Peter M. Ball

Now that I’m posting to my blog regularly, there are regular notices that come through my blogging platform that track my daily posting streak. My notice on October 2:

You’ve posted 11 days in a row on Peter M. Ball! Keep up the good work.

It’s a simple gamification trick, but damn me, it works. Blogging is important enough to me that I want to do it, and there’s been at least one day in the last week where I dragged myself to the computer late in the day just to keep the streak alive and see high I can get the number.

Google “The Seinfeld Method” and you’ll see the idea of streaks as a productivity hack everywhere. I’ve used it before to keep me focused on writing, and I’ve just fired off a fresh streak tracker to ensure I write every day (an unnecessary practice for me when I’m at my best, but useful for me when managing disrupted routines and uncertain periods).

But there’s an interesting thing about gamification: it’s at its most pleasurable when it’s optional, reinforces an identity the user already wants, and ultimately has the most effect in the short term. When carried long term and robbed of its voluntary status, it can quickly become a source of irritation rather than motivation.

Further Reading

• Pew Research: Getting In Gamification – Main Findings 
• Lifehacker: Jerry Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret 

I’ve spent a few days talking stress, so I should note at least I have moved one major stressor off my plate: toddled off to my first vaccination appointment this morning, with my partner off to get theirs in about twenty-four hours.

I seem to be one of the folks showing side-effects after the first jab, with my joints doing a low-key ache and my neck doing a not-so-low-key hurt. Both incredibly preferable to Covid, though, and I’m off to take a panadol and lie down for the afternoon. 

In place of a real post, here’s a little glimpse at a novella in progress, where even my attempts to write secondary-world D&D-esque fantasy show signs of venting my spleen at certain members of our society who are proving to be remarkably pigheaded.

It had been three days since the caravan from Ironhall had failed to arrive at Zalanka, and the town was rife with theories about why they’d been delayed. Half the marketplace buzzed with rumour the dwarves had been caught by the Nine Red Feathers, shot with arrows and left for dead while the bandits retreated into the depths of the Orkessa Forest. Others theorised they had struck a deal in secret, that the dwarves had pledged allegiance Baroness d’Ettiene after years of dealing with the Marquis of Zalanka, and the town’s supply of ore and dwarf-forged blades were already heading West. A scattered few—the foolish and the deeply stupid, if you asked Kai—proposed a theory that the greed of the dwarves had gotten the best of them, and the guards tasked with transporting the caravan had abandoned their people and absconded with their supplies.

The loudest proponent of the latter theory had been a blacksmith propping up the end of the bar in The Last Bear, just beside the Red Gate. A hulking monster of a man, shoulders chorded with muscle and a chin shaved scrupulously clean, his thinning pate covered in wispy, straw-coloured hair that would soon recede for good. The man was several flagons of ale over the edge, and had Kai not been almost as drunk, they might have avoided an incident.

Alas, that was not the case, and Kai had taken offense at the blacksmith’s belligerent theories and expressed his displeasure with a punch to the mouth.

The negative effects of stress are magnified by a lack of self-efficacy and control. The more you feel like you’re unable to shift the needle in a stressful situation, the faster you inch towards stress induced burn-out.

We often advise new writers to focus on the things you can control. You can’t control whether publishers buy your work, or how many people end up reading your book, but you do have control over how much you write, what sort of stories you tell, how you revise, and how you build up parts of your author platform. You have control over how you respond to setbacks and what ideas you put into the world.

The hardest part is learning to let go of your ambitions, all the big picture hopes and dreams, and narrow your focus on what needs to happen today in order to progress your career forward. Writing 500 words never feels as exciting as releasing a book or getting great reviews, but those small, incremental gains in word count are the minor cogs that keep your entire career running.

Ironically, I’m currently feeling stressed out and more out-of-control than usual. Partially it’s the pandemic, partially it’s searching for a new day job, and partially it’s a bunch of personal stuff that makes life complicated. There’s very little control, a whole lot of stress, and lots of big-picture ambition with no day-to-day steps to focus on.

It’s time to take a lesson from my writing career and bring my focus down. What small, elementary things do I need to achieve that will have the greatest impact further down the line?