THREE MORE DAYS

We've been hard at work for a couple of weeks now on The Latest Big Thing™ and after a few more ten and twelve hour days, we're going to be ready to show you what we're up to.

It's going to change EVERYTHING about this blog. 


Three more days until the announcement. Ten more days until the official unveiling. 

But I will give you one clue….

Keanu Reeves voice: "Cookies. Lots of cookies."

FOUR MORE DAYS

BIG BIG NEWS IS COMING!!!

Did I say six more days yesterday? (I did.)

Yeah, that's because I'm a math for liberal arts type and I can't count past four. I should have said five more days. Which means today is four more days.

On Monday the 14th, I will announce the big change that is coming. And in ONE week from that day (the 21st) it will be unveiled.   

I will give you this one hint though….

The big changes coming to the blog are predicated on BIG changes coming in my personal life. There are cookies involved. 

SIX DAYS TO ANNOUNCEMENT

SIX DAYS

Hello everyone!

The sounds of construction you hear are everyone here at Writing About Writing working overtime on a HUGE project and major change to this blog. (And actually to NOT Writing About Writing too.) An offhand comment led to a conversation which led to a plan and we were off to the races. Sometimes inspiration is lightning in a bottle. 

It's going to be big, and it's going to be COOL!

In six days, I will tell you what's coming. One week from then, the unveiling will be made public. 

Big Changes Coming

My Newsletter-level Patrons already got the news in the most recent post, but big changes are coming to Writing About Writing.

And they're coming soon!  

I'm so excited to open the curtains, but it'll be just a little longer. What I can tell you is that what I thought was going to be a month coming, looks a lot more like it's going to MAYBE early April and might even roll out next week. 

In the meantime, the folks who kept the bills paid around here have been saints of patience while tragedies in my life were going off like microwavable popcorn in the last half of the second minute. I'm going to focus on some of the rewards I've promised them like the "Inside Scoop" Newsletter and an early access article.

It's About Time—The [Actual] Hard Choices

Go Back to Part 1

So Rhapsody is better. I'm not in the middle of a medical crisis. And copy of The Muppet Christmas Carol is missing. Clearly, it's time to get back to writing. However, that turns out to be a lot harder because of all this other stuff that has cluttered up my schedule in the meantime. I didn't just have five empty hours a day waiting for me like "Insert Writing Here." I have to go and get rid of things to make room for it, sweeping my calendar clear like it's a desk of bills and I'm Steve Martin in The Jerk.

What? Too '70s for you? My 46-year-old references aren't "hip" enough for you? 

Well anyway, I sat down with my priorities and my calendar and I made some really hard choices. 

The 7-10 Split (Finding Four to Five Hours a Day—Not Twelve)

First let me start by saying my days will be shorter now. I'm not trying to find 8-16 hours a day to write. Even my overachiever ass was having trouble with that. The vortex of writing noisily slurped up everything and swallowed it down….uh….but not in the fun way. Noisy fun slurping would be so much better.

I'm in a very different place than I was five years ago. That place is Concord. Which is nothing like Richmond. (Haha, little Bay Area humor there.) 

Okay but really though. Cancer. Miscarriages. Death (not mine). These things make you look at life a little differently. Even before I met Rhapsody, I was starting to realize that I could pay the bills writing only if I had absolutely no work/life balance and my "innie" worked twelve-, fourteen-, or even sixteen-hour days. Sometimes I would wake up, wander downstairs and spend a whole day on an article without ever changing out of my pajamas. It was high pressure and low reward.

I technically made ends meet, but only technically. There was an AWFUL lot of extra money watching The Contrarian that paid for brand-name peanut butter and Prada paperclips.

True story: I ended up in Urgent Care after a series of sleepwalking incidents and the doctor got about five questions in before it was obvious even to me that I needed more rest, more sleep, and less stress. I actually got told I was going to get heart disease and die early if I didn't learn to chill the fuck out. Now I pay attention to my sleep hygiene so I don't wake up binge-watching Iron Fist Season 2 (~shudder~).

But something funny happened when I forced a work/life balance—particularly one that involved a little bit of physical activity. You would think the less I wrote, the less I would get written, but that's not how it shook out. I started to notice that I could do the same amount of writing in less time. Give me sixteen hours, and I'd finish up around 15:55. Give me twelve hours, I'd finish up around 11:55. Give me six hours, and I'd finish up around 5:55.

I mean EVENTUALLY I would run out of time before I finished. I can't write a five-hundred-page novel in an afternoon just because there's a stopwatch ticking off the seconds. But my productivity almost always involved absolutely exactly as much procrastination as the job could handle, whether that was five hours or five days. 

Not only that, but my head felt clearer after a good walk and between that and the way the smaller container of a deadline "put a lid on the pot" I was able to get a lot more done in a lot less time. After about four hours, I reached a point of diminishing returns. (Or, to be more accurate to my ADHD ass, it was only under deadline with four hours REMAINING that I achieved a point of maximum increasing returns.) So I started trying to exercise more and more and even took up running. 

Then I fell in love, moved, had a miscarriage (well, Rhapsody did) and got cancer, my liver blew up, Rhapsody's boss was killed in a robbery, we got evicted by a landlord who wanted to flip the house we were in but not pay a relocation fee, and then chronic pain struck DURING the move and didn't go away until surgery. Good times.

After cancer, I decided I wanted a whole new thing. Not a change from writing—I still want to write—an addition. An "equal partner" in my career. A yin to my yang. A Bert to my Ernie. A donkey to my Shrek. A Chewbacca to my… okay, you get the point. I still want to write, but I wanted to stop living my financial life so close to the edge (even though I was technically "making it"), and I wanted a second job (not a side gig, but a full 50%, half-and-half job) that was as FAR AWAY from sitting in a chair as I could possibly get.

I also had some other guidance and direction that I speak of in my other blog. My calling to serve The Morrigan became clearer, and one of the things I was called to do was create a container from which I could do the work of being a priest. Everything from training as a death doula to continuing to be a loud and obnoxious writer to martial arts. One of those things was to help people find fitness (and try to make it as accessible as possible, but I'll get into that elsewhere). So I went back to school, got a Certified Personal Trainer certificate, took my NASM test, and took on clients.

So now I spend time working out and teaching others to work out. I write MUCH faster in a lot less time. I still need to find time to work, but I only need to find FOUR HOURS.

Will I write a little less? Probably. 

Will I be happier and more well balanced. Almost certainly.

Will I binge watch Season Two of Iron Fist ever again? Absofuckinglutely not.

Easy Changes

The first round of changes wasn't really going to be much effort. They just took a little recalibration. I spent a long time with a lot of buffer time between activities just because you never knew when plans were going to explode and a day was going to take a sharp right turn into Whatthefuckersville. By eight in the morning, a day of classes and work could turn into staying home to nurse Rhapsody through a panic attack, a handhold to the doctor, or a step-up to take care of the kids because the pain was just too great.

I spent tons of time on frivolous phone games and time wasters just trying to regulate my nervous system from the last panic or crisis and keep myself from getting too deep into anything before the next one cropped up.

But Rhapsody had surgery and is feeling much better. Last weekend she danced all night and then woke up and walked around the neighborhood for three hours. The grief has faded to a dull ache. She is a little worried about what's next since it's been four years of needing to get through [the next thing] in order to survive, but these are like the background radiation of generalized anxiety, and not a special version of pain or grief.

And my own nervous system's response to that unrelenting couple of years is starting to calm. I don't need an hour to wake up in the morning just so I can face the day. I don't need to keep the afternoon open any longer because I might need 90 minutes in the middle to do school pick up. I don't need to be "on call," and that means I don't need to be playing phone games for hours or just giving my fourth rewatch of Supernatural a thousand-yard stare. My trauma response isn't hair trigger, ever ready for another several hours of being in a support role and then a couple more of regulating myself.

The problem is that I did this for years. If it wasn't one thing, it was another. Adaptations turned into habits. And habits turned into lifestyle. Eventually you stop trying to jump right back on the horse because what is the point? So now, after years of taking it slow because it might blow up, I'm used to moving at snail pace, and it's hard to hit the ground running. I have to make a conscious effort to crack my overcautious cadence open and undo it all for a little bit of focus and urgency. But if I can tighten things up again, I'll gain a lot of time in moments here and there just by being a little more disciplined about how I use my time, a little more determined to get some work done, and less distractible by things I needed for the last few years to calm me. 

Estimated time gain: 3-4 hours/week

Tougher Changes

So once the easy changes were identified, it was time to really get to work. When a schedule is bleeding, there are usually two reasons for it. 1) You're spending time on things that aren't a priority. 2) You have no idea how much time you're spending on anything—priority or not.

In my case, both these things were true. 

So step one was to track where my time was going and step two was to make a list of priorities. These are MY priorities. Yours might be different, include more family time, include more downtime… whatever.

Priorities

• Family
• The Morrigan Priest Duties*
• Writing (Job #1)
• Certified Personal Training (Job #2)
• My Own Physical Fitness
• UU Church (Community Service)
• Further Morrigan Priest Skills (Death Doula, Martial Arts, Tarot, Irish, Fiddle)
• Personal Leisure Time

(*A lot of The Morrigan Priest Duties are double dips with other things. I can write a social justice article and it's priest work and writing, for example. [The Morrigan is big on social justice.] Or when I go to the Unitarian Universalist Church, it is because the pagan community—even here in the very woo-woo, alternative Bay Area—is pretty scattered, disorganized, and largely into their own thing rather than community, so it is the compromise I have made to find a community of like-minded, multi-denominational, queer-friendly, leftist-activist folks to be of service to AS a priest while I begin the work of decades building something local and intentional.)

What combing through my calendar this carefully meant was that I needed to make sure my time reflected my priorities. Not just a matter of not wasting time, but was I spending a lot of time on something far down the list from higher priorities that were getting neglected? Here are a couple of examples:

1-My service to my community through the UU Church is important to me, but if I sign up for every march, vigil, sit in, "know your rights" class, volunteer opportunity, food distribution across their LGBTQ+, POC, and help-for-the-unhoused activism, I would be doing that a couple of hours a day and three to five hours each day on weekends. That's wonderful, but I have other things I want to be doing as much and sometimes more than church activism, so I need to spread those things out and go to one or two a week instead of every one I get an email about. I want to go, be seen as reliable, learn to organize, and also do a lot of other things too.

2- I want to run really long distances—half and full marathons—but I'm going to have to give those up. They take months of training and involve more and more hours of running and cross-training every week until they eat 10-15 hours a week of time. I had to make the tough choice that the time investments for me to run those kinds of races were going to take too much time away from things I want to do more. I'll stick to 5k's, 5 miles, and the occasional long run of 8-10 miles and set my goals within that container. Maybe someday I can push for longer distances.

There are a half a dozen or so more choices that were like this—they're activities I want to do but that are clearly down the priority scale. Now that I'm writing, SOMETHING has to get bumped, and if I'm not deliberate about what it is, I'll end up scratching my head at where the time has gone.

Estimated time gain: 1-2 hours/day

The Really REALLY Hard Choices

So that left nothing but really hard choices.

And I mean REALLY hard choices. 

Up till now was Kirby's Dream Land and now we were on to Dark Souls.

Things I wanted to do held up against other things I also wanted to do…and one of them HAD to go. The stuff that stings to admit you're not in a place to do. The stuff that HURTS to give up. It's not enough to say, "Hey I want to be a writer more than a death doula, so that training will have to wait until I have a little more free time." No, that's child's play compared to this shit. These are choices that require a careful examination of my priorities and the most strategic way to serve them, and the grudging admission that I can't do everything I want to do. That required just acknowledging that my time was going towards lower priority shit. This requires strategy and planning.

For example, I wanted to stay in school. There are more fitness certificates I want to get to be the best certified person trainer I can be, and I may want to get a nutrition certificate as well. Eventually I want to open my own community outreach gym/martial arts studio/woo-woo center that is accessible to lower- income folks, and I can imagine an associates in kinesiology will help immeasurably with that. I like the routine that classes bring to a week. I even just like BEING a student. Taking my work to the library or cafeteria and working in a change of environment. But right now, that's just six hours a week I don't have. I've got the certificate I need to take on clients and make money RIGHT NOW. So school isn't urgent compared to other things I want to do. 

And I had to admit that right now was not a good time for high-intensity dating. Technically, I have the TIME to date. But it's not just a matter of holes in the calendar where dates could go. There's so much energy expended in capital-R Relationships™. Particularly as you start to get past the "whatever's offered" stage and talk about what each of you wants. That hypothetical person would have to slide effortlessly into my life (local [but truly], kitchen table, experienced at non-monogamy, etc.), and I'm feeling pretty picky right now. I don't need a relationship to feel full and content. So while I'm technically open to the possibility, I have a lot of other things that are pulling my focus right now. Anyway, it's not like I wouldn't bang half my friends if they wanted to. That's a lot less emotional investment, is still pretty fun, and fits my life better at the moment.

Dropping school (for now at least) and giving up dating (for now at least) are huge. They're both things I really want to be doing, but they need to be sacrificed if I'm going to get back to writing. They put a lot of time back on my schedule.

Estimated time gain: 10-15 hours/week

The Final Answer

I ended up with at least three hours every day and big chunks of time on Thursday and Friday. Weekends are configurable but now include enough time to get some writing done. My Monday-Wednesday are going to be a little light in the writing department. I'll need to make sure my big articles are getting written between Thursday and Sunday.

It wasn't easy, but writing is worth it. And if you are trying to make writing The Thing You Do™--or even just An Important Thing You Do™, at some point….eventually…you're going to have to do something LIKE this. We all have to check in once in a while and see if our priorities match up with our activities. I can't tell you what YOU will give up and what you will keep, but maybe my process can help you streamline the things that are not priorities in your life. Most things in world out there are literally made to be just a little too addictive and creep in without you noticing.

But writing is worth the effort. 

The Hard Choices (Personal Update/Process)

I had to make some really hard choices last month.

This is somewhere between a personal update and a process article, but all writers have to grapple with the cold reality of time management at some point or another. I can't tell you how to make your own decisions—maybe you prioritize family or career over writing—but I can tell you you will eventually MAKE them.

And I can try to show you how I walked through mine.

Last month, I spent several days deciding how much of my current life I need to stop showing up for. Writing is too important to me to give up (or to relegate to a side quest), but how would I make the time for it? Do I abdicate from some of the help I've given Rhapsody with Treble and Clef? Do I drop some or all of the four units I'm taking to bolster my personal training resume? Do I stop running? Do I stop attending the UU Church where I have begun to form a few threads of community that I can serve in my capacity as a pagan priest? Where do I find the cuts that will leave me enough time? 

Particularly time to write. 

If you're writing AS a full-time job—or if you want to be—it probably takes you full-time-job amounts of time to get the writing done that you need to. One of the strangest misconceptions writers seem to labor under about making money writing (one that I am constantly calling out here) is that one can make Full Time Salary™ with Weekend Warrior™ effort. You can get published. You can finish your book. You can PUBLISH your book. You can get paid—maybe even enough to pay a bill every month with the fruits of your wordsmithery labor. But you won't be taking summers in the French Riviera if you don't work hard and almost every day. If you're a household name, you might be able to rest on your laurels for a few years making asynchronous income, but I fucking PROMISE you that you also didn't get to be a household name by working ten hours a week.

And let me tell you, when you're not writing full-time, other stuff seeps in. (And, of course, though I tell this as a cautionary tale and for the sake of transparency in my process, I should point out that by "you," I mean ME….but I probably also mean you, so be careful.) I never stopped writing every day (another drum I bang all the time), but boy did I drop off of trying to get posts up and sit down for ten to twelve hours and edit and do all the hard work of the space in between writing for pleasure and publication. I just made sure I was keeping the habit so that the tools of process (and maybe a few tools of craft) would still be waiting for me when I came back. 

Most are. 

A few are stiff and rusty. 

A couple I'm going to have to start over on. 

It could be worse. And if I hadn't written every day, it WOULD be worse. And if I'd written more, it would be better, but that's where your own life balance and priorities come in. I wasn't willing to tell someone I loved (going through the worst thing they'd ever been through in their life) that they needed to find someone else to talk to about it. Maybe you make different choices.

Now…..I am all too well aware that I have been writing a long line of "Here's what went wrong in the LAST few months…" posts spanning all the way back to 2021. Miscarriages. Cancer. Terrible breakups. Liver disease. Death of boss-friends. Evictions. Debilitating chronic pain. Multiple surgeries and recovery—both me and Rhapsody. Tons of pain and anxiety. I don't want to bore you with another post like that. In the words of Mrs. Landingham: "So you're having a little bit of a decade."

And it wasn't all bad. In there I fell in love a couple of times and took some trips and got to pivot completely on my career by going back to school for a year to get a certificate. 

But in that time of writing much much less, other stuff oozed into all the cracks…and not in the fun way. 

It wasn't like I ever said, "Hey, I'm going to do this other thinginstead of getting back to writing."

[Okay, actually, that's not true. There was that year of community college where I very deliberately said, "I don't want to take three years to become a certified personal trainer, so I'm going to do this all in one year even if it eats up some my writing time—which holy hells did it ever.]

But other than that very minor incident—hardly worth mentioning really—with the nine months off, I didn't ever deliberately sacrifice my writing time to other things. It wasn't like I was making a choice. It just sort of happened. I took on minor things in the cracks and crannies, since I was doing a lot less writing anyway. A commitment here. A diversion there. A weekly hike. A daily run. "Yeah, I can take the kids to school every morning." "Sure, I can help out with that." A sense of how much I could put on my plate that wasn't based on needing hours a day to write.

One more thing. 

One more thing.

One more thing.

Mostly I was sick or in support mode…or sometimes both. Hospitalized. Doing chores. Running errands. Helping process grief or chronic pain. And it wasn't all bad either—sometimes I watched Daredevil because Rhapsody was tired of Love Is Blind and we were both home. Stuff just kind of dribbled into my schedule and once it got in there, it became VERY hard to get it back out. In the last year, I repeatedly noticed that on days where I wanted to write—where I was really excited about it—but there just wasn't time. I was running from thing to thing to thing and then my day would end. And every week I said "Okay, I'm going to be better on the weekend when I have time." And every weekend I would run ragged after the kids and say, "Okay, I'm going to be better during the week when the kids are gone and I have a routine." 

Months of this.

And loved ones…. Loved ones. Oh dear sweet loved ones. They ARE loved—and they love you, I promise—but they can smell free time like a shark with a drop of blood. And if you're not wrapping your arms around that time, declaring it writing time instead of "free" time, and growling at them when they get close, like Rocco when you reach towards his bowl for that bacon the kids slipped him…you're going to have that precious time taken away by the most well-intentioned, well-meaning, deeply-loving, sincere people in your lives who just don't understand why it is that you can't do this ONE thing for them during all that "free" time you have. 

Suddenly, I'm ready to write and champing at the bit to write and humping the WALLS to write, and my schedule is saying, "When, Chris? When would this writing happen?"

I'm a writer. I write. I have to write. If I don't write, it feels like a part of me is broken. So finding the time I'd lost to so many other things was the highest priority of February, and I wouldn't rest until I figured it out. I know a lot of people talk about writing in these terms, but when you take a look at their actual lives, they don't get much writing done. And I was about to be one of those people, speaking in florid, purple prose about how much I loved writing while doing little of it.

And so I took to my schedule. Every reclaimed hour its own battle of wills and Tetris'ed logistics. 

I'm not going to tell you what matters in your own life or what might be more important than writing in a moment or in a week or in a month or in a year. That's for you to decide. I've heard people tell me there's no time to write when they play 8 hours of video games a day, and they're clearly kidding themselves, and I've seen people keep at it every day but the scheduled date of their own abdominal surgery and they're clearly more dedicated than me. Most everything else is in the liminal space between those two extremes, and I'm not here to judge what makes a "real" writer. Real is someone who writes.

What I can tell you is that if you're not writing daily—or very very close to it—you probably won't be able to quit your day job. And that on a long enough timeline, your priorities WILL become self-evident.

If you write roughly a page a day for 20 years—which is a reasonable pace for well revised and edited work—and take a year off to help a loved one through cancer, your body of work will be 6935 pages instead of 7200.

If, on the other hand, you let paycheck-earning work, family, and leisure time take precedence (and I'm not saying you shouldn't—we all live life according to our values and priorities), and only manage to come to the page six or seven weekends a year, and write the same page every day, then your body of work in the same 20 years will be only 240 pages. 

At the beginning of February, I hit a crisis point. There just wasn't enough time for all of it and I HAD to write. I tried to add writing and four units into my already-busy schedule and the whole thing collapsed like a lung in a medical drama. And I had to have my Coming to Jesus The Morrigan moment.


OKAY SO WHAT WERE THE ACTUAL CHOICES???

On to part 2 

But The Art Will Be Great….Right?

One of the refrains I see when fascism rises (higher than it already is) and begins to sweep across—well, let's be honest here—the Republican Party……is that "at least the art will be great." Like everything else is going to suck for millions, and we might end up at war,  and probably a lot of marginalized people are going to die, but at least we'll get some good albums and novels out of it.  

But will we? 

Will we really?

Turbulent times of cultural tension can create great artistic expression. But if you're grabbing popcorn and hoping for a lit art scene, you might want to check your history books. Because you know what doesn't create artistic expression? Artists going hungry, and keeping their heads down because they might get killed.

Artists have to get paid. I don't know when the idea showed up that artists shouldn't get paid for their work. 

Actually, I do. 

It was in the early 19th century France (and late 18th in Germany) when "art for art's sake" became so absurdly en vogue. Art then became almost exclusively something done by "starving artists" (or maybe by an upper class, white, gentlemen-of-leisure type who didn't need to work or raise kids or anything) and the idea that money sullied it showed up. It wasn't that other people weren't MAKING art (and good art)…to pay the bills, it's just that the circle jerk of rich white men deciding only other rich white men were making "real" art showed up. France and Germany were two tiny European nations joining England in telling the rest of the world how to live around this time.

One of the reasons that around that time we have way too many books by landed gentry white dudes with too much time on their hands.

And like most things the power elite and monied classes do, the bourgeoisie adopted it lock, stock, and cliché so they could play at feeling like they have some modicum of power by enforcing status quos (instead of their reality of being proletarians about three or four paychecks away from destitute) and proceeded to use it to create an artificial class barrier to feel superior to people who expected to be compensated for their expertise and time. 

This idea of art for art's sake and starving genius artists endured even after art exploded in its consumption, artists became celebrities, and most began to be exploited by capitalism. 

First of all, fuck that. If you didn't pay attention in ANY humanities classes, let me give you the straight dope on this: some of the best, most endearing, most provocative art came either back in the way back when an artist had a patron making sure they were WELL taken care of so they didn't have to work some menial job that took them away from creativity or when they absolutely were doing it as a job. Not starving. Not above it all. Just like everyone else making a living. 

I shouldn't have to tell you this, but France and Germany at the height of European colonialism don't get to decide what makes for good art. They sure thought they did (particularly at the time), but they didn't. Even at the zenith of this myth about what was considered "high" art for its own sake, you can still find better art that isn't.

But also…an artist can't be creating something you find subversive if subversion will get them hurt. And I’m not trying to be alarmist, but that’s where authoritarian movements that create scapegoats in marginalized communities always wind up going—artists who don't toe the line land in prison or get dead.  These times are the LULLS in a nation's artistic expression. (Unless they're cranking out a lot of propaganda.) You might find most artists to be pretty resilient against social consequence. They don't seem to care if they upset the status quo and if you threaten them with a one-way ticket out of polite society, they're liable to ask you if they can take the express train. But when you're jailing them, disappearing them for a while, or worse for having the temerity to hold a black light to the sheets of society, you're not going to get a lot of rousing artistic discourse.

It turns out that social consequence or even oppression in the form of marginalization or cultural imperialism might embolden most artists but actually imprisoning them or worse has kind of a chilling effect on their creativity. Violence puts us in a survival and crisis mode that isn't where creativity happens.

If you really want your art to be off the hook, pay the shit out of artists and make sure that they are safe enough to feel like they're just losing social standing and their comped tickets to BRESH instead of their homes, their livelihood, their freedom, and possibly their lives.

And on that note, here's my patreon if you're looking for an artist to support.