Journal

I’m trying to get my brain into gear for a return to QWC today and my brain is not terribly interested in complying.

The last month has been remarkably pleasant, possibly the longest period I’ve had off work since I actually went out and got a job with a regular pay cheque, and I find myself slightly miffed at the thought of having to go deal with other writers problems instead of my own. It will wear off once I get there. Possibly after I clear out the terrifying amount of email that has backed up over my month-long absence.

Naturally, hitting the end of the holidays mean I’ve suddenly started doing all the things that I meant to at the beginning. Yearly budget. Yearly plan. Sudden bursts of writing productivity after weeks of letting things lie fallow while I binged on a bunch of Netflix shows. I’m not quite caught up with things, but I’m closer than I expected to be this time last week.

Off to write things now so I can justify being up this early.

Everyone I know is going back to work today. I am staying at home, having taken a two extra weeks of leave this holiday season, and it feels utterly decadent to know that I’m still fifteen days away from my return to the day-job. On the other hand, the lack of regular work schedule has meant that I don’t do my grocery shopping on a regular schedule, and I am now out of coffee. It’s all swings and roundabouts in the end.

I have hit the scene on the current work in progress where it would be really useful to know what’s going on, so I’ve spent the morning writing little page-long myths and legends about the characters in the novel so their back-story is fleshed out enough to give me something to work with.

Now I shall do grocery shopping, ’cause the need for coffee is pressing.

I lose track of things when I don’t go to work. Things like what day it is, what time it is, when it was that I last ate. My sleep patterns go to hell. I’ll sit down to type an email at 10 AM and look up to discover that it’s now 4 AM the following morning and I’ve eaten nothing but cheese slices for the last nine hours.

There’s a reason I dislike taking holidays.

A lot of the advice around writing is built around habit, and habits are burnt in by particular triggers and sequences of behaviour. Most of mine are built around going to and from work, which makes the absence of work problematic.

Even worse is this: I am pretty good at avoiding the siren song of the internet when I’ve only got an hour or two to get some writing done. I am terrible at it when I’ve got an entire day to work with and no pressing reason to do things now.

Net result: December will have the lowest cumulative word-count I’ve had in over a year.

It’s been making me kinda grumpy. Increasingly so, over the past few days.

Because I am an idiot, it’s taken me eleven days to realise that I already had a sequence of habits coded in that would combat this. They just didn’t involve the computer.

So, today, I did a sensible thing that I should have done ten days back, when the time away from work kicked off – I broke out the notebook and started hand-writing again. Using perhaps the prettiest notebook in my collection of notebooks I’d been given in years past, which is an absolute pleasure to write in.

This, in turn, made it much easier to get to the part of the day where I sat down and rewrote things. Also, the laundry. And cooking dinner. ‘Cause, really, when you get one of these things right, everything else starts to click into place.

Habits are weird. And less static than you’d think.