The State Of The Union
Somehow the year's half over, and where's that to-do list?
It’s almost the first of June, which means it’s almost my birthday, and somehow we’re closing in on the halfway point of the year. Old people weren’t kidding when they told us how fast shit goes by now – I just hung my advent calendar to-do list on the wall a few minutes ago, it seems, and it’s about time to reckon with where I am with it and take stock of the year so far.
I’ve made huge strides in organizing, and I’m seeing results of that. This holiday weekend was my best batch of sales in years, and I’m hoping to keep that momentum going. My game collections are shelved, the inventory is in good shape, and I’m paying down some bills. All of that is awesome.
Some of the projects on the list were always going to take months to achieve, and that’s fine, but as we wrap up half a year, it’s frustrating not to have closure on them. As an example, I powered through and listed hundreds of DVDs that’d been piled up here for ages, and that’s done, but it wrecked my life for a whole week till I got it all finished.
I have a similar project with a pile of over 1,000 science fiction books that need sold, and I am trying to do it piecemeal, 20 or 25 per day. And that’s probably the logical, sensible way to do it! But watching that stack shrink like a melting glacier, and not having the satisfaction of striking one more thing from the list, is a drag.
I’ve documented some of my game coding adventures over the last few months, and I’ve had some fits and starts of real progress there. What I really want to be doing is spending hours a day on those projects, though, and so far that plan has been a bust. I always intend to start the day with that stuff – to attack the code while I’m in those peak morning hours of optimism and possibility. But there’s always listings to finish, orders to pack, errands to run, and next thing you know, it’s the middle of the night and I’m picking at lines of code while fighting off sleep.
And the writing has sunk to a low point, priority-wise, which I’m trying not to be unduly anxious about. I stopped doing the 100 Words stories because I felt like they’d run their course (I wrote about 2,000 of them, after all) but since then, I barely feel the compulsion to work on the projects I wanted to finish up this year. I still hold out hope that I can get some existing stuff printed and published, but I’m not sure I’m in the headspace right now to start devoting the lion’s share of my time to a novel I’m not that motivated about.
I think June’s gonna have to be a buckle-down month for either writing or coding. I’ve talked before about organizing my day around these creative pursuits and relegating the listing and packing of stuff to “after hours,” but that’s always been easier said than done. I may finally be caught up enough, if only for a short while, to really plug away at this other work – the stuff without the immediate financial results, or the hard external deadlines – to get a bunch of it off the docket.
Time’s always a little more of the essence in my fifties, but it’s more so now, because I have more traveling coming up starting in July. Two big roadtrips, family coming to visit here, and my son coming home from the Air Force are all on the calendar, and I know there’ll be times when I’m in a plane or a car wondering what I did with all those days I had a pot of coffee, a clear desk and what should have been a straightforward game plan.
I like the idea of hammering on these games and finishing a bunch of them over the summer, then turning to the novels in the fall. I’m never as productive as I want to be on the road, but I can definitely write more easily than I can code while I’m traveling, and this might be the excuse I need to invest in a laptop that isn’t ancient and wheezing.
The deeper issue, aside from the more immediate financial reward of working on business stuff, is the ease with which doing organizational chores scratches that productivity itch without all the impostor syndrome and creative frustration of making something new. I’ve had a spring of filing, listing, selling and puttering, and that’s been nice, but it’s time to make myself jump out of the plane again, mentally speaking.
Watch this space, hopefully there’s more neat stuff about to happen.