Happy Caturday, Patreon Fam! This week’s cat du jour is Master Librarian Radish Loki Izzar, taking a quick nap between a heavy-duty week of chewing on books, yowling at doors, beating up our venerable elder cat, and being our household chaos gremlin.
As someone who regularly bullet journals with varying degrees of diligence, Ryder Carroll’s decision to share his yearly reflection for the first time intrigued me and set me thinking about some of my habits. The full post is long, but I’ve quoted the interesting bit below:
…writing for an audience shifts one’s context in a powerful way: you go from journaling to storytelling.
There’s a certain courtesy that an author needs to extend to their audience. A good author has to keep in mind that they’re guiding readers through an unfamiliar world. They have a responsibility to provide the tools and directions necessary to help the reader navigate it.
The question is: why does this matter, and why am I sharing my yearly reflection publicly? The main reasons are:
Communication: I hope that this peek behind the curtain of Bullet Journal creates more transparency about us as company and me as founder. I learn a lot by reading these from other small business owners, so I hope this will serve others the same way.
Sharing: It’s not often that I run across a way of journaling that really shifts my perspective as much as this new (to me) format. I found it very helpful, so I wanted to submit it for your consideration.
Future Proofing: When I journal, it’s for my current self. It’s easy to take shortcuts, leaving out information because I think I will remember…but I can’t remember what I ate for lunch two days ago. When writing for others, I fill in the blanks, and connect the dots in a way that makes the information evergreen. This matters because it will help who I will become over the next three hundred, or three thousand days, look back and clearly see how far he’s come.
I’ve been thinking about these Caturday posts since I started them a few weeks back, trying to figure out where they fit in my overall approach to writing and threads. Were they advertising for the projects I’m writing here (and, if so, why put them behind a paywall?) Are they offering enough behind-the-scenes thinking to count as a patron perk? I kept doing them, primarily, because it forces me to curate and edit the endless pictures of my cats I take every week, but I hadn’t quite figured out where the habit fit.
I’m thinking the final approach might transform my weekly log in the bullet journal into an ongoing narrative, for the reasons Carrol talks about above. There’s been hints of it here and there, in weeks prior, but logging broad themes in the current week and where my thinking is allows us all (including me) to really see what’s going on underneath. Patreon is, after all, another form of social media and I’ve written about the transformative potential of thinking about the narrative you’re building around your life in the past (See We Are All Unintentional Hypersigil Machines over on the blog).
The Bad Weeks
It’s worth acknowledging up front the tail end of January is traditionally a dreadful fortnight for me. Years of journals and blog posts bear this out, especially during years when I’ve freelanced rather than collecting a weekly paycheck.
The logic behind it is pretty simple: when you freelance, or write, or publish, there’s usually a lag between when you do something and when you see the financial results. Brain Jar Press is just now being paid for the releases that did spectacularly well back in October, and late January is the point where the financial impact of mentoring and tutoring work drying up in late December finally hits my cash flow.
January’s also a period where everyone’s back on deck and looking to start projects anew after their holiday break. End result: my bank account dwindles as I eat away at my “for the slow weeks” buffer, yet I’m pulled in a dozen directions by people for jobs and releases that won’t pay for weeks or months down the line.
Psychologically, it feels like working incredibly hard for no real tangible reward, a state that leaves me grumpy, less focused, and more reactive than I’d prefer to be. Things slip through the cracks, and writing projects which feed the ego rather than the cash flow becomes more attractive.
(Since my mum reads these posts, and worries the moment I talk about the financial difficulties of the freelance life, I’ll stress here that I’m fine. I’m not starving or unable to pay the mortgage, just adapting to a little more scarcity and a thinner buffer against things going wrong than I’d like).
The cash flow issues aren’t the only things going on, admittedly, but they wear away at my resilience, which amplifies the focus on minor stressors and eats up spoons that would otherwise be spent dealing with the big stuff.
Threads
Speaking of writing that feeds the ego, my chosen distraction for the last two weeks has been creating threads about writing and publishing. It’s been a bit of a wild ride there—for week I had some insane follower growth (a 500 person jump), and now I seem to be on a slow-and-steady grind as the algorithm switches its attention elsewhere.
There’s very little tangible benefit to doing these posts—although I sold a few writing-oriented mugs off the back of the rapid-growth week—but the intangibles are definitely the same as running a blog about writing back in the day.
Framing ideas about writing/publishing for public consumption means I’ve got a deep catalogue of stuff I can dig into while mentoring or teaching workshops, and making it public means I’m top-of-mind when folks need a writer or they’re looking for a mentor. Occasionally, work you give away for free will lead to reprints or freelance gigs.
The challenge is weighing the cost-to-benefit of spending time there. I spent thirteen hours on threads last week, and it was frequently a gateway to wasting more time on social media. Those were hours I usually spent writing, or prepping posts here on Patreon, and the lack of attention caught up with me this week.
I’m familiar with this dynamic (see Who Gets To Monetise Your Spare Minutes of Attention), and noting it here is the first step in curtailing the habit of making Threads my default activity when there’s a gap. Threads still holds some value to me because it’s new enough to still be finding readers, but I suspect there’s a better way of getting what I want from the platform without being suckered into the attention sink.
Writing
Sustained writing never really got off the ground this week. Every day where I’d set aside time for writing got blasted off-course by something unexpected and urgent, from problems with my PhD submission (now resolved) to clients having printer issues.
We’re also working on a new routine in our household. My spouse is working longer hours, and starting earlier than they did, which means our morning routine is now very different than it was two weeks ago. The hour I used to have to get some writing done before making coffee is now gone, and I counted heavily on that sixty-minute burst at the start of the day to set my intentions and connect me with the project.
Further complicating matters is the question of marketing. For the last three years, I’ve not really put much focus on my writing. The bulk of my time and marketing attention went on Brain Jar Press books, and while I put new work into the world, it was very much doing the bare minimum to retain my sanity.
2024 is a year where I’m trying to reclaim my status as a writer, rather than a publisher. This is one reason I’m putting more focus on the serials, which in turn will become full-length books down the line (easier to sell to unfamiliar readers than short stories or magazines, and generally drawing in more per sale). My newsletter is reactivated, and I’m on the socials once more. I’m trying to fit more tasks into my writing time, rather than less, and on weeks where I’m not on top of the ball I’m definitely paying the price.
To borrow a term from chefs, I’m definitely in the weeds this week. Lots of things to get done with increasingly urgent deadlines, and no firm routine to support me. I’ll be breaking out the pomodoro timer for the first few days of the week, with the goal of knocking over thirty writing pomodoros (or 15 hours) focused on pure hands-on-keyboard writing. With luck, that should get me one chapter ahead on The Shackleton Job, clear up the last bit of writing for Eclectic Projects 6, and start work on a freelance article.
Workshoppery
With February on the horizon, I’ll be resuming my fortnightly workshops for the folks at Spectrum Writing. We’re kicking off with a request this year–a 90 minute workshop focused on the “Ordinary World/Status Quo” section of the three-act structure and how to build in conflict before the real conflict of the story kicks off.
I’m scheduled to deliver 20 of these workshops accross the year, and did a similar number last year, so there’s quite a suite of topics I’ve built up. I’ve been debating whether to run them for folks outside the Spectrum cohort, either as a paid Patreon tier or a subject folks can order from my site. The infrastructure is largely there, and it would generate recordings folks could revisit, but I can’t decide whether the time-to-return ratio is going to work out.
I suspect I’ll need to think up an Ooch to gather the data I need to make a firmer decision, but if there’s general interest semi-regular workshops, shout out in the comments.
COMING UP NEXT WEEK
I’m still badgering away at my goal of getting this Patreon to “fully operational Death Star” status by the end of March, but we’re on the verge of returning to the three-posts-a-week structure with new stories on Monday and serial entries appearing on Wednesday and Friday.
Ideally, I’d like to have at least one more project on the boil, but I’ve got to be at least a month ahead on all the projects before I allow myself to add a new thread.
This week still has two posts scheduled to go live:
Wednesday – Bif, Bam, Kapow (Shackleton Job 9)
We jump from the islands of the Pacific to the streets of San Diego when Talulah and Doc hit up a comic book store searching for the seer, Jack Glastonbury. They’re searching for answers to a few important questions, but Glastonbury is not a simple man to pin down..and the comic book store is not what it seems.
Friday – Laneway Pastural (Warhol Sleeping 8)
Babylon’s recruiter, Pandora Wylde, makes her pitch to the human half of the Warhol-Sleeping gestalt. They head to Happy Pastures Lane, a Babylon project that just might be the most serene public place in Helix City, and offers a vision of what art could be if he parts ways with Jude and Big River.