2024-W23 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• The MRK Prime Cohort has a meeting this coming week and a deadline of submitting something by Wednesday. I promised at least thumbnails. Come Wednesday, nothing. Thursday, nope. It wasn’t until yesterday I wrote a hurried, exhausted, defeatist message that I don’t think I could make it. Fortunately for me, Nigel suggested we do an unlocking session instead. Positive news for the cohort is that Nigel made his first sale and Theresa her third this past week or so.
• The middle one participated in a Battle of the Bands yesterday. The only middle-school band (everyone else was in high school), and also, the only one of two bands to perform songs post-2020 (Laufey and Wasia Project). The rest of them all performed stuff from my teenage years? Nirvana, Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, Hole, Bon Jovi. It was extremely weird to see Zoomer teenagers perfectly cover these songs. We had not one, but two covers of Creep.
• Last week’s revelation that I need idle time to stew continues as I balance the weight of my new full-time contract, now two months in. I need to stop cramming every single available moment of my life with stimulus. If not reading a book, then listening to an audiobook, then pointless social media. I need empty time if I can only commit 30m of actual fiction writing time during the weekdays. I have reduced my book reading goal on Habitica further to two novels and one history per month. Furthermore, a relevant one, and not just whatever’s available on Libby.

Project Status Dashboard

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

Stuck on plot for prj: MINOS. Grr. LK helped a bit with a convo on Saturday. Olivia sent over a Reddit comment. Nigel suggested we do an Unlocking Session on Wednesday instead of me pressuring myself.

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.

• CURRENT STREAK: 0 Days
• LAST STREAK: 5 Days (June 7, 2024)
• BEST STREAK: 18 Days (May 10, 2024)

Four Thousand Weeks

I’m beat. That’s it. I don’t have anything new to say life-wise that I haven’t already. I just wrote and sent out my monthly report to the email list. And teh accumulation of what’s happened in the last three months is just a mad rush and now it’s time to readjust again. One full-time contract, one final client retainer, and this. I’ve found myself “shopping” again. I’m looking at Lego, Warlord Games, Warhammer, Reaper Bones, GMT Games, BoardgameGeek. I have zero intention of buying any of it. But it’s a brief, quick escapist fantasy to believe I have time for it. It’s the “hobbies that aren’t actually hobbies” catching up to me again. It’s on one level, this realization that I’m numbing again… that I’m no longer in panic mode, and I’m sort of getting comfortable with a new normal… but I’m also doing something incredibly difficult and those brief moments of numbing happen. Or maybe it’s just a brief break from intense focus. I hope.

One of my partners at my mental health company recently shared something with me. Burnout is when you do the same thing over and over again and you don’t get progress or results. That was certainly the case with the last client. What I do at the new place fortunately, makes an impact. And in fact, I almost feel like I have too much power and freedom and I’m afraid of rocking the boat. Maybe wielding that power is also part of the exhaustion? It is new in the sense I haven’t had it in a while and/or I had too much of it as a freelancer without accountability to too many people directly? I dunno. A job is weird.

Book Reading

• Finished BBC’s version of Hamlet (1601) with Michael Sheen. Will probably listen to again.
• Almost done P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn (2021). Pretty sure this isn’t for me. It’s lacking the layers and depths of Ring Shout (2020)… or to be more precise, it hints briefly at the layers and depths, but doesn’t actually go into the layers and depths and it’s not actually woven into the story. It’s a bit of a fantastic Indiana Jones like adventure, a noire mystery, a fun Arabian Nights setting… and it mentions the disparity, the racism, the colonialism… but it doesn’t DIG into it. And ultimately, it feels like a fun cartoony superhero comic book that’s just too light for me. On one level, it’s missing the thick theme I want. On another, there just isn’t enough emotional interior of the characters for me to care about. And when you strip away both those things, you better have a fast-pace thrilling plot like Dan Brown or Michael Crichton… and it doesn’t have that either. Maybe I’m just a miserable person who doesn’t like light-hearted adventure. I’m sure that’s it.
• Started Atonement (2001) by Ian McEwan. Olivia says it’s one of her top five novels. I’m four chapters in and I’m loving it. There is so much emotional interior and drama and these small, minor domestic conflict writ large and blown up with this beautifully dense prose. It’s weird writing this, because in my twenties, I would’ve loved everything A Master of Djinn was doing, but I guess taste-wise, I now need more subtle, nuanced emotional stories? I’m not sure that’s 100% true either. I enjoyed John Cheever and Jhumpa Lahiri stuff ten years ago, I loved my Douglas Coupland and F. Scott Fitzgerald stuff in my twenties, and I loved Michael Ondaatje and Rohinton Mistry stuff when I was a teenager. It’s more like… I dunno… I’m growing impatient with stories that don’t have character depth? I think back to July 7th last year in London and how I was starting to get sick of “nerd stuff”. I dunno.

Archive of all EOW reports here