Sunday 27th September 2021
Sometimes it’s OK to have an experiment fail.
This past week has been one such experiment. Feeling slightly overwhelmed by writing projects, I wondered if I could ‘trick’ my brain to ignore the stress but continue to write by making the focus on secondary tasks.
I should have known that, given that my secondary tasks weren’t getting done, flipping my primary and secondary tasks would have an impact on my writing.
And so I’ve had a week where I haven’t got a lot of writing done. The Climb has a backlog. I have a mountain of projects. And worst of all, the household tasks I made my primary concern only had a small dent put into them.
The lesson here is that I can’t trick myself out of my writing stress and task anxiety.
In that, I’ve learnt an important lesson. As much as my systems to help me be productive might seem like overkill, they are needed and they do work.
Which means I need to lean on them heavily next week as I make next week a very writing prioritised week. And if there’s one experiment for next week, it’s whether I can start and maintain a strong focus on the words amongst all the other tasks.
I’m constantly doing this. Testing myself – not so I might pass or fail, but so I get a better understanding of how my brain works, and more importantly, how it’s changed during the pandemic. I do it with my writing as well, trying new craft, seeing how well it works for me, working out what doesn’t work.
It keeps the work interesting, but more importantly, I hope (probably in vain) that one day, I’ll clear my worklog, and with it my stress and anxiety. The first might be faintly possible, I think the other two are totally impossible.
But a new week brings new opportunities and I really do need a week where the focus is purely about getting words on page. That’s a small part of writing, not every week needs to just be about words. I’ve already subconciously started developing ideas for the book after The Accursed. I hope that won’t be such a big book, but I only have a few characters, a world and ‘situation’ and nothing else. There’s a lot to think about on that book before I start writing.
Hopefully, I’ll get time in between writing sessions. I’d like to get The Accursed done by… Ah, I’m not going to say. Novels never seem to hold to any internal deadline for me. Maybe the next one will.
And I still have things I need to get done around the house. Maybe I can work on those inbetween writing sessions.
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