Anti-Goal Cycling

It’s been a week since my friend Ashley Janssen wrote about why traditional goal setting doesn’t work, which referenced Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s article on the Paradox of Goals. Given what has occurred this year with my fiction, and in parallel, what has happened with PHC the last three years, I can’t help but think that both ventures have been approached in what is essentially, the wrong way. Now, of course, what PHC went through was mired in problems that were wildly out of our control, fighting against gargantuan Cthulhu forces, and on top of that, a streak of incredibly bad luck, unreliable partners/vendors, and freak occurrences. So maybe tying my frustrating year in writing fiction with PHC is a terrible and no good, bad idea. And as per my last journal entry, there’s really no reason to write about my life outside of fiction in this journal. I suppose all this (this paragraph), is basically the equivalent of throat-clearing for my journaling on what I actually want to write about. Right. Let’s get back to goal setting.

So as Ashley wrote, the problem with goal setting is that oftentimes the whole concept of time-based, measurable results is that final mile, that last leg, it’s often completely out of our control. And yet, here we are feeling — both good and bad, both self-rewarding and self-berating ourselves — for meeting (or not meeting) these goals. It also creates a linearity and ultimate end… which, for a craft like fiction, becomes counterintuitively, destructive. We shouldn’t be aiming to write x amount of words, x number of novels, win x awards. The storyteller should pour all their energy into simply being the best storyteller they can possibly be. That’s it. You write a string of stories until the day you die.

Every attempt I’ve had at setting goals and trying to reach them has ultimately failed this year. Yes, a large part had to do with me simply stuck and insecure about my theoretical knowledge. A lot of it had to do with me fighting myself and dealing with the January Incident as well. But also, let’s be somewhat fair to myself here. The third leg of this stool is the fact that I lost a retainer in March, found a new one in April, but it was full-time, and I was carrying a second client and ultimately… left very little time to do much of anything. Which is something I want to address here as well.

Fact is — when I started building out my “Order of Operations” as I do near the end of each year for the next, I couldn’t stop thinking about how, despite “killing all hobbies” and “hobbies that aren’t really hobbies”, there were still several dilly-dalliances in my head, this never-ending temptation to ESCAPE into these possible worlds, these fountains of potentiality, these vast, unexplored lands of “what ifs”. The Seven of Cups. An illusory mirage of quantum realities. The multiverse. It wasn’t until I truly thought about what else I could kill for 2025 to open up more efficiencies to focus even harder on fiction that I realized… this problem I have, this addiction to possibilities, this escapism… it’s an addiction.

Let’s see what else I toyed with this past twelve months, what I was tempted to START despite already being starved for time, energy, and bandwidth. I thought about starting a solo-RPG and read Ironsworn. I thought I could start an asynchronous RPG with LJK and Olivia, and two others from the MRK cohort. I thought about writing a fucking album when I was given last minute tickets to see Tim Minchin from AJM. Because I picked up the skill of layout with Client B, I told Ogrebeef, let’s start a monthly RPG Patreon thing. Because I got back heavily into comics, I kept thinking, let’s write a blog to monetize this hobby. I even looked up “panelbreaking.com”, which is available btw, tyvm. Whoever takes it, you owe me. And there were even times where Beau almost got me to play war games again. It wasn’t until a long confessional to my wife that I finally, finally, deleted all my GMT preorders. I mean, fuck, I still have a stream of Kickstarters coming in, and they all go straight to the shelf. All of them. I haven’t read a single one of them. I even ordered Lancer the moment I saw it was available on Amazon because it was so damn hard to get previously.

These temptations are problematic in that it just diverts my attention, it’s not fulfilling, and in fact, it adds to the resentment I have with work.

So going back to the “Order of Operations” I wrote i/r/t 2025. I started writing about two things in particular. One, how I’m going to start using anti-goal cycling instead of hard goals with clear deadlines. (It’s basically Le Cunff’s “Growth Loops”, but I wanted something more sci-fiey and less woo-woo self-help). Second, I laid out all the warning signs I’ve found with this past year. Let’s start with the warning signs I wrote myself.

2012-2024 BAD BEHAVIOR WARNING SIGNS (ADDICTION TO ESCAPING)

You want to escape because you feel a lack-of-control. You feel lack of control because you’re not where you thought you’d be at this age in life, or you’re overburdened with work, or doing work you resent, or feeling like you’re running out of time, or you feel trapped. When you feel this lack-of-control, you do things to regain what modicum of control you can. This expresses into bad behavior as per the list below.

You broadcast and show off to reassure yourself that your identity isn’t tied to the soulless work you do, that you’re unique and special and human. You track vanity metrics because you want to feel accomplished outside of work, but it’s just as empty and pointless. Consuming art the way you do it is not healthy. You hoard research and information because you believe you’ll come back to it at a future state, when you’ll “have more time”. You’re addicted to and constantly tempted to “start new things” like adjacent projects, monetizable ideas, new hobbies because starting new things gives you a rush of energy, it creates a world of possibilities, you get an adrenaline rush of hunting, chasing, collecting, learning, applying your work skills to - again - something that’s NOT your work. None of these activities give you a fulfilling sense of where you want to be, WHO you want to be, HOW you define your life.

  1. BROADCASTING - Showing Off (being clever, funny, trollish on social media & discord servers)
  2. MONETIZING - Temptation to start another Blog, Newsletter, or “Creator-Project”
  3. ADJACENCIES - Starting partnerships for fiction-adjacent projects (Ogrebeef, Garage Fiction, TTRPGs)
  4. NUMBING - Shopping for Things to Numb lack of control with Overwork (RPGs, Board Games & War Games)
  5. HOARDING - Tracking Vanity Metrics (books, films, subs) and Hoarding Information (archiving old messages)

ANTI-GOAL CYCLING AND EOW JOURNALING SECTIONS FOR MOVING FORWARD

OK, so the reason I wanted to talk about the negative stuff first is because it informs and directs the “anti-goal cycling” initiative. The “anti-goal” here is a cyclical one: become a storyteller because you want to become a storyteller. Be a storyteller because you want to be a storyteller. I guess it could be more clear with this line:

Experiment & Iterate on Stories because you want to Become a Better Storyteller. That’s it. There’s no word count I’m committed to. There’s no number of stories I want to have written and finished and published by the end of the year. There’s no grandiose dreams of writing a bestselling novel. It’s simply: Do The Work. It’s about getting through as many cycles as possible until I’m dead. The more cycles I can get through, the better storyteller I’ll be. For what purpose? To become a better storyteller. That’s it. There’s no financial award, no aggrandizement, no recognition. It’s simply the craft.

What are some of those cycles though? I’ve broken it down into three things that just need to happen:

That’s it. I’m just going to put the work in. Half an hour each day. Improve with dissection and introspection on short stories and comic books. And feed my brain to become a history nerd because that’s the hobby I keep gravitating towards and not taking seriously. Because I get distracted. Because I’m addicted to easy escapes. Because I pick up my phone every few minutes to check on useless things. Because I go into my daydreams and ask “what if” and plan another venture.

So no. Next year is going to be killing off that part of me as well.

I/R/T the journaling, I’m going to kill two sections as well. The comic book tracking. That is taking up an inordinate amount of time. I don’t know why I felt compelled to track every writer and title (but guiltily enough, not artists) by tagging them in every journal entry. I am simply going to paste the media I’ve consumed on one giant ass EOY post. Smart people can find it on GitHub. Everyone else will have to wait until December 31st to see the whole list. But I do NOT need to be compulsively tracking, tagging, and indexing each and every week. It is a waste of bandwidth. I am also going to get rid of the project status updates. There’s literally a page for it. Go look at that. I don’t need to update it every week. Especially since projects haven’t moved in several months now.

What remains? Three sections that are actually meaningful and moves the Anti-Goal Cycling forward. They will be: