Journal

I woke several times over the weekend and went to work on my thesis prospectus in the wee hours of the morning. Solutions to problems kept coming to me as I dozed off, found their way into the work in progress because I didn’t trust myself to remember them later. Going to bed at 11 PM quickly turned into working until 5 AM, then sleeping until later in the day.

It was great. Incredibly great. It’s been nearly a decade since I worked those kind of hours. It happened all the time before I started working in offices, but the demands of being somewhere at a certain hour meant adapting to other people’s patterns. Getting up early has become such a habit that I’ve organised much of my life around it.

I meet a friend for breakfast once a week, at an hour based on the fact I used to rise at 6 AM without fail. I have a certain degree of flexibility over when I go to the office and work on GenreCon, or agree to meet with my thesis supervisor, which would theoretically make it possible to start later in the day, yet I still default to starting at 9 where possible.

But for the first time in years, I can look at the fact that I prefer to work in the quiet hours of the morning and sleep late and see it as semi-regular possibility.

Three years ago I bought an apartment and began the process of moving in. I remember thinking, at the time, that I should probably stop buying new books because the ones I had already didn’t actually fit in my one-bedroom apartment with its outright rejection of right angles.

Obviously, I failed at that. It’s not really a surprise. I’d made a similar promise when I moved into my previous place, crashing in a friend’s spare room for a few years, and the bulk of my book collection went into storage. That promise resulted in nearly thirty boxes of books getting moved when I left.

Part of me resents the fact that I don’t get to move any more. I’m used to living like a hermit crab, always searching out a new shell when the one I’m in starts to feel restrictive. In another world, where I stuck with renting, I’d be spending the next month searching for an apartment on the far side of town that’s more convenient for getting to university.

Part of me watches friends moving out of their rental, quite unwillingly, and admits that I’m kind of fond of having a place that’s mine and will stay mine until I decide otherwise or I fail to pay the mortgage (which, quiet honestly, is so much goddamn cheaper than any rent I’ve ever paid).

So I stay. Quietly figuring out new places where books can be stored, or what can be thrown out in order to make more room.

And occasionally, just to keep myself focused, I sit down and figure out how many words I’d need to write and sell in order to pay this place off. Not that I’m relying on writing alone to do it, but writing is how I measure everything.

Current status: 2,984,186 words to go.

I really should get back to work.

Tomorrow I’ve cancelled my usual Wednesday plans and set aside some quality time to tidy my flat, revisit my quarterly plan, and generally wind the key on all the systems I rely upon to keep my life running. There will probably be white boards. There will definitely be laundry.

I’m not a natural born planner. In fact, I kinda loathe the process. I’m totally on the pantser side of things, when it comes to writing, and I will generally defer any kind of collaborative planning to the other person as much as they’ll let me. I dislike making decisions, and I dislike being responsible for things.

Worse, I resent time given over to planning. It always feels like wasted time that could be spent doing other, more useful things. It doesn’t matter that planning always saves me time, ’cause I get bogged down in fewer dead ends and panic spirals and I-don’t-know-what-to-do-next apathy…

My gut tells me that planning is a waste of time right up there with reading the instruction manual for a new DVD player, but my head knows that reading the manual saves all sorts of time once you have to do anything more complex than pressing play. I am doing complex things at the moment. I acknowledge the necessity of planning, and make time to do it.

And then I will go see Kong: Skull Island. Because, you know, giant apes and Tom Hiddleston with a machine gun.