3-Item Status
Current Location: Seattle, WA
Reading: Crown of Midnight by Sarah J. Maas
Listening: Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want To Come by The Wombats
If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status.
Quick Notes
My New App: I’ll write more about this soon, but my first-ever MacOS app is live in the App Store (as of yesterday)! It’s called Authorcise, and it’s a writing app that’s optimized to be simple, unobtrusive, and to help you start and maintain a daily writing ritual. It doesn’t collect your data and it’s free. If you’re on a Mac and have a moment to check it out, please let me know what you think, if you notice a bug, or if you have an idea for a new feature (a quick review would also be very much appreciated) :)
Seattle: I’m leaving for Seattle today—I’ll be visiting family there for the next week. I’ve pre-scheduled most of the stuff that would typically go out during this period, but apologies if I’m slower to respond to emails for the next seven days (I’ll be in-transit and full-up with family time). Also, next week’s newsletter will probably be truncated (maybe just a list of fun links) as I’ll be traveling back to Milwaukee that day.
New Work:
This week’s Let’s Know Things is about the recent Coinbase Hack
Yesterday’s Brain Lenses essay was about Money Dysmorphia & the pod was on Self-Concept
The Slowdown
Being able to persist through difficult times, tedious moments, and dark nights of the soul is important if you want to achieve any kind of long-term goal.
That’s true whether you’re painting a mural, planning a big event, or raising a child. There’s a lot to love about all these processes, but plenty of strain, angst, and even pain, along the way.
When you’re in it, though—really focused, committed to the task at hand, ignoring all those aches and anxieties by thinking about how good it will feel to accomplish your intended outcome—there’s a clarity of purpose that can help salve those drawbacks.
That clarity of purpose all but disappears as soon as that goal is reached, though.
You finish the mural, the event is a success, your kid grows up and leaves home…what now?
It’s a difficult moment, as while you now have something you can be proud of (a race won, a heavy load lifted), your body and mind are primed for a certain amount of strain, and it can be disorienting if that strain suddenly disappears.
I experience this feeling semi-regularly, but it’s especially potent when I reach a book-related milestone, as the effort required to complete each step is just so time-consuming and all-encompassing.
Since January 4, I’ve been working on a new book—a work of fiction called Yore that’s intended to be the first work in a series of three—and that book has gobbled up basically all of my waking hours not already claimed by the work I do to pay the bills.
I’ve felt excited, disappointed, worried, vulnerable, inspired, and exhausted by this thing, and last week, 131 days after starting, I finished the “ready for other people to read” draft of the book.
To be clear, the book isn’t done: it’s ready for a small number of beta readers who will read it and provide me with feedback that’ll inform the next draft.
But this is an important moment, in part because until now no one has read these words but me, and partly because I’ll be setting the book aside for two months before I come back to it with fresh eyes (and those valuable notes from beta readers).
This moment feels like a big deal because of how excited I am about this story, and because it was a lot of work to get this far.
But it also feels big because…two months. That’s a long time.
I haven’t really had a spare moment all year because so much energy and so many hours were plowed into this book. And already my brain is freaking out a bit, not really knowing what to do with itself, with all this excess time and cognitive capacity.
I think of this period as ‘the slowdown,’ because it’s a bit like stepping off a treadmill after running an ambitiously paced marathon: you can rest and recover! (Yay!) But because the change is so stark and sudden, your whole being rebels against such laxity and flails around, seeking out equally dense, difficult things to fill the void. (Boo!)
Sometimes I give in to that impulse, cleanly segueing into another ambitious project so I don’t have to face the gaps in my schedule and the anxiety I often feel about such gaps.
I’ve gotten better at preparing myself for this moment, though, and have reframed the idea of slowing down as being its own type of productive.
This moment is its own thing and serves its own purpose. It allows me to recharge my batteries, unfocus my brain, and deviate from a single pattern of behavior and thinking—freeing me up to adopt other patterns for a time.
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Interesting Links
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What Else
I’ve got most of my beta readers lined up, but I have room for another one or two. If you think you’d be a good fit (can read a 100,000+ word book sometime between now and late-July, and are willing to give me feedback on the story, characters, plot, rhythm, etc), and if you’re a fan of sci-fi and fantasy (the book is sci-fi with some heavy fantasy elements), please let me know!
Also, I’m looking for some new books to read and shows to watch during my slowdown period, so I’d love any suggestions you might have for me.
Say Hello
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