My birthday is the 18th of March. The anniversary of my father’s death is the 19th of March. This one-two punch often catches me off-guard, a double-whammy of anxiety and guilt that throws me off my game despite my belief that I’m feeling fine. As mentioned in the authors note for this week’s Saturday Morning Story, I honestly figured this would be the first time in thirty-eight weeks where I could not produce and post a story for my patrons. Then Vulture did an article on Kelly Link, and I decided to spend Friday hustling to get a new story done. My biggest influences have always been short fiction writers, and Kelly Link rates up there as one of the biggest. Stranger Things Happen and Magic For Beginners are two of my favourite collections ever, and half the reason I attended Clarion South in 2007 was the chance to get taught by Kelly. In a lot of ways, her work and mentorship gave me a way into speculative fiction—2007 Peter had spent years in university writing programs, deeply immersed in poetics and post-modern narrative experimentation, and the fact I loved Conan the Barbarian and the critical work of Roland Barthes

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,

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, last week was pants. Nothing went seriously wrong. Nothing went seriously right. It was just the kind of awful, no-good week that doesn’t really deserve that designation. The kind of week where you huddle up in your house, utterly certain that everything you do is wrong, that your body is falling apart and your mind is no good for anything and you indulge in the dream of no longer having to cope. The kind of week where lack of sleep kills your fine motor skills, and every attempt to rub your weary eyes is accompanied by a small vision of accidentally pressing your eyeball into the back of your skull, even if you know that’s relatively insane. The kind of week where you desperately try to hide the fact that you are a twitchy mess from the world. The kind of week where your focus is utter crap and you feel yourself getting behind on everything. Where writing consists of sitting at a computer for three hours and typing, maybe, two hundred words. By you, of course, I mean me. Last week was pants. This morning I am dancing. David Bowie. Lets Dance.

2016 is looming, as new years tend to do. I’ve been sorting through the options of big, writing-adjacent goal-setting projects I’d be interested in doing to replace the mad dash of the 600k year. Doing nothing was pretty high on the list, but that’s not in my nature. I like having big meta-projects to focus on that are writing-adjacent, even if they’re basically insane and designed to fail. So I went through the list of things I really enjoyed and found useful in 2015 and came up with three words: word count data. I tracked daily word-count pretty obsessively over the last twelve months. And, when I didn’t track words, I tracked daily pages in a notebook, faithfully switching back-and-forth between different coloured pens so I’d be able to see what was written on which day. I’m still tracking my word-count now, updating my excel file after every writing session. First, because it’s become a habit. Second, because I like data. Data is fricken’ awesome. Data means that when I hit the first week of December and start wondering what the hell has gone wrong with my process, I can go back to previous years and see that December is always a goddamn