Consistency Frustrations – The Climb #625

Sunday 8^th November 2020

One of the good things to come out of Lockdown was that it gave me the push to restart The Climb.

Whilst overall, the idea is to create something akin to a DVD commentary on the making of any book, on a micro level, it gets me writing every day. When I wrote Action-Figure I’d have to bang out articles when tired and under pressure, and to some extent The Climb is fulfilling the itch that left.

I can write fast and accurate because I spent years having to do it. Like those articles, The Climb gets a quick second pass and then it goes up.

It forces me to write when I don’t feel like it. It forces me to write when I’m tired. It’s very much about maintaining the pressure on myself to produce.

It means that some days it’s easier to write than others. Some days I don’t think about writing at all. I’m OK with that, and that’s why I cover things like gaming, productivity and HEMA. They all help feed into my creative process and so it seems right to document them if that’s what’s forefront of my mind.

It helps give structure to my writing, and behind the scenes in my head, it forces me to treat writing as a business rather than an occasional hobby.

I think I’ve done OK in lockdown. I know some people have really struggled to write. But The Climb has showed me that I’m very inconsistent during lockdown. Things get done but I flit between projects, swap between being super-productive to not being productive at all.

With a lot of my writing projects, I don’t worry if I lose a week here or there. I make it up elsewhere. This year has been incredibly stressful for everyone and the fact I managed to get as much as I have is something I’m very proud of.

But…

I just get The Climb back into a regular cadence and then the US elections come along and throw me for a loop. As a result, I’m a week behind on The Climb.

Yes, I have notes, yes they will get done. But it’s that cadence that bothers me. Now, more than ever I feel I need some structure to my writing. To the outside world I seem incredibly efficient, but behind the scenes I’m bumping from one extreme to the other. That’s frustrating, and not how I want to continue.

I’ll go easy on myself because of the fact that this has been a weird year to say the least, but I need to be much more structured. There’s lots I need to get done in the next few weeks and months and I don’t want to be bumbling my way through it.