Tapping Work Forward

As I write this I am grieving my dog who died a few weeks ago. It’s been a tough few weeks for a lot of reasons.

Part of me wants to get back to work.

Part of me wants to sit in bed all day and never get out of it, even for food or water.

Historically, I have not been great at being patient or gentle with myself. I am trying to change that about myself, have been for a while.

But I also know that if I’m too gentle then I’ll never get out of bed.

Maybe gentle isn’t the right word there.

I know that laying in bed all day and doing nothing is not the way to heal; to get through the grieving process. But some days it’s all I can stand to do.

I have a pretty standard plan for my weeks. On an ideal Monday I’ll spend 30 mins journalist, 2 hours writing, 2 hours of marketing, 1 hour of learning. That’s a real solid day for me.

That’s a day with an overwhelming amount of work for me right now.

And as much as I’m trying to be gentle with myself there is still a little part of me that says “Man, you’re a real POS sitting in bed all day doing nothing while the rest of the world is out there working.”

I know it’s wrong. I know it’s unhelpful.

Shockingly responding with that doesn’t shut it up (which seems to be a theme with wrong and unhelpful people).

So I can’t do a full days work because I don’t have the energy. I can’t do nothing either because that will just feed the negative voice in my head and I won’t heal.

My solution, the one I’ve been using the past few days, the one that got me to sit in front of a writing computer to punch out this paltry amount of words, is to touch everything every day.

Touch means that I will do some amount of work on every type of work I have planned for this week. It does not mean that I will do the whole thing. It means I will in some cases (most cases) just tap it towards the finish line.

I will open the program. Then I will do a small, seemingly insignificant, amount of work. Then I will consider doing more with the opportunity to quit.

I’ve yet to work my self all the way up to doing the full amount that’s planned for a standard week. But I have gotten more than the small tap of work I expected myself to do.

Here are some examples:

A weekly task is to mail out short stories to magazines so that editors can buy the stories. At the beginning of August I had 11 stories out, now I have 1. So I decided to mail 1 singular short story. This includes going to a magazine’s submission page, filling out 5 boxes with info about myself and the story, and uploaded a document that I’ve already formatted. (If it hadn’t been formatted then a perfectly acceptable touch on this task would’ve been to format it).

Then I mailed out 2 more stories. That felt pretty good.

Another example is this blog post. It’s currently titled “I don’t know what this will be” on my computer I suspect I’ll come up with something better when I upload it. I told myself, OK write anything you want for 5 minutes and if you want to leave after that you can.

I’m about 10 minutes in and will probably finish this post (hopefully soon).

Yesterday I wrote a 150 word drabble story that was quite gloomy. I didn’t think it’d see the light of day, I’ll post it below. It’s not the best writing I’ve ever done. Doesn’t matter. I touched writing (writing new words for others to read).

Last example: reading. I am studying the book Writing the Blockbuster Novel by Al Zuckerman. I’ve read it already. I enjoyed it and thought I could learn more so I decided to study it closer and take notes about it.

I know if I read at a pace of 7 pages per day I’ll finish by the end of August. Yeah that pace got blown out of the water when I did jack for the past 2 weeks.

I’m not up to the pace of reading 7 pages per day and taking notes on them. So I’ve read one page every day this week. Sometimes I’ll read a page and a half just so I don’t stop mid paragraph or section.

Well, I finished reading a chapter today. That felt pretty good. Who knows if I’ll read 7 pages, or 3 pages tomorrow. But I know I’ll read at least 1 page.

Will this help me get through my grieving and depression that I’ve sunk into right now? Who knows.

However, I know I can’t build a writing business with this poor of work ethic. And I know I certainly can’t build a writing business or a life by staying in bed all day.

So for now this is my balance of being gentle to myself and encouraging myself to take steps to heal.

I find that it works on two fronts:

One, it gets that unhelpful voice to quit calling me a POS for being in bed all day. I have proof that I wasn’t a POS and got out of bed. Take that!

Two, It makes taking action not feel overwhelming. Often I don’t want to get out of bed because lifting the sheets off feels like I need to be as strong as Conan the Barbarian. Telling myself to then write for 2 hours and mail out 10 stories that didn’t sell isn’t going to make lifting those sheets off any easier.

This is the best idea I’ve got so far. I’m not seeing immediate results but hey, it got 1,000 new words on the page and that’s the best word count I’ve had all week.

Find Peace in (tiny) Progress,
Nicholas Licalsi

Here is the little drabble story I mentioned above:

Jack Sinks

The ocean waves came over the side of the small boat. The air smelled like salty brine and the air was nearly as wet as the waves. The slick vinyl rain clothes kept out the wind and the wet. But it held in all the moisture of sweat and did little to insulate from the cold.

Jack held on to the railing on the side of the boat and it toppled to and fro on the rough waves. He hadn’t fallen over yet. He was sure this was the time.

And sure enough a wave caught him from the side hitting his left shoulder blade as strong as a grown man’s shove.

It wasn’t a long fall from the railing to the choppy surface of the water.

The vinyl rain clothes could do little to keep out the cold water now. And eventually Jack couldn’t keep the water out of his lungs either.

It was a long way to the bottom of the sea where Jack lay unmoving for the rest of time.