It has been a long time since I was last struck by inspiration. Most of the time, when an idea “comes to me,” it’s the result of me chewing something over in the back of my mind for a long time before coming up with whatever thought or idea will form the center of what thing I’m going to produce. Poetry, short stories, a novel draft, all these blog posts… None of them are the result of inspiration even if I’ve often claimed to have been “inspired” by something. Even those times, I came up with an idea after thinking about some media or idea for a while. Which might sound a lot like inspiration, but I would define inspiration as something external that plops a fully-formed idea into your head. All of my “inspired by” ideas are a result of my internal processing coming up with an idea based on thinking about something else. It feels like quite a thin hair to split, which is why I haven’t written about this before and am somewhat hesitant to write about it not (mostly because it doesn’t much matter to me which side of the split hair you’re on since it’s all a part of the writing process and the only person the precise definition of this stuff matters to is the person doing the defining as a part of their process). Still, this feeling of actual, true inspiration is rare enough that I feel compelled to say something about it now that I’ve been on the receiving end of it for the first time since I set up an online D&D campaign back in 2019.
Continue readingDiscipline
This Is My 900th Post
While I’d love to claim that this is a complete coincidence, I’ll admit that I did thumb the scales a teensy bit to line up the first post of 2023 with my 900th over all blog post. A teensy bit. My time off was legitimate and I definitely didn’t have anything ready for last Saturday as far as Infrared Isolation goes, but I did decide to still do a post on the 31st and not take an entire week off when I realized I wasn’t going to have Chapter 13 ready just so I could line this up. It was a small amount of effort and is, ultimately, a fairly small thing. I’ve been running this blog since 2017, after all, and while most of those years show huge periods of inactivity from me, 2018 and 2022 saw almost daily posts, and that’s most of 900 posts right there. The rest mostly come from posting in the last third of 2021 and the last two months of 2017, when I got on the daily blogging train for the fist time.
Continue readingSaturday Morning Musing
I don’t have an Infrared Isolation chapter ready for today (Holidays, y’all), so I figured we might as well return to an old classic instead of just putting up a short post about skipping a week. Plus, I felt the need to stretch, metaphorically speaking, after some rest, and figured this would be as good a way as any.
Continue readingBank The Coals For Tomorrow’s Efforts
Sometimes, on a day that is busy beyond measure, I find myself settling down at my computer to write a blog post with the thought tumbling through my head that, maybe, this would be a good day to skip this exercise. I am frequently full of eloquent and entirely reasonable justifications for why it would best for my mental health and physical well-being to skip a day. I constantly remind myself that I can always make up for lost time by writing an additional post some day in the future, when I have the energy to spare, or that I could simply allow myself to skip a day since there is no reason not to take days of rest when I feel the need. “Rest,” I tell myself, “and you will be better prepared for whatever comes your way tomorrow.”
Continue readingThe Fuel To Your Fire
Spite can be a powerful motivator. I can think of a huge number of things I’ve done just to prove people wrong, and I can think of times spread across my entire life that it has motivated me to act when I otherwise might not have. It is growing less and less frequent, though, as time passes. Spite burns brightly, but it burns quickly as well. Spite can be used to alleviate exhaustion from burnout, but it generally leaves me feeling worse once I’ve burned through it. These days, I’m pretty much out of everything I used to burn as the fuel that drove my work. I get by on discipline and inertia, but nothing has really stepped up to take the place of the hope I once felt.
Continue readingThis Time, I’m Going to Enjoy Myself
I’ve been reflecting lately on the role of discipline in achieving goals.
As most people in moderate income blocks whose work was impacted by the pandemic can attest, life’s been difficult lately. Despite my entire past (or maybe because of it, now that I’m confronting it in therapy), the past year and a bit has been one of the most difficult periods in my life. Constant stress, anxiety, loneliness, and the pandemic itself has left me with little energy or even desire to create. Even my old constant of working on projects to fill my time until I don’t have the energy to even think about what is bothering me failed eventually.
Continue readingModeration Itself Can be a Kind of Extreme
If you’ve been following my reflections, you’ve probably noticed a lot of common themes. Stuff like “advocate for myself” and “communicate openly” are repeatedly featured, though they’re often worded differently or an implicit part of one of my other themes or self-directives. I’ve been trying to put them into practice and, between last night’s meditation (that quickly turned into sleep since I made the mistake of sitting in bed to do it) and this morning’s reflection, I’ve noticed a lot of interesting results.
Thanks to the way I’ve focused on the direction of my thoughts, the meanings and sources behind my various anxieties and moods, and the reminders I’ve written to myself, I think my overall mood is more positive. Maybe not in a major way, but I’d say the change is statistically significant. I don’t feel much better from moment to moment, but I have noticed I’m less likely to get caught up in my once-frequent small thought spirals or anxiety dust devils. Unfortunately, not a whole lot has helped my depression other than the exploration of my metaphor for talking about my mental illnesses and that only really helped me be more precise in seeing how my mood changes happen.
It’s too soon to see a lot of results, since I’m still trying to open up to people and advocate for what I want more often instead of trying to be constantly accommodating, but it feels nice to be making progress again. In today’s therapy session, I was able to tell my psychologist about all of the progress I’ve been making, thanks to the meditation and tracking everything in this little notebook I’ve got. Having her affirm my progress and talking about the things we can do to help me continue to make progress felt wonderful.
When I was seeing a psychologist in college, back when I was at the peak of my reflection and self-management game, most of my sessions would be me trying to convince myself that what I knew was the right solution was the wrong solution and my psychologist patiently backing up the part of me that knew what the right thing was. Once he pointed out what I was doing, we wound up meeting less frequently since I was good at figuring my own shit out. I still occasionally needed official confirmation or a bit of help when I couldn’t figure out what was really wrong or what to do about what was going on in my head. If I’d continued to see a psychologist after moving to Madison, I’m fairly certain I’d have maintained that skill and maybe have avoided some of the problems I ran into. By the time I started seeing a psychologist again, I was so caught up in how awful I felt and how my life felt like it was being taken over by my OCD, anxiety, and depression that I didn’t realize I was no longer certain of what was going on in my head on even the best of days.
Now, I feel like I’m getting back there. I feel like I’m starting to get a grasp on what is going on behind the veil of my thoughts and can start making progress at working on fixing what I want to fix. There’s a lot these days, but I feel confident I can keep making progress and that I’ll get there eventually. Since I’m making progress on my own and more effectively managing my moods as a result of being even more conscious of my thought processes and how to constructively combat the thoughts that come from my mental health issues, it lets my therapist and I work on some other stuff during our sessions. While I’m a bit concerned about keeping everything straight in my head and how much reading I’m going to wind up doing before meditating two weeks from now (I’ve already got almost two dozen pages of notes and reflection questions to review).
Progress is good, but I’m also worried about getting so wrapped up in trying to make progress and keep track of everything that I lose sight of what I’m trying to do. I want to be better, yes, but I don’t want to sacrifice everything else going on in my life. I want to write more, I want to get out more, I was to improve my mental health, I want to improve my ability to manage myself, I want to get back to working out regularly, I want to enjoy my summer by going camping or taking trips to the beach, and I want to keep paying down my debts.
As soon as I start lumping everything into one phrase like “making progress,” I run the risk of losing sight of the trees because of the forest. Sure, it’s mostly semantics when you really think about it, but semantics and framing are really important to how I handle things. “Progress” requires measurable change every day, but I can’t go camping and write more. I can’t pay down my debts by taking a day off to go to the beach. I can’t work out if I’m spending hours meditating and reflecting. Daily progress isn’t possible when it comes to collectively addressing my goals for this summer, so I need to focus on them individually and incremental progress. I can easily plan a trip after spending time reflecting, or figure out how to make a camping trip cost-effective so it doesn’t break my budget. If I work toward at least one goal a day and make sure to track everything with a checklist, then I can avoid feeling like I’m floundering or panicking because I’m trying to do too much.
As I’ve repeated many times in different words, I have a tendency to let obsession replace discipline. I need to proceed thoroughly and carefully. I need to exercise restrain and caution so I do not get over-invested in a particular way of doing things or in how I expect things to work out so I can avoid the crash that accompanies flawed expectations. That was the result of today’s reflection and something I am repeatedly emphasizing to myself. After all, what is the point of trying to improve myself and work on my goals if I just transfer my unhealthy habits from where they are currently to the idea of getting rid of unhealthy habits? It may seem like an impossible oxymoron, but I’ve already done it before and that level of recursion creates mental hurricanes when it gets disrupted by sensibility reasserting itself.
It can be an incredibly frustrating balancing act and just trying to sort it out in a way I feel explains it well is giving me a headache. I know what I’m trying to do and, even if I can’t properly explain it here, I know how to do it. That’ll have to be enough for now. Maybe I’ll figure out the perfect explanation at some point. Maybe I should meditate on that tonight, since I feel asleep while trying to think about it last night. We’ll see. I’ve got a long weekend to work on it.
This whole thing is kind of funny. It reminds me of the lyrics to one of my favorite Andrew Bird songs, “Lull.”
“I’m all for moderation but sometimes it seems
Moderation itself can be a kind of extreme”
I can take anything to an extreme. Moderation is key and moderating myself requires I do it moderately. Talk about meta.
NaNoWriMo Day 21 (11/21)
Well, I’ve officially pushed myself to the point where the minor cold I’ve been fighting all month has fully developed. I’m actually going to need to make sure I get enough sleep every night because I can’t just caffeinate my way through a cold. Nor can I DayQuil my way through one, not really. If I had any sense, I’d take the day off tomorrow so I can sleep before I spend the rest of the week traveling for the holiday. Truth be told, I have so much sense that one of my graphic designer friends made me a little icon that I can send to people with a label that says “Mr. Good Plan Certified Good Plan.” I have some pretty stellar friends.
That being said, I managed to get my writing done last night after my D&D session. I had started it before the session, but 2400 of the 2800 words I wrote last night happened during the last two hours of my day. It feels nice to be back into the writing game, able to throw up something close to my old numbers. The quality’s still a bit lower than I used to produce at this speed, but I’m also pretty exhausted. I don’t typically get 4-6 hours of sleep every night during any month other than NaNoWriMo. Usually, I just write 4 or 5 nights a week, whenever I’m not filling an evening with video games or reading, and there’s no word count goal for every day. That means I don’t wind up staying up an extra hour or two just to finish for the day. I just stop writing when I get sleep and go to bed.
I’ve actually had a few friends and one coworker ask me why I’m subjecting myself to this much stress and exhaustion, beyond the feelings of fulfillment. Which is a fair question. I’d feel just as fulfilled if I was writing at a less demanding pace and I’d also feel a lot less like crap. Trying to meet a goal like updating my blog every day and writing 50,000 words in a month is about more than fulfillment, though. It’s a challenge. Its something I’ve never done before and I want to see if I can. I want to push myself to my limits and see if I can push those limits out further. I want to remind myself of what I’m capable of doing if I’ve set my mind and aligned myself toward one goal. If I succeed at this, I’ll have updated my blog every day and written not just 50,000 words in a month, but written almost 40,000 of those words in only two weeks. A couple of years ago, for one of NaNoWriMo’s “Camp NaNoWriMo” events, I wrote 40,000 words in four weeks. Now I’ll know that, next summer, I’ll be able to do twice that many words.
Assuming I succeed, of course. I’ve got a head cold now, so all bets are off. We’ll see how things go after I’ve slept in tomorrow.
Daily Prompt
By the very definition of the phrase, no one enjoys being told something they don’t want to hear. Some of us handle it with more grace than others and some of us willingly subject ourselves to these things if we think they’re in our best interest. Despite our grace or our willingness, the end result of being told what we didn’t want to hear can be unpredictable depending on the subject matter itself and what seems like something that shouldn’t be a big can quickly become one. Write a scene in which your character is subjected to something they didn’t want to hear and then have them react differently than expected.
Sharing Inspiration
Today’s inspiration is my favorite D&D comic and my favorite place to go for esoteric rules and game-breaking character builds for version 3.5 of Dungeons and Dragons, Giantitp.com. Giant In The Playground, as the website’s banner reads, is the host of the Order of the Stick comic, which is one of the longest running D&D comics I’ve read and the story is amazingly well-written, with plot-twists at all the right moments and epic scenes that draw you in despite the fact that it has a rather slow update “schedule.” The characters are represented by stick figures, but you can easily tell the artist puts a lot of work and effort into the comic by the detailed backgrounds and how consistent everything is from one panel to the next. If you like D&D comics, good story-telling, excellent villains, and can appreciate jokes made about weird D&D rules, this comic is right up your alley!
Helpful Tips
One skill that is essential to develop is you want to be a writer is discipline. All the inspiration and motivation in the world won’t do you any good if you are not disciplined enough to sit down and write regularly. If you keep it up long enough, you’ll move beyond the need for inspiration and motivation (though they’ll always be welcome). Like any habit you’re trying to establish, writing during the same time period every day can help you get more done every day. During my more prolific times, I would sit down and write from 8 until 10 every evening. Two hours, at least, of writing every day. I’d get about 2500 words written a day on average and it only ever got easier to sit down and write every day. On Weekends, I wrote from 10 until noon every morning, getting a little less done on most days but more frequently letting my writing time leak into the rest of the day. Creating a schedule will help in the same way, even if your writing time isn’t at the same time every day. Discipline is the key to consistency and consistency is the key to writing success.