Peter M. Ball

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. 

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’m not going to lie: I feel pretty beat up at the moment.

One of the short-term issues with the BWF job is simple: I didn’t expect to get it. Which meant I spent the week prior to starting the job soliciting a metric ton of freelance work to cover the rent once my small business grant ran out (which happens today). And my partner is still two weeks away from picking up the admin side of Brain Jar, which means I’m getting up to speed on an insanely busy full time + doing twenty hours a week of freelancing + maintaining a publishing company + trying to fit personal writing projects around the edges.

And, because I’m a masochist, I’ve thrown in an hour of walking home in the spring heat every day, because running events requires cardio, and after two years of working from the couch mine is pretty negligible.

I tried a little experiment with the first half of my week, forgoing the morning writing shift before work under the theory that sleeping in and getting home a little fresher would mean I could get work done before I keeled over in an exhausted heap at 9:00 PM every night. It had the advantage of giving me a workspace with internet, with is great for the freelancing and publishing gigs, but terrible for writing.

Sound in theory, terrible in practice. By the time I got home, did chores, and ate dinner, there weren’t many spoons left for writing or freelancing/Brain Jar work. Some work got done, but far less than when I started the day in a café, getting some words down, and I’m still dropping balls that shouldn’t be dropped.

So I’m back to the pre-work routine, working my way down the pyramid of priorities, getting as much done as I can in the hour and a half before work begins. Truth is, my day works better when work is the middle layer of the obligation sandwich, rather than the foundation.

The big challenge of this week is reminding myself that OCTOBER IS AN ABBERATION. A confluence of mis-matched expectations collided and created far more work than the norm, and I’ve got about three weeks of clearing the decks before I get a sense of what my routine needs to be going forward.

On the plus side, one freelance project is almost clear. Another two are heading towards their end-point. One their done, I’m closing the doors to everyone except a handful of legacy clients, because it’s pretty clear this is at least one major set of commitments too many.

Which is actually one of the upsides of declaring this an exploratory period, specifically set aside for testing approaches and trying new routines: every failure is actually a success, because it’s one more piece of data that informs the new normal I’m working towards.