Four days of a sore throat and runny nose. Four nights without using my CPAP machine to regulate my sleep apnea, which means I wake every day with a head full of cotton wool, exhaustion, and nascent craziness waiting to be given form. I slough around the house, coughing up phlegm. I sleep in fifteen minute bursts, before my own biology revolts and wakes me up to start consciously sucking down air again. I do not trust myself to react to anything, because all my reactions are basically insane: extreme; ill-formed; straight from the exhausted, primal Id. I cannot be trusted to engage with other people. I can barely be trusted with the written word. I was planning on starting a new project in June – a short, straight-rush project contained by thirty days, just to see if I could manage it. This is going to make things interesting.  

I have a new phone. Unfamiliar. It makes different tones to the old phone, has a range of different features. None of the notifications sound the same. Some of the notifications I had disabled have now come to life again, as the apps are downloaded, which means my attention is constantly pulled towards the device as it chirps and chimes and tings. The on-screen keyboard is different. Smaller. Harder to use. And the autocorrect still hasn’t learned my ways, so the messages I send out are frequently…weird. Riddled with typos and uncapitalised usage of the letter i as a single word. I cannot communicate in the ways I am used too, as reliably as I used too, and it is frustrating as hell. But the old phone had definitely seen better days, and it was time to make the upgrade. And for every old, familiar habit that has been frustrating, there are a whole bunch of outdated apps and habits that

I am writing a two hour workshop today. I was not meant to be writing it, exactly, but things fell out the way they fell out and now that is my Wednesday and I am frustrated as hell. I have Pulp’s This Is Hardcore on the stereo, ’cause it matches my mood. Cycling back and forth between The Fear and the title track. I wasn’t really a fan of Pulp, before this album came out in 1998, but I listened to this one over and over and over. Horns, piano, anguish. Brilliant. Pulp helps, I think, but I could be wrong. I’ve written this blog post a half-dozen times already, trying to find the angle or the spin that makes it something that I can post. Something that isn’t the equivalent of me showing up here and saying, effectively: today is hard. I am fretting about things. I have The Fear. I don’t want to be writing workshops today. I want to

It may be time to move my writing process off the computer again. I went digital again a few months back, when I was working on a redraft, and I found myself lured back into the rhythm of the keyboard and the quick accumulation of words that can be counted. And then, gradually, as things got busy and allocating my time got more complex, I started to loathe the idea of opening the laptop and the writing faded into the background. On the other hand, I also need to do dishes. And change the sheets on my bed. And wander, blinking, into the sunlight without resenting the fact that I have to go to work. These are not signs of not writing, they are signs of higher-than-usual stress levels. I let the little things go when I have no power to change to big things that need changing. I start questioning long-term plans, and making crazy alternatives. I stop reading

I am doing things on top of my usual work schedule this week. For instance, tomorrow night I am off to Logan Library to do a seminar about some of the myths about getting published. On Wednesday, I will be giving up my weekly write club in the name of working on workshop content for next week. Then, on Thursday, I will be back at QWC talking about Hard and Soft Launches as part of the Business of Books series. Spots are still available, if you’re inclined to come hear me talk about such things. By Friday, I will be disappearing into a bunker and trying very hard not to hate the world. ‘Cause I love doing this stuff, but holy shit-balls there has been a lot of it in recent weeks, there is only so much time I can spend around people before my urge to unleash the winged monkeys of death becomes overwhelming. A photo posted by Peter M Ball