There are days when the internet feeds you an interesting series of posts, comments, and articles that all seem to weave together in interesting ways. For example, this quartet of things have all showed up on my radar within a twenty-four hour period:
- Charlotte Nash’a comments about the limits of time on Tuesday’s post about bad systems and newsletters, which I read a few hours before…
- Kameron Hurley’s Locus essay about burnout, the expectation of productivity, and the reluctance to say “do less” in our culture at the moment.
- This post by Daphne Huff about writing a novel when you have zero time due to running a family, a full-time job, and a podcast (which seems like madness when read alongside everything else, but the final section about focusing on one aspect of craft/publishing at a time in the final section orients it with in this list).
- And this highly interesting twitter rant by @GravisLizard about the way we react to the phrase $100 shoes as if it’s a Gold Plated Toilet, rather than a sign that our understanding of money, value, and cost is fucked up and set to the standards of an 1980s economy, and the implications of that in terms of fixing larger problems.
I’m intrigued by this because the indie publishing world is hyperfocused on hustle at the moment, with a lot of people getting very vocal about the success they’ve had through producing fast and launching content regularly.
It’s undeniably a useful tactic–I’ve seen my own modest gains when Brain Jar releases things on a month-by-month basis, even if they’re just short stories–but I’m also conscious of the skewed landscape I’m working within. One in which definitions of success either sync with default capitalism (I have hustled and come out the end with $$$$) or are predicated on publishing expectations set by the industry as it was several decades ago.
On occasion, when you feel guilty about charging money for your art, possibly even definitions of success predicated on the industry as it was centuries ago, before capitalism had a name and the internet made everything more complex.
Sometimes it pays to take a breath and re-align your expectations with the world and capacities you’ve got right now.
