Why I Wrote Two Other Articles Before This One
What's coming next for Thorough and Unkempt
Like two vast and trunkless legs of stone,
This edifice lets its pretense lay bare,
Its arrogance and shallow feal outgrown,
A threadbare cover over despair.
I tell ya hwhat boi, distraction is one hell of a drug, yeehaw!
No less than 12 tangents. That’s how many detours I’ve taken simply to not start this blog with the word “I”.
The original title for this article was “If you want to plan for 2025, you must start now.” I was going to write yet another post about New Year’s resolutions. Even though we all know that Every Monday is a New Year. You do know that, right?
But as I am prone to do, I went into a deep existential metacrisis. “But what if someone doesn’t want to change? Wait, do people change? Of course they do. Everyone changes. All stories about change. But who am I to…” Blah, blah, blah. Another black hole of insecurity and indecisiveness and an excuse to not write.
However, I had one actual, acceptable, valid reason to not write this blog entry. I had to write two others first. To understand why, you need a little context.
Once more into the void
On November 7, 2024, I “voluntarily resigned”1 from my job, much like almost 150,000 tech employees have done in 2024.2
My first instinct was to laugh. This was the universe telling me, “Okay, you drained your savings becoming a homeowner. This last job was to refill them and give you some runway. Now get back to what you really want to do. Write your damn novel. Write Karsica and the Sky Islands.”
It’s been 5 weeks since. I still haven’t touched my draft. I think I can see it in the corner, behind all the cobwebs and dust bunnies.
You know what I have done? I’ve started 2 small freelance gigs, with hopefully more in the pipeline. I’ve run Dungeons and Dragons games and crafted miniature terrain. I’ve started reading books for pleasure again.3
Because when you have ADHD, everything is interesting. Distraction is one hell of a drug. Remember the tangents.
But also because I’m avoiding writing Karsica because it is big and scary. I keep finding problems in the story and getting stuck. So I’m revisiting the outline and learning from books, videos, and experience on how to keep at it.
I tried to meet it halfway by exercising my fiction muscles with a short story for the blog. The working title is Conscious Choices and it is about an unwilling telepath who lives in a disaster area and cannot stop hearing the pain of the people around him.4
Why I wrote two other articles before I allowed myself to write this one
Money where my mouth is? My resolution is to grow my audience. If I want to write Karsica, I want it to have an audience when its ready. And to do both, I must write far more often than I’m doing now.
From one mindset, it’s unfortunate. I’m falling into the internet trap of volume. More, more, more. Daddy made you some content; open wide.
But from another mindset, it’s okay. It’s practice in public. It’s developing a voice. It’s discipline.
So what was my big plan? I was going to write 52 articles in 2025. That’s right, my pretties, every goddamn Sunday at 10am, without fail! Then I slapped some sense into myself. How about I try writing 4 for January and go from there?
So that’s what I did. I started writing a 3-part series, with the short story Conscious Choices slotted for the 4th week. That 3-part series became a 4-parter, and I started and finished drafting the first 2 yesterday. I am confident that I can draft and polish this series (called “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”) within this week, and thereby have 4 posts ready for January.
The harder thing to do will be writing Conscious Choices. My fiction muscle was never well developed to begin with, and it’s becoming atrophied. I think I can see it still, behind all the cobwebs and dust bunnies. But I want to have it ready before December 31st and schedule it as the first post for February.
Meanwhile, I can take the outline fixes I’ve done for Karsica and rewrite and expand the five chapters I’ve written so far. I have all of January to do that as well as consider the next batch of articles and stories.
If I want to plan for 2025, I must start now.
So that’s what I’m committing to for now. The first 5 Sundays of 2025 at 10am, you will receive in your inbox 4 parts of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger and Conscious Choices.
Yet another shiny new plan
Another thing that I had started before November 7th was working with a friend to clean up my blog website. I have 400+ articles that I’ve written since I started in 2011, and they’re languishing in anonymity because at some point I moved from WordPress to Substack.
There’s good stuff there, I know. And I want to make it accessible to you.
I got huge in my head about having collections and e-books and value for paid subscribers and moving back to a different platform because Stripe sucks for India and I need Razorpay and…
Distraction is one hell of a drug.
I’ll get to all of that in time. I don’t need to do everything at once. I don’t need paid subscribers at the moment.5
I’ve always used action as a threadbare cover over despair. Running myself ragged is not deep and meaningful, it’s self-flagellation. It’s shallow obsession with Ozymandian legacy. It’s a pattern of shiny new toys that I will play with until they break or I do.
And I tell you hwhat son, what good is that, daggummit?
Okay, I’m pretty happy about that. Fucking finally.
CoMiNg sOoN, yoU gUyS i prOmiSe. 😭👍
Though it would be really nice to become resilient to the whims of a day job at another tech company.