2024-W13 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• Wrote and delivered first draft of prj: SAVED to the MRK SSC for a Wednesday night critique session.
• Drained from back-to-back hustling for replacement client(s) this week. Fifteen calls.
• Delivered a lot of client work on Friday in a deep work session at Starbucks. Felt good.

Project Status Dashboard

The following are ongoing fiction writing projects broken down to what stage they’re in. Legend in footnote¹.

MRK SSC critique session on Wednesday night. Was slightly discouraged, but encouraged at the same time. I used Kij Johnson’s Ponies to write prj: SAVED. It… mostly worked. The discouragement comes from the fact that even though I’m “cheating”, or more positively, using every trick in the book to get to a complete story here… I’m still not there. The flipside to that is, I am almost there. So taking THBs and “swiping” their structure to practice the craft is a VERY GOOD THING. I just need to do it more. A lot more.

And I need to accept that I am a long way from being anywhere near competent at storytelling, much less “good”. All the clever tricks, easter eggs, references that I like in stories won’t save me here. All the metaphors, symbolism, allegories, beautiful bits of prose won’t save me here. All the fun analogues to our real world… everything I’ve just mentioned are all what I guess is called “voice”. And “voice” is ultimately, unfortunately, NOT STORYTELLING.

Actual storytelling, the craft of it, is the ability to string together a beginning, middle, and satisfying end that delivers on what you set up in the beginning. I know this now to be the foundation of the craft. Everything else is magic tricks, fun lighting, cleverness, special effects, and lazers. And none of it matters unless I can actually craft a beginning, middle, and end that works.

EOW Time Tracking

The following is based on logged productive hours using Timeular. Parameters and definitions in footnote².

In Summary:

• F = 6% (still low and not back in rhythm. Need to stop the income bleed)
• X = 23% (Even the studying was low. This is double-digits only b/c of critique sesh on Wed)
• C = 34% (Actually delivering on consulting, writing, and review for potential clients)
• P = 37% (I had fifteen calls with leads this week. I am beat up.)

Four Thousand Weeks

I am exhausted because of the grind of the hustle. Fifteen calls with leads. Each one a new relationship or an old one that I haven’t connected with in years, some a decade even. There are tons of opportunities. Valuating what projects work or don’t work is a skillset I haven’t paid much attention to in a while. I also flippantly forwarded something to M^x. The fact that M^x took the time to respond shows me just how much integrity he has. He said X a decade ago. He meant it. Of course, any encounter with M^x means holding a mirror up to myself again… and what I see from the past five years has been ugly. Going dark in both meanings. Bottled up anger, sadness, resentment, frustration, fear, lashing out, relying on baseline defense mechanisms and just coming off as a smarmy smug smirky asshole. The situation I had earlier this year via Discord really points to how ugly it is that I present myself the way I do. Long conversations with wife about the last fifteen years and the mask I’ve worn for business, and how that mask could be a factor for success, but now I’m questioning it. All of it. Who do I want to be and how do I want to present myself. In some ways, a part of me is doing this with the purpose of ensuring I can operate and navigate becoming an author and all that entails in this world. And I don’t know if having that “usefulness function” is part of the old me. As in – should I be “good” just for being good’s sake… (which ideally, is what shows genuine, grounded character), or am I so old and broken and carrying so much baggage (including my family history as M^x asked me to review my aunt’s notes from their time in Vietnam) that I need to be incentivized in order to change and transform? As in, if intent matters, does wanting a hugely positive side effect dirties up the intent and therefore doesn’t create a clean transition?

I don’t know. I know that doing this (the act of actually pursuing the craft of fiction), and filtering all my decisions, behavior, and actions is facing some of the darkest recesses of who I am. I feel like I’ve been dismantling so much of what I’ve protected as my “identity” and there is so much more to do. I know that “doing the work” with M^x again is going to accelerate that, but there’s a bit of dread, because it will be difficult. It will be a fight against myself. I will come up with clever tricks to dissemble this “identity”, this shell I keep protecting and using. The shields. But every week that I write these and track my weeks left, I see a timer running out.

Book Reading

• At 88% of The End of the World Is Just Beginning. Feel like I need to buy a physical copy to reread because this book is important. I want to review each and every argument again.
• Finish Timeline by Michael Crichton. Comments here
• Making gains on Pride and Prejudice again. It is heavy. The dense, labyrinthine prose describing the thoughts/feelings a character has towards another requires focus and concentration to unravel what they actually think about said person. It is enjoyable though. It’s like reading TMZ gossip but in pretty prose that’s delivered to you in a word puzzle.

Archive of all EOW reports here