So, picture this: It’s a new year and—for once—you’re ready to go out and kick ass. You’re ticking off daily task checklists and things are humming along. Your ambitious plans are achievable, and you’re delivering on your resolutions.
Work is good. Health is good. Life is fucking great. For the first time in a long while, you’re ahead of where you need to be.
Then things go wrong. Your spouse is sick for a week, and nobody can figure out why.
Then you figure it out—there’s water trapped in the walls of your house, growing black mould in the bedroom—so you spend a week camped out on the kitchen floor.
Then some cavities in your wisdom teeth get infected, and the surgery you’d carefully planned for next month ends up happening now now now.
Then the surgery complications arrive, and you re-enact scenes from the Exorcist that involve vomiting up blood. Which, at least, distracts you from the catastrophic political situation going on.
You’re thirty days into 2025 and so much has gone wrong. You’re on longer ahead on work. Huge chunks of your day are spent talking to insurance companies, trying to get the mould thing fixed.
You dimly remember, nine days later, that your new book went live, and you forgot to mention it to anyone.
Now imagine you look at all that, sigh, and think about how happy you are, because things are going well.
LIVING IN THE GAP VS LIVING IN THE GAIN
As you may have surmised, nothing in the above is truly hypothetical. By many standards, I’ve had a truly abysmal start to the year.
And I would probably be writing a very different email if I hadn’t read Dan Sullivan’s The Gap And The Gain in the waning days of 2024.
The core philosophy of the book is simple: there’s two ways of measuring what you’re doing with your life/business/writing.
The first is looking at your goals and measuring the gap between where you are and where you want to be.
The second is looking at where you started and measuring the gains you’ve made since the origin point.
One puts your focus on the things you’ve failed to do, while the other puts your focus on your wins.
It’s easy to look at everything I laid out in the introduction and think about the opportunities I’ve missed in January. Hell, at one point I cracked a joke about being cursed, because it felt like one damn thing after another.
But if I flip the script and look at gains:
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Brains came out and—even with no launch-week promo—has sold about 50% more copies than my new releases normally do .
- We’ve been living with a crazy mould problem for a while, which adversely affected my wife’s health, and now we’ve cleared that problem out (and we’re slowly putting the bedroom back together).
- Good financial decisions in late 2024 meant—for the first time in a while—I was fully prepared to cover a few weeks where I wasn’t able to work (which is huge when you’re a freelancer/self-employed and don’t get sick leave).
- I didn’t have time to celebrate my new book coming out but I also have Unfamiliar Shores dropping in late February because this year’s releases are set up months in advance.
Plus, the really important thing: as things calmed down, my focus on gains made it easier to get back in the swing of things.
I’m not quite kicking all my goals for the week, but new books are getting scheduled for GenrePunk Books and Brain Jar Press, my writing speed is picking up, and I’m clearing my freelance gigs to make space for new work.
Lots of terrible things happened in January 2025.
But it’s still shaping up to be a pretty good year.
If you’re struggling with the state of the world right now—and, honestly, I don’t blame you—narrowing your focus down to a handful of wins might be the right step.
Not because bad things aren’t happening, but because we live in a capilist hellscape which says you need to get things done in order to survive despite everything that’s going on.
In bad times focusing on the wins—however small—can be a survival strategy.
But Also, What We Talk About When We Talk About Brains is out
Did you catch this bit of news seeded in the above? My ‘What if Raymond Carver lived through a zombie apocalypse’ collection of short fiction, What We Talk ABout When We Talk About Brains, is now live and in the world!
Here’s what you need to know:
Vicious storms of red rain sweep across Australia, raising the dead as zombies hungry for human flesh. Fortunately, we’ve all seen zombie movies and know what comes next, allowing the locals to band togetherand live small, desolate, ordinary livesdespite the ever-present danger.
Drawing inspiration from George Romero and Raymond Carver in equal measure, Peter M. Ball presents six dirty realism tales of quiet desperation and spare, razor-sharp narration in a world overrun by the walking dead.
