It’s early. My eyes hurt. I have to go to the day-job today, when all I really want is to stay home and tinker with the opening scenes of the novel in progress. Maybe write the ending to one of the hundreds of unfinished short-stories on my hard-drive, that are waiting for me to figure out the endings. In short, welcome to cranky town. Population: me. I have it pretty good. There is a trend, among writers, to ignore the essential privilege of how they do what they do and how they came to do what they do as a semi-regular thing. This frequently means that readers will do the same, since they’re only seeing the process from the outside and filtering it through public statements. And since most writers are also readers, we can get some bat-shit crazy assumptions about the job. Case in point: a writer I know recently posted about his yearly word-count on Facebook. When someone pointed out it was rather a lot, my name came up as a comparison point on account of the fact that I wrote rather a lot myself this year. And yes, it was a joke, but I found myself sitting there thinking no,

There’s a really good post about process, goals, and identity over on LitReactor at the moment. It’s worth taking a gander at the entire thing, but I’ve grabbed the key take-away here: You can never take the process away, but once you attach your identity to goals and results you can’t control, it’s a recipe for disaster. Dying on the Mountain: How Goals Will Kill You and How to Focus on the Process, Fred Venturini @ LitReactor Or, to phrase it as one of my writing mentors did: you have no control over whether you get published or read. You do have control over how much you write and how much you submit. I keep circling around that particular idea, because it’s so similar to the key takeaway when I was seeing my psychiatrist about anxiety: don’t focus on what you think or feel, focus on what you do. So much of my anxiety is predicated on what Ellen Hendrickson has dubbed The Reveal — the fear that we’ll be judged, and that those judgements are right. It’s a fear that a thing that is fundamental to who we are will be taken away, because we don’t truly believe that

In the early days of my newsletter I posted a link to Maggie Steifvater’s journaling approach, designed to manage uneven energy levels after she contracted a long-term illness that kept her from writing. The original post is gone now—along with the rest of Steifvater’s Tumblr—but the lesson from it has lived with me on-and-off in four bullet journals now. The basic theory is this: before you plan the day, imagine the idealised version of you that’s operating at 100%. The perfect, focused, utterly ready to do all the things version of yourself. Then check in with how you’re feeling right now, and rate your current state as a percentage of that ideal. Or, to put it another way, acknowledge your limits and work with the energy you’ve got, not the energy you wish you had. It’s really easy to resent work when things are off-kilter with your health, whether its physical or mental. Resentment quickly leads to procrastination, which only compounds the problem. It’s so easy to hate yourself for being less than 100% that a 20% day can result in no work at all, instead of the 20% you might have been capable of if you’d framed your to-do