Getting Back On The Horse – The Climb #629

Thursday 12^th November 2020

I’m starting to catch up with myself.

After last week’s air of doom and gloom in the greater world made me feel so negative and started clouding my judgement, I felt the need to bury my head in videogames for a number of days.

The trouble is that there is then a mountain to climb to get back on top of things: Editions of The Climb that need writing up, thumbnails that need creating. There are general admin tasks as well. There’s taking my ToDo list and rescheduling it all.

But I had a productive day today, and finished clearing most of my backlog.

I got all the editions of The Climb posted (which was no mean task), and then set about creating a logo I need for a project that could come to fruition next year. I’m not going to win any awards for Photoshop but it’s something that needed doing to the extent that I had been looking at outsourcing it. Now I don’t.

Getting back on the horse always tends to feel slower than I would like. It’s like all the available hours in the day suddenly shrink, and you then have no time for anything, but I managed to complete what I needed to get done, and I no longer feel overwhelmed with tasks I need to get out the way before I dive back into The NaNoWriMo novel.

As writers we often train ourselves to have daily habits, to crank out the word count every day. Whilst that’s good, I sometimes think a better skill to have is the ability to get back to work after a break. That’s much more difficult (to the extent that writers push the daily habits).

With the pandemic, I’ve been unable to be consistent in my habits. I try. I really, really try. But I flit between projects and bounce myself forwards rather than glide. It’s something I’m working on but given the state of the world right now, I’m grateful for any progress.

So the ability to get back into projects after I’ve fallen off the horse is an important one for me. It still takes too long. As much as I would like to start getting words out tomorrow on the project, I suspect it might be next week.

The weird thing is that whilst I am behind on NaNo and we’re approach the half-way mark, there’s part of me that feels I’ll be able to catch up. That seems to be how this pandemic has worked, periods of inaction followed by a flurry of activity, culminating in the illusion that everything is getting done on time. I mean, it is, it’s just not steady progress.

Overconfidence? Maybe. Who knows what else will come along and knock me off the horse. All I know is that I’m pretty good at getting back up, dusting myself off, and getting back on.