2024-W18 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• OK. Okay. O.K., the waking up and doing “fiction anything” for thirty minutes is working. It’s not moving as fast as my “dream state”, but it certainly is moving faster than reality. It’s especially interesting when I reflect on how Burkeman talks about this in Four Thousand Weeks, where reality will always be imperfect, throw up obstacles, and will not be like what you thought it would be in daydream land. Progress, then, is realizing daydreams are illusions. They serve the purpose of letting you fantasize and desire, but reality wil always be scrappy, scarred, and some other s-word to indicate imperfection.
• Olivia and I have officially re-launched the Garage Fiction Podcast. I unfortunately spent six hours last night editing the one minute trailer. It was a lot of time. But it’s up! The goal is to keep our episodes at around 15 minutes, I take the Zoom recording to upload it into Patreon, it gets fed into Spotify. In other marketing news, I sent out my first monthly update to the ConvertKit list.
• The Prime Cohort (a named bestowed upon the short story cohort by MRK) met up for our first workshop in the post-MRK world. It went well. I submitted a second draft of prj: SAVED.

Project Status Dashboard

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

This week was me reviewing all the feedback I got for prj: MINOS from a MRK Prime Cohort workshop back in early March. I also built the world a little more. I still have a lot of load bearing elements I need to figure out. That’s my focus for this week. Unless I go back to prj: SAVED. Because getting that third draft done would be sweet. Then I’ll have something that’s complete-ish ready for submission. Of course, it will need one last review from MRK as well. OK. Maybe 4th draft is when it’s ready.

EOW Time Tracking

In this section, I track daily actions (axn) and emotions (emo), aiming for just 30 minutes of fiction work a day. If time permits, more is done. AXN emoji legend in footnote².

STREAK COUNT: 12 Days

Four Thousand Weeks

The month of April is locked in. I’ve been at my new job for three weeks now. Here’s the thing (and I don’t know if this is “good” or “bad”), but… with a full-time job, something I haven’t experienced in fifteen years, I’ve found the CONSTRAINTS of a Monday to Friday schedule a lot more freeing if I’m pursuing fiction as well. When I was a freelancer, I would always do the 4000 Week thing where it’s like “I can fit it in, because nobody makes my schedule”… but ultimately, didn’t do anything. Because I would always invariably end up hustling more clients, chasing more projects, increasing my income, and procrastinating so damn much because “I was my own boss”. But now I’m back to, “I’m responsible for 45 hours of work Mondays to Fridays” and… it’s done. I know, I know, I’m still in the honeymoon phase of this newness… but I also feel like this is the better structure to getting a difficult hobby like fiction going. Or maybe all this is happening because of Four Thousand Weeks and I would’ve made it work freelance or fulltime. And/or maybe it’s me turning 40 during the pandemic. I mean… that’s the messy cause-and-effect of history isn’t it? For all we know, what I’ve been typing for the last few minutes is just the prefrontal cortex justifying shit. Who knows? Point is – I’m in a better rhythm now. It’s the best rhythm I’ve been in since attempting this back in 2006-2007 and 2015-2017. By the way, I found this old FB post. Kinda embarassing. If I did the math, that would’ve put that post at 2,636 weeks left, which is 890 weeks ago. Time is weird.

Book Reading

• Finished P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout (2020). It was very good. Comments here. Also wrapped up The Great Courses: The Age Of Henry VIII (2003). It was very enjoyable. I wished I had gotten into The Great Courses back in the early 2000s when I became aware of them. Oh wait. They charged over $150 for courses I wanted when I didn’t have any money. Nevermind.
• Still at Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Never Let Me Go (2005). Started 1776 (2005) on Libby.
• Flip-flopping between starting a third novel or not. Either The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) or The Underground Railroad (2016). I mean, I really shouldn’t and up my history game. Ruth Goodman’s How to Be a Tudor (2016) has been camped out on my nightstand for months now and if I’m serious about getting into the historical fiction game, I really should build my foundation of daily life stuff now. Oh fuck you, Jinn, for writing out things, it always forces you to process thoughts and come to sensible decisions.

Archive of all EOW reports here