(or, choosing the path less followed)
Maybe this will resonate with you, even if you’re not a writer.
It’s about rest. Kind of. And enthusiasm. It’s about focusing on what you can handle, which I think is the key to dealing with a lot of things. But let me start this way: this week, for the first time since I started this Patreon community (really, about March), I’ve been spending my mornings making fiction rather than using those hours to push my more businesslike pursuits along. It felt weird, to be honest. Good, but out of kilter.
As I’ve made painfully obvious through many of these posts, I’ve spent much of this year getting my efforts aligned due to being derailed by my need and decision to focus on other life things. When the clouds cleared, I thought I would just hop on the horse and get to riding again. Alas, I guess, a horse is not like a bicycle. At least mine was not. Mine was all horse, no setting (to make a weird inside joke that either you’ll get because you were there, or that you’ll just have to forgive if you were not). It took me a couple months of pounding my head against the rocks before I realized my body/mind needed to get my business running again before it was going to let me create a bunch more stuff.
So I inverted my priorities.
For about six months now, I’ve given the best of my days (the morning hours) to getting my business ducks in a row—writing in little bits and drabs, but giving my brain full authority to answer Scott Carter’s standard WIBBOW question (would I be better off writing) with a resounding “No.” Hence, the late winter beginning of this page, and a minor web update in April. Hence, the completion of three Kickstarters and the launch of my store on SkyfoxPublishing.com.
Now, however, I’m ready.
Monday, for the first time in what feels like forever, I inverted the inversion and gave my morning hours to creating words.
And it was glorious.
I’ll be honest. I intended to do this last week.
My planning mind assumed that finishing the Holiday Hope Kickstarter on Thursday would mean that by Friday or Saturday I’d be ready to go.
That was woefully wrong, but in a good way.
Turns out I had another opportunity arise, which took some time.
Beyond that, I think the emotional part of my brain needed a better waypoint for the inversion. It just felt better to point to Monday. Probably because my work mind is forever warped by thirty years of being steeped in the professional workplace, to see Mondays as fresh starts. Also, I think my brain wanted a little vacation. A few days to celebrate the path into this transition, which is really a big deal.
If you’re a creative person living the solo life of making stuff up for whatever your living might be, you probably get it.
If not, maybe it’s just me.
Maybe I’m the crazy one.
Regardless, in the vein of “everything about being successful in doing this creative thing for the long term is about keeping my emotional balance in the right place to do the work,” I think it was fair for my brain to ask for the time. And, given that I’m lucky enough to have had the space to give it, I’m glad I did. Ultimately, moving my inversion or priorities back a week is a little microcosm of this entire journey, except that the first part was inverting work priorities, and this last was about reducing stress by focusing on rest.
Yay me.
With four clear hours to focus this Monday, I actually finished a short story I’ve been piddling with for over a month. Tuesday (today as I type this), in those same four hours, I dropped about 2,600 words down on what will be the first book of the “second season” of my Cruise Brothers collaboration with Jeff, my brother. It was fun.
Of interest also is that I’m writing this book differently than I’ve written others.
Since Jeff and I already have a weird little flowchart of an idea on the storylines, I’m not writing into the dark (which is an interesting topic of its own, but one I’m leaving set aside for now). I’m also reluctant to say I’m outlining. What I’m doing is something more akin to the old Snowflake model I read about some time ago, but again, it’s not quite that, either. Instead, I’m basically writing the entire story at the 5,000-foot level, using some narrative, some dialogue, and leaving some ideas along the way. I’m trying to focus on characters and emotions. Trying them all on for size as I go.
This is supposed to be a fast-paced, wacky story of hijinks and humor, but the characters need to ring true or else it’ll come off wrong.
This method is letting me play-act the story.
In addition, since the flowchart Jeff and I created is a bit notational in places and has some holes in it, the method is giving me leeway to leave breadcrumbs that I’ll come back to as I loop through the whole thing again, and presumably again. This means that I’ll be doing a few full drafts of the piece rather than the cycling that is more standard for my version of writing into the dark.
Right now I’m liking it quite a bit.
But then, I’m two days into this inversion. All four of my brains are in the right places (yes, I am weird. I have four brains; if I’m guessing right, you do, too). My creative brain is having a good time playing, and my critical brain is serving an active role, too, so it’s enjoying being along for the ride. My asshole brain has been properly banished, and when you add it all together, my babysitting brain seems to finally be able to sit down and sip a glass of wine or whatever.
I wanted to write this piece now because…
Well, because as important as I think it is that we give ourselves grace to deal with ourselves at times, it is even more important to realize when the value of taking that act has paid off, because, let’s face it, giving ourselves grace generally feels pretty shitty in the moment. Every ounce of our body and our culture is pushing at us to just power through whatever it is that is holding us down.
Be strong, right?
Make things happen.
To be fair, there are times when you have no choice but to power through something. When food really does need to be put on the table, the cost of allowing yourself to take some rest or otherwise adjust your gears in the moment can be too high. But, really, when it comes down to it, in a lot of our lives, the pressures we’re feeling are often just as much internal—or if they are coming from outside, they are often so arbitrary as to be artificial. For example, having worked in the professional world, I’m well aware that a big deadline at the day job is often no more real than the deadlines we give ourselves for our personal goals. You can tell because if they slip a little, nothing bad happens. But still, we give them such amazing power over our behavior.
The problem there, however, is that grace rarely comes in that world.
And that’s a shame.
Because, for the moment I’m talking about here, the need for giving myself the grace to focus on my business rather than my writing was a need for giving myself the ability to do my best work.
How so, you might ask?
Well, follow me here.
Follow the chain:
- In order to do great work, my brain has to be engaged.
- For my brain to be engaged, I have to feel energized.
- To feel energized, I need to feel hope that the work I do is going to be useful.
- To feel that my work is going to be useful, I have to see that it can accomplish something I care about.
In the corporate world, being tired—often from overwork—means you lose the capacity to care about the work you’re doing. This is partially because, at the root of all things corporate, we know deep in our bones that the corporation doesn’t care about us. A majority of people in a company are there because they need to make the money their salary brings them. It helps if we enjoy doing the work, though. And we like doing the work if we can see that our effort helps our teammates and results in a product that we think is beneficial to someone, but when we’re drained and the company won’t give us the grace to recover well, they run the risk of exposing the churning blades of the meatgrinder that is the fundamental business engine of all corporations.
The same dynamic exists for small businesses, though.
And being a long-term writer—especially in the independent sphere, but really no matter how—is also being a business. Hopefully, though, a kinder/gentler business, though. One that has a boss who will not actually force you to push through when you’re not able to push through—or, better put, one with a boss that will allow you to work on the things that will help you accomplish the things you care about.
Make Cool Stuff, Show Cool Stuff
I’m talking about being a writer, though, and specifically about being a solo business as a writer.
There’s only me in here.
How does that apply?
Looking back, I see that I needed to invert my priorities because I wanted to be able to, as my daughter has said, “show my cool stuff to other people who would think that stuff is cool.” But my business’s delivery pipeline was clogged up. I already had too many things in the flow. As the famous scene with Lucy and the candy belt shows, it’s not helpful to make things faster than you can package them.
The beginning of 2025 found me stuck in the “Make Cool Stuff” part of my production flow.
That sucked.
And every part of me said I should fall back into the creative process of being a writer. Writers write, after all. That’s what every writer hears coming up the road. It’s a mantra as old as writing itself, I suppose. Write every day. Keep the creative process going.
But that’s not what I needed to do.
I can see that now.
This decision was about creating enthusiasm. It was about building back the world around me, such that my creative brain could breathe more happily, understanding that, yes, when we make something cool, other people are actually going to get to see it.
That’s great motivation.
Even better, when I realized that focusing on these businessy bits from the right perspective made them at least a bit creative, too…well…I was off to the races.
As hard as it was at the time, when I came to that fork in the road earlier this year, I chose the one less traveled.
And as I sit here today, I’m happy to report that it has made all the difference.
Perhaps it will for you, too.
Whether you’re a writer or not.
I am a human. Not an AI. You can tell because keep a Patreon page where I talk about writing and being a writer (among other things). In other words, I post a lot of things there before I post them here. This post, for example, was there first. I also share occasional work in progress for Patrons only, and give special discounts and sometimes even free books to Patrons at various levels. If you’d like to support me–or just this blog–you can do so by clicking here:
