Thursday. Again.

I had many plans to have plenty of time to write. I even had this afternoon off, and thought I’d get it done in leisurely fashion.

Plans don’t often go the way I think they will.

I took the day off to help my sister clean out her car, which got totalled. (Accident when she wasn’t even in the car.) She is currently sick, but, it had to be done soon. Also, I am listed on the title because I was the co-signer on her loan, so, I had to also sign the title over to the insurance.  Our “leisurely” afternoon consisted of a visit to the clinic for blood work, going to the auto body place to clear out the 14 years of crap in her vehicle, packing that into mom’s car, going to the insurance office, taking the check to the bank, and running to get antibiotics. Then, a stop at the grocery store and preparing and eating dinner. As the silverware clattered to the empty dinner plates, I looked at the clock and it’s time to go to bed. Already.

That’s when I said, ” *expletive.* It’s Thursday.” I thought about ignoring it, and I even was about to go to bed, when I managed to get myself into the chair by promising I would make it a brief post.

In other news, my mom’s company went out of business, so, she who hasn’t gone back to work from her hip surgery is unemployed. The uncertainty is not my favorite bedtime cocktail, but, right now, that’s what is being served. And, I am tired.

I started working on the YA time travel series this week.

This doesn’t sound so very earth shattering, but, it’s probably been on my mind for more than a decade, and I decided to stop waiting for the characters to drop into life, or plot to magically plant itself in my head, no, I would actually *work* on it. Actively.

I wrote a few pages, and then decided on a radical “venue” change, and re-wrote them.  It has sparked a few other things into motion, and I think that maybe it’s a sign that this is what I should be working on? I don’t know. What most people don’t know is that there is actually a connection between this series and the SHUSH Museum, which probably sounds absurd, and in a way, it is. I’m not going to say more about that right now. It’s part of how I’m building them all to come together, and I mostly feel like as cool as I think it will be, the amount of work it will take to pull off will not translate into any sort of return on the investment, and no one will give a flying frack about it.

There is part of me that is looking at the amount of work involved to make the whole plan I envision for this thing, and know that I have very often poured tons of effort into things that didn’t do me any good. In fact, most of the things I’ve poured tons of effort into have done me no good.  And, while there is a decent chunk of my hesitation that is wrapped up in the normal fears of creative sorts that work very hard to keep us locked in our heads and not creating, there’s also the fact that none of the things I have managed to create have been particularly successful in finding an audience. It doesn’t help me fight off those fears if they’ve been RIGHT at every step. Maybe it’s just insanity to continue to pour effort into things that really ARE doomed to fail? Why do I keep doing this? Because, I will tell you, writing is hard. Marketing is harder. I don’t really like doing any of these things.

This is when I’m supposed to wax poetic about the urge to create, and how that is supposed to sustain us through these periods of doubt. Except, I’m not entirely sure I am feeling that urge. I feel like I’m doing the only thing I know how to do, to keep trying to do what exactly? To somehow turn these things into a product? To actually, FINALLY make consistent money on the crap that comes out of my head? Am I completely delusional? Who would pay for these things? *I* would not pay for these things. I am not even convinced that the small audience I do have would bother to plunk their money down for products. That is, while they’re loyal and engaged and the best and I love them, would they actually feel the content was worth spending money on? Even more so, I’m not sure that the content I am planning on building for sale actually matches the audience I am building. In other words, the people who read this are the people who would be interested in what I have to sell, as it’s different from the content they know. Am I wasting my time building the “wrong” audience for the stuff I hope to sell?

But, I’m trying to not think about the money part of this equation, even though, it’s taking a bigger and bigger part of my attention as I can’t seem to improve my income by the usual routes. I have tried. More than once. And after trying dozens of the usual routes multiple times? I’m feeling fairly confident in my assessment that an increase in my income is not coming from those routes.

I am exhausted by the limits of thin margins. How much longer will things hold together? I don’t know. The only thing that seems to make sense is to keep going forward, even if it doesn’t really feel like a meaningful direction.  So I will celebrate a few pages of a start, and hope more pages follow.

The Boyne River. There’s just something about Irish rivers.

I’ve had millions of thoughts running through my head this week, which is, admittedly, pretty much normal, and probably is something everyone could easily say. Usually, I have a zillion ideas and they send me in a dozens of unproductive directions. This week the thinking has been a tad more philosophical and focused, which has been somewhat confusing to me. I am not used to it.

These threads are in the same flowing river, which I say not to be poetic, but to give an image to what I mean by “focused.” Most of the time, I have an idea in a lake in Maine, and a thought about the river in Egypt, and then I wonder about a pond in Germany, and a swimming pool in China. They are all bodies of water, but, they really, really, really don’t overlap.

Having a flow of thoughts in a single river, however, means that the ideas are all going in the same place, and I’m intrigued by this development, and I’m also finding it unnerving, because, it seems to be heading to a place I really ought to go, but, also that I am scared of it, and there is some active part of my lizard brain that keeps pulling a curtain in front of the path when I get close to glimpsing the thought’s destination. I am clearly afraid of seeing what is behind that curtain.

Several times this week I’ve had some really good thoughts in this river, and those thoughts have wanted me to sit down and write about them, to deliberately follow them to their conclusion, and I want to capture the elegant phrasing my mind churned up as I paid attention to it, and because I am in the store or not near a pen, I push it aside, and tell myself I’ll get to it shortly. I really haven’t managed to get to any of these things. I’m struggling even to recall any or all of them when I sat down to do the work. There are answers in there. I just need to have the courage to do what I know needs to be done, and I suspect, do just that will be wildly rewarding, if I get over being afraid of it all.

As I have sat down to write this, knowing that I’ve had many possible things to put here this week, and that I have largely dismissed them as being not substantive enough to sustain a full-length posting, (and yes, I know that part of that dismissal is me not wanting to face that particular topic), what I am acknowledging first and foremost is that I need to be more mindful of each of these notions and when they appear in my brain, I need to stop dismissing them. I need to give them  enough space to be scary, and to put other things aside to focus on just that one thing. I need to stop deciding that whatever it is that has re-emerged into my brain is there for a reason. Does that mean that I should ignore things with deadlines or actual urgency? No. But, it does mean that it’s not time for me to decide I’m too busy for that now, when I know that “busy” is an illusion and a way for me to dismiss something that might take real work.

It’s a step. And it might mean that I am perhaps finally doing the hard, heavy lifting I need to do to move forward with something akin to purpose. It might be another illusion, but, it might also be a valuable clue to the next steps in the path.

The last few weeks have made me really re-think the plan to increase the frequency of my postings, and I am actually starting to get a bit panicky about this rash proclamation. I had a bout of sickness two weeks ago and it really knocked me down, and then last week, there were technical issues on the site and I ended up doing some maintenance work that didn’t get resolved until Friday morning. I’m still very behind not only from the lost time, but the resultant catch-up. I’ve re-run old columns on most Sundays for many weeks, and the shame of not having written anything new makes it feel like failure. And, really, especially as I gear-up he content volume, it presages the bigger failure. It doesn’t help me that most people don’t seem to notice that they’ve read this material before.  It fills me with doubts, and makes me question whether anyone is actually reading anything, or if any of this work is worth anything to anybody.

Of course, I do know that when I failed to send a column a few weeks ago there were a few people who had missed it and were concerned for me, and I felt both good and bad. I felt bad for having caused concern and for failing to send something out.

Technically, it’s the first week in 259 that I have failed to send send something out, but, in that 259, there are probably fewer than 100 stories, sent many times. That starts the shame spiral again, and we don’t need to tread there again.

I fantasize about having stories queued up weeks in advance. I dream of being ahead by weeks, and not having to be working on an impending deadline so that I can finish — or even start working on a product to sell.  This fantasy ranks up there with a clean house and more sleep. I am starting to feel like the entirety of these projects are useless and not worth the effort, and am finding it harder and harder to argue with these thoughts.

I have been buoyed by the excitement from you, my loyal readers,  which has keep me pressing forward, and even with these excited murmurings, I am deflated and adrift, at the same time, the looming launch of the “secret project” tells me again how far I am behind. I had plans to be halfway finished with it by this time, and I’m being overly optimistic by proclaiming it 1/4 of the way done, and looking at a list of workable items at being fewer than I need. And I know that as soon as things are underway, I will find it more difficult to keep up than ever.

I guess, I needed to share with you the fears I’ve been having, and it feels a bit better to confess. It feels even better to have gotten something new posted.  And the only way forward is putting one word after another. Tiny steps. Drop by drop. Trickles to streams, streams to ponds. Ponds to lakes. Lakes to oceans. Oceans don’t come without the drops.

It’s Thursday, and I had many things I had prepared for this, and all of those became moot in the presence of the holiday.  Or, if not “moot” exactly, rather they are things that can be said at anytime except today, where the holiday is the elephant in the room, and everyone would be very confused and puzzled about it going without mention.

And, frankly, while I am grateful about many things, I would rather ignore the fact that is a holiday.  The best thing about it being a holiday is that I didn’t have to go to work. The rest of it, well, it doesn’t feel much like the holidays I remember fondly from years ago. It’s so different, that it really hurts less to just think of the day as just another Thursday, and a day that I happen to have off.

Right now, having addressed the elephant, I would much prefer to change the subject, and put a happy face on things, and talk about the Super Secret project that will be launching on Jan 6.  It’s starting to come together, and I really hope it’s something you all will enjoy.  There is tons of work still to be done, and I am worried that I’ll be overwhelmed by the increase in production demands. That’s between you and me, right? Right.

Naturally, I’m also worried that it’ll fall flat, and not go anywhere, and I’ll have sunk another bunch of effort into something that is as ambiguously successful as all the other things I’ve worked on in the last few years. What all that means, I don’t know.  I do know that this speculation is wandering back into less cheery thoughts, and I’m not entirely prepared to go down that road right now.

Instead, I will focus on the work in front of me, and be grateful for a long weekend in which to complete more of the pieces that must be done between now and the January.

Last week, I promised that I would post on Thursdays, and so, I am, having just remembered it was Thursday. This sounds like a convenient sort of memory, but, it has been a challenging week for me, which has included a 7-hour ER visit, with myself as the patient for a novelty. (I’m mostly fine, I will need some dental surgery, which is for next week, and I’ve been on antibiotics since, but have generally felt not so great.)

Today, winter started, and that involved a long commute home in unfortunate conditions and cold, and then I got caught up in doing things for the dentist and being indignant about their intake form, which is not only full of implications that my ability to pay the bill is vastly more important to them than is my need for care, but it took much, much longer than anyone could have anticipated, even accounting for an eight full pages.

This is all to say that I had many plans for this evening, and this is as far as I got. Perhaps there will be a bonus post tomorrow.

Crazy Idea Photography http://crazyideaphotography.com/

Dear Readers,

You are probably surprised (and, I hope, delighted) to see a message from me on a Thursday. I myself am surprised to be finally, actually, posting it.  It means, quite frankly, that I have summoned my courage and taken a giant leap to a brave new world, and instead of feeling brave, I am terrified.

With this missive, I am publicly announcing, and therefore committing to, a second weekly posting. This posting will NOT be mailed to to you, it will be a different sort of communication from what you receive on Sundays.

On Thursdays, I will be posting a status report-type blog on my website. It will be a way for me to alert people about things I am working on, and help me to keep accountable about completing them. What i hope, too, is that you all might help me by occasionally commenting on the site, or by offering your opinion on the projects I’m working on, or even with an occasional “I like this,” or “You forgot to post.”

Basically, I am needing to feel like someone is actually paying a teensy little bit of attention. One of my very special peculiarities is that I am more likely to keep an obligation to “someone else” than I am to keep one for myself. I am asking you all to be my “someone else.”

I realize it’s on the loony side of things, but, you should be used to that from me.

Speaking of loony things…

I am excited to announce that, starting in January, I will be revealing a THIRD weekly posting, the content of which promises to be a unique surprise. This content will be released every Saturday. If you want to get that content sent to you every week, you can add your name by subscribing here. When you sign up to get that new weekly content, you’ll get a teaser of what lies ahead.

Thank you for reading this and all the other assorted things that find their way to your e-mail from this somewhat humble source. I am grateful for each of you.