GenrePunk Ninja

I upgraded the calendar tracking yesterday afternoon, after deciding that maybe stickers would make a difference. And, let me say, it probably did: I didn’t quite earn a two jewel sticker for hitting 1,500 words yesterday, but I definitely did way more than the 750 words I intended to write (and ended up pulling double duty on the Patreon/Socials column as well).

Of course, weekends are good for doing slightly more work. The challenge is meeting that same push to do more during the week. I had a very fuck-around-and-not-really-focused morning because we stayed up late Sunday night, and still jammed out my words for the day (which also involved some redrafting and cutting of yesterday’s work, so it’s more productive than it looks).

I’m pondering the success of the calendar today, and why it seems to work a little better for me than the Don’t Break The Chain/Seinfeld method. In a lot of ways, this shares a lot of the psychological tricks that make Don’t Break The Chain motivating — I hate the idea of seeing blank space on the calender, and start my day with the goal of filling it.  

But Don’t Break The Chain comes with one major flaw: the moment you break it, the psychological reward of building the chain is lost. A bad day can quickly turn into two or three. 

There’s an interesting take on habit building in James Clear’s Atomic Habits where he argues every habit is connected to self-image and identity. You put forth an identity you want — I’m a writer — and  stack up evidence to support that through your ritualised and habitual actions. But that can be a double-edged sword, as those actions and habits also tell you what you’re not. 

For something like Brain The Chain, you live on the edge of the sword. While the chain goes up, you’re a writer. When you break it, you not just failed to write, but you’ve shattered your postiive self-image and welcomed in all your worst fears about yourself (this is, perhaps, not something people without anxiety manage, but I’ve encountered enough writers with anxiety issues that  wonder if anxiety and the desire to write a comorbid conditions).

The thing about not breaking a chain or buidling a writing streak is that they’re bets you make with yourself, and they’re at their most useful when you’re on a winning streak. Your identity is, in essence, pass/fail.

And every writer is going to fail, somewhere along the line. They’ll get sick, or their car will break down, or the story will be frustratingly awful. Something will always break the chain, and if you’re lucky it’ll happen several hundred days in when it doesn’t feel like a big thing.

Most folks won’t get lucky. 

The calendar isn’t one big bet, but a series of small ones. Breaking the chain doesn’t matter because the goal isn’t buidling a chain, it’s celebrating the small victories that slowly add up to a finished project, and down the line a fully-fledged writing career. It has the capacity to celebrate different milestones and markers — right now I’ve got stickers for 750 words, but also finishing a draft and submitting/publishing a book and launching a new Brain Jar Project. 

It is, in effect, a cumulative build rather than a pass-fail line. 

And right now, that works for me. I get to celebrate those victories that confirm, yes, this is who I want to be, without the looming threat of failure. It’s a visual record and celebration of the parts of myself it would be all to easy to let slide amid the chaos of the new job (and, it must be said, the relative security of having a steady paycheque instead of living and dying by the release of new books).

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta go put a gold star on my calendar.

I got my second COVID jab back on Friday morning, and for the first twelve hours afterwards I thought I’d gotten away without major side-effects. I swallowed some aspirin and went back to work, felt good enough to hike home after my day was over. It tuckered me out a little, but only a very little.

“This is not so bad,” I thought. “Much easier than jab one.”

I went to bed early, with big plans for the weekend…and promptly woke up with a high fever at two AM, unable to get back to sleep because everything fucking hurt. Headache, arm, every joint in my body. The whole damn enchilada.

Plans for my weekend were revised, and all expectations curtailed. My partner and I figured we’d take things easy, order breakfast in. I wasn’t in any state to make something myself, and my partner was getting antsy about their second jab on Saturday, given how rough I felt.

Our breakfast arrived and we chowed down, and had immediate regrets. Nothing tasted good, and one thing in particular tasted a little…off.

Which is how the food poisoning began, derailing the handful of plans we’d left in place including my partner’s second shot. They were throwing up. I was trying to hold food down because we only had one bathroom. Everybody was miserable, and the weekend was a wash. We curled up in bed, slipped in and out of consciousness, and chowed down on crackers and lots of water until Sunday night.

The only upside was that the freelance job I was trying to clear off the table over the weekend ended up stalling because the client wasn’t getting back to me with feedback, so the illness didn’t put me anymore behind than I would have been anyway.

All of which has got me thinking about the fragility of processes at the moment, because I was struggling to keep up with all my commitments before I lost a weekend, and getting sick over the two days I can use to “catch up” really threw me off. I’ve dropped a few balls on the writing and publishing front, and the act of writing gets harder to pick up again because the looming weight of undone projects starts every writing stint from a place of dread and pressure to get things done.

I promised myself I wouldn’t start making any serious cuts or reshaping of projects until we hit the “new normal” of December. Last week was the tail end of the truly bad period – overloaded with freelancing projects and deadlines while bedding in the new job – and this week sees my partner and I figuring out a new morning routine for the third time in as many weeks.

Fortunately, things start to settle from here. My partner is wrapping their head around no longer going into the office, and focusing on a big spring-clean of the flat now they’re home full time. Come November, we start on the Brain Jar learning curve, giving them capacity to pick up jobs that currently get done in the spare moments of my evening. And, with luck, my freelance work will be fully set-aside by November 30, leaving me wearing two and a half hats (writer, program manager, brain jar press) rather than four rather large ones.

That will help, I think. If not…well, there’s some really hard choices to be made about what projects to keep and what to set aside.

Until then, I’m pondering options: is it time to write by hand again, just until we get to the festival in May and things start to settle down? Time to do NaNoWriMo, just to push myself to cleave to a process and schedule for a stretch? Time to concede that I’ve made a horrible mistake with this job, and the perks like “being ahead of the mortgage” and “allowing my chronically ill partner to step away from work and heal for a stretch” come with trade-offs I’m really unhappy with?

There’s no easy answers to any of those questions, and my current answer is unlikely to match my answer a few hours later (I was seriously down on the job on Monday night, less so by Tuesday evening; and my answer on NaNoWriMo switches every fifteen minutes).

And in truth, all of them are trying to answer the same question in their own way: how do I rebuild and keep some resilience, instead of rendering my workflow fragile and prone to breaking when I’ve had a bad day at work or launch into a story that doesn’t quite land right. 

I’ve mentioned there were a few big projects I needed to clear off the deck in October a few times now, and I’m pleased to report that one of the biggest is now over (and went swimmingly). On Sunday, Sarah and I snuck off with a couple of witnesses to make our partnership official, signing all the paperwork to become spouses at approximately 2:30 PM.

It was—intentionally—a very low-key affair. I’ve long been of the opinion that there is nothing like planning a wedding together to figure out if you’re really on the same page as your partner, and you learn a lot about your long-term capability and values.

Fortunately, Sarah and I were on the same page about pretty much everything: we were both more interested in being married than the ceremony itself, and we wanted to strip away as much of the bullshit (particularly the patriarchal bullshit) that surrounds weddings as possible. Our celebrant worked with us to boil the ceremony down to the bare necessities required to be legally married, and we only told the bare minimum of friends required to make things official and help us get ready.

At the same time, it’s amazing how much mental real-estate even low key wedding with only three people in attendance will take up in your week. Our celebrant was fantastic at figuring out what we wanted—and at accepting that certain decisions would be made on the fly—but gently asked questions that allowed her to pull off certain surprises like the sign out front and the very spooky booklet containing our vows. She even pulled off a brave-as-heck gamer joke halfway through the ceremony, despite not really knowing the context, simply because she’s picked up that everyone in our ceremony were folks who were gaming with Sarah and I when we first started dating.

And, now that it’s done and the new week begins…I started slotting into a new routine with considerable ease. Getting up at six to write for two hours before I head to work, leaning into the pen-and-paper notebook approach to prevent myself from doing Brain Jar Work instead; sneaking in a quick, forty-minute burst of Patreon writing at the cafe before heading into work; writing myself a list of Brain Jar stuff to do in the evenings.

We still have a month of disruption ahead of us — a huge part of November will be getting Sarah up to speed on Brain Jar’s systems and goals — but I’m feeling a lot more confident that the new normal is going to settle sooner rather than later.