help me hesitate before I open Blue Sky.
We’ll see if either of these things bear out more results over the next month.
Fourth: What I’m Doing
1st: media being consumed in bullet point form.
-Watching: My Dress up Darling (Still cute!) the BTS comeback, not much else. Have I mentioned I’ve been busy?
-Playing: Age of Imprisonment (with my son), Battle for Wesnoth, not much else—see above!
-Reading: Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha oh God.
-Listening: “….”
2nd: here’s all the other stuff I’m doing.
This… was a big month for stepping out on some long-abandoned limbs. I attended SoCal Swordfight two weeks ago as of today, and did some things I haven’t done in awhile, most notably compete in steel longsword and teach outside of the PNW. It’s funny, I’ve said in the past that I’d talk about HEMA on here but I haven’t tended to much so far. Suffice to say I have long had issues with competition, both psychological and social, and one of the really nice things about SoCal was that I was able to step outside of them and just enjoy myself for the first time in a good long while. I fenced well, and I taught a class that was well-attended and of worth to the people who took it. That’s honestly all a guy can ask for.
I still have mixed feelings about tournaments, and tournament fighting, but that’s a subject for a future newsletter, and those issues are minor in the grand scheme of things.
In Conclusion, or What’s Next?
Chapter 8 of Glassblade drops on Monday, and I am into the second half of Broken Vessels, which means despite time delays and other such things I am still on track to have the book done before the first one is done releasing. As we get closer to the end of Glassblade I’ll talk more about what the structure of the series is going to look like, but for now, I’m just happy to be on track. Thanks for your patience and your continued patronage, everyone. This job is particularly lonely, sometimes. Knowing that there’s a lot of you out there reading my words is immensely heartening.
Stay healthy, stay friendly, stay curious.
~Joe