Blogging–and most creative work, if I’m being honest–feels like an exercise in futility these days. Even putting aside all my doubts about my small audience, my questions about my own motivations for blogging (and the work I have to do in order to make sure that I’m not obsessing over numbers instead of focusing on honing my craft and expressing myself), and the constant grind of fighting against my own mental health and worsening burnout in order to continue creating, I still think the rising theft of creative work would be an existential threat to my public writing. I’d still write privately, of course, no matter what. I’m too much of a storyteller to ever stop telling stories, be it in tabletop games or in my own creative writing, but no part of me needs to post things publicly. I like posting things publicly. I like seeing that people are reading what I’ve written. I like having this level of public accountability. But I absolutely don’t need it. So it is incredibly difficult for me to keep writing posts for this blog as I slowly work on finding an alternative hosting platform and figure out what shape I want my blog to take on that platform. Normally I’d say something like “it would be really easy to ignore this and just carry on,” but it’s actually not easy this time. This time, I can barely make myself focus on my writing for more than a couple minutes at a time and my buffer, a staple of the last two and a half years of writing, has started to slip as I lose the energy and willpower required to push myself to write when I’m feeling worn down.
Continue readingWriting
The Nightmare Of This Capitalist Dystopia Can Always Get Worse
Every so often, some horrible shit happens and I have to interrupt my blog writing and posting cycle to insert something while it’s still relevant. Today is another such day, even if it feels much smaller in the grand scheme of things than most of the other stuff I’ve disrupted my schedule for. Honestly, I’m only doing this because it’s something that actually impacts my blog as a whole, so it would be incredibly remiss of me to wait a week to talk about it. Yesterday, the website 404media broke a story that the owner of WordPress (.com, specially) and Tumblr was going to start selling their user’s data to a number of LLM companies for use in training their plagiarism machines. That article is paywalled, unfortunately, so I can’t send you there, but The Verge covered the story pretty well and that isn’t paywalled (and believe me, I’d be paying for access to the original article if I wasn’t already overbudget for this month). The short of it is that the parent company, Automattic, has publicly said they’re going to allow people to opt out of having their data sold (all in the name of staying modern when it comes to creating “content” rather than, say, Art or Blogs or even the almost-as-meaninglessly-generic-but-still-less-shitty “Media”) and that there are already some settings to help restrict access to your data, but they can’t do anything to stop any company from taking whatever is publicly available on the internet. They add that “respectable” companies will respect your settings, but I think that’s a load of hogwash since no company running a LITERAL PLAGIARISM MACHINE is anything approaching “respectable” under any definition of the word.
Continue readingThe End Of National Novel Writing Month 2023
Well, National Novel Writing Month is basically over at this point. Sure, there’s still a bit over a day and a half left before it ends and I’m certain there are plenty of people working their butts off to wrap their goal up in whatever time they’ve got left (I used to be a regular member of this club), but I’m pretty much done. I’ve got all the time I need to finish and, depending on when you’re reading this, I might have already finished. I was just over three thousand words away from being doing when I started writing this blog post and that’s an achievable amount of writing for a day where I’ve suddenly got more time than I expected because, say, a Dungeons and Dragons game I was planning to play in got canceled just two hours before it was supposed to happen. So now I’ve got all kinds of time and while I might use some of it to run an errand, make myself a nice dinner, or finish a normal day’s writing early so I can enjoy some time to myself, I might also just push through the end of this month’s goal so I can stop writing it down as something to do on my to-do list.
Continue readingRiding The Coattails Of One Very Productive Day As NaNoWriMo Wraps Its Third Week
Well, it’s almost midnight the day before this post is due to go up and I’m only now writing it because I forgot, until this very moment, that I still needed to actually write something for tomorrow/today. Good thing I decided to do a little writing to end my very long, very busy, very social, and very fun day. I am exhausted and really considered just going to bed. I was certainly tired enough an hour an a half ago to consider doing it right then. Now, my kitchen is clean, my apartment is mostly clean, and I’m sitting tucked away in my closet-turned-office to do my daily writing because my siblings are bedding down for the night and I don’t want to keep them up with my light or my noise. Which, thanks to a really over-the-top day last Friday, I only have to do just over a thousand words to make my count. I’d really love to double down and insist that I only include words on my actual NaNoWriMo project, to keep the “Infrared Isolation Chapters” train rolling along, but I’m now twenty-two days into the month and I think maybe a fifth of my total word count for this month is for writing that isn’t going up on my blog. Which, on one hand, really just goes to show me how much writing I do most months. On the other hand, though, it really isn’t in the spirit of National Novel Writing Month.
Continue readingWe’re Halfway Through National Novel Writing Month
Well, now I’m two weeks into National Novel Writing Month and while my work days aren’t as incredibly hectic and busy as they were during the first week and a half of November, the rest of my life has picked up the slack. I’ve been preparing to host two of my siblings and two friends of one of those siblings, plus we’ve had a bunch of more solidly cold weather come through, so I spent all of last weekend doing some projects around my apartment to weather-proof my bedroom door so I can keep that space cold and warm up the rest of my apartment for my guests. I mean, I also enjoy a warm apartment, but my tolerance for the cold is much higher and my preferred apartment temperature is much lower than most people I’ve met. I just really enjoy being under blankets and I’m much too warm for that unless my environment is in the low sixties. Which, you know, is much lower than the upper-sixties and low seventies that I know most people prefer, at least in terms of the experience of the temperature. So I cut and put down some carpet remnants to insulate the floor and help protect my downstairs neighbors from the sound of extra feet (I walk incredibly quietly for someone my size, so I was putting this task off until I actually had other people around), put up some weather stripping around my bedroom door, and really just strained the muscles of my lower back. Apparently, I’ve gotten too old to be crawling around on the floor with reckless abandon like I was while cutting the carpet to fit around the support beam for my staircase and tightly to the door frame at my bedroom door (so it could fit under the door in order to block all the air that used to pass through that gap).
Continue readingNational Novel Writing Month Update: One Week Later
Well, it’s been rough. I was INCREDIBLY optimistic about the course this month would take and I think I hit my primary daily writing target only once so far, let alone my daily secondary target of getting enough words to exclude my blog posts from my daily writing totals. I’ve been so busy with work and then so burned out from how busy I was that I when I finally go home and eat dinner, I’ve only got enough time and energy to spend an hour listlessly trying to write before shuffling off to bed. Even the weekend wasn’t much better since all the exhaustion I’d been putting off since I couldn’t afford to feel tired during my incredibly busy work days came crashing back down on me. I did almost nothing but play Spider-Man (the PS4 one, since I never finished the DLC) the entire time. I did eventually finish a blog post and do my laundry, but I was so wiped out that writing the post took three times longer than it should have and I didn’t even fold my clean laundry. What little energy I had for stuff beyond all that was spent on doing my dishes, a little bit of cooking, and taking care of things like paying my bills and other such unfortunate necessities. It has been rough mentally, emotionally, and physically these past few days, and even now that it seems like the worst has passed (though it remains to be seen if this will stay true since it’s not like I anticipated the horrible, frantic, and exhausting week I’ve had since the month began) I am barely staying on my feet as I struggle to remain functional despite the exhaustion.
Continue readingThe Write Way To End An Exhausting Day
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the years is that, sometimes, pushing yourself a little bit harder than you think you should, taking one more step after you decided you’ve given up for the day, or just convincing yourself that even just a little bit is better than nothing at all… All of that can make the difference between peace of mind and feeling like you’ve failed. I worked for twelve hours today [wrote this on a Wednesday, rather than my usual one-week-ahead, which really only matters to me since I worked 7.5 hours on the 31st and then 12 every work day since then]. I spent the entire thing running around, chasing down a problem, and trying to run herd on a group of people who were placed at my disposal to help figure something out. I ended the day barely on my feet at a quart to nine in the evening, so mentally and physically exhausted that I had to take a break between walking to my car and driving it to the restaurant where I’d made my takeout order. I was done. I had barely enough energy for a shower and to climb the stairs from my main floor to the second floor where I’d planned to eat my dinner at half past nine, watch a little anime, and then play video games until exhaustion overwhelmed me. I had done enough. Even I couldn’t have asked more of myself than I’d already done, because I not only did everything I expected to do, but everything that came up along the way.
Continue readingNational Novel Writing Month 2023
Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month (Or NaNoWriMo as I’ll be calling it in the rest of the post) and I only just decided I was going to definitely participate yesterday (which, coincidentally, is the day I wrote this post). I’ve been thinking about it for a bit, but not as long as I usually do. Normally, there’s little else on my mind as summer finally begins to fade into fall, but this past year (since it has actually been a year of this life stress and chaos now, despite my desperate attempts to avoid it) has driven most things beyond the immediate day and sometimes week I’m experiencing so far from my mind that I’m beginning to forget what it is like to live any other way. So when my friend asked if I was planning to do NaNoWriMo, it caught me off guard since I did not have an answer prepared and I almost dismissed the question as being hardly relevant right then, despite it being the twenty-first of October, because I’d forgotten how soon the beginning of November was. Still, it’s not like I had to do much to prepare. I’m fairly adept at coming up with writing projects and while I expect to struggle with finding the time I need to do my daily writing since my schedule is already so full, I expect I’ll be able to find enough to write about to fill any words left over should I finish the last twenty-ish chapters of Infrared Isolation before I hit the required fifty thousand words for the month. I mean, the first twenty chapters are over seventy-five thousand words, so I’m really not worried, even if I wind up being a few chapters short of forty-six.
Continue readingToday Marks Two Years of Updates
Today, when this blog post goes up, is the two-year anniversary of my return to updating this blog on a regular basis. The day I wrote this is the two-year anniversary of my return to writing regular blog posts. I started this period of blogging with a one-week buffer and, with a couple small exceptions, have maintained this lead-time ever since. I am incredibly proud of the work I’ve done over these past two years, the growth I’ve made as a writer (since this project and the one-week buffer was intended to give me a means to practice editing my own work and to improve my drafting abilities), and the discipline I’ve shown by sticking to it as much as possible without damaging my health or well-being. Turns out it is more difficult for me to do something on a limited scale than it is for me to do something more extreme. Updating this blog every day for over a year, like I did when I first started out, was mentally easy. I just had to do a thing every day. It became a daily habit, just like brushing your teeth or showering. Doing this five days a week with a single weekend update if I can manage it is much more difficult, since I actually need to plan my time out. After all, it’s easy to take a day off if you’ve got a buffer before you run out of blog posts. It takes way more work to keep the buffer in place.
Continue readingSkipping Another Week
There’s no Infrared Isolation post today. While my rest is having a positive effect, it is not an instantaneous one, nor is it swift. It is a slow process that will hopefully bear fruit in coming weeks. The chapter for next week is already written and sent off to my editor, so it will be good to go for next week. Since I finished that early, I’ve even already started work on the next chapter (by which I mean I renamed the document, moved some things around, and reviewed the old chapter that is being rewritten into Chapter 25). If I manage to actually get more work done on it this weekend, between my various other activities, that will be even better. I don’t know if I’m quite that recovered, though. Just because writing during the week has gotten easier doesn’t mean that I’m quite ready to start spending time on the weekends working on writing projects. Especially this weekend, with my last two days of preparation for my new tabletop campaign and my on-going attempts to not mess up my sleep schedule all over again. I’m a bit more hopeful than I used to be, though. Now, recovery and a return to my old, non-exhausted way of living actually seems possible. Only time will tell, though.