We went to Oscar’s sports day today. It had already been delayed twice due to the temperature, but third time lucky, I guess. It was similar, but a bit different to previous years.
During the last year the school has made a few changes and one of them is that all the kids are now in houses. There are four across the school, and Oscar is in water (the others are, of course, earth, air and fire) and over the year they can earn points for their house and at the end there will presumably be some kind of Harry Potter style ceremony where the winner is announced.
That’s the background and that’s why the teachers and support staff were taking the points more seriously this year. The kids got points for all the events they took part in and you know what I figured out pretty early on? They couldn’t have cared less.
If they actually cared about the points, they could have easily gamed the system by just having the people who were best in each event take part. That kid who could throw the most accurately would have done all the throwing and they would have racked up the points. But that’s not what happened at all.
The kids all wanted to take part in the events because they were fun. It didn’t matter to them whether they were good or not. It didn’t matter to anyone whether they were good or not. They took it in turns, they made sure everyone got a go and they had a great time.
It got me wondering why the school is trying to instigate the whole point system and it was pretty easy to figure out: because that’s what adult life is like. If you’re good at your job then (in theory) you get more points (money) and that kind of makes sense, but we do it to ourselves as well when we don’t pursue something because we perceive ourselves as being no good at it, completely forgetting the most important metric of all: whether we enjoy it.
An incomplete list of things that make me feel better and I should make sure I do more often.
I feel better when I…
– spend time with my family
– spend less time online, particularly on algorithm driven sites like Reddit
– do things to help other people
– am physically active
– read books and long form content rather than skimming through dopamine trap headlines
– don’t have to worry about money
– get on with the work rather than endlessly tinkering with the scaffolding around it
– have purpose
– eat well
– drink enough water
– know that I have used my time wisely
– put on new socks
– focus on doing one thing at a time
– slow down
– am not too hot and not too cold
– sleep well
– feel as if what I am doing has value
Do you know that I love seeing piles of notebooks that someone has been using to document their lives? Even better if they’re all the same brand and they line up neatly on a shelf and you can look through the whole stack and see the spines with the dates on them. I look at them and I think ‘they’ve really got it figured out’. The same with bullet journals and digital tools. It makes me feel like a ragged mess by comparison because I keep changing what I’m using every few months.
And yes, I realise that part of the reason for that is procrastination. I’m aware of myself enough to realise that. But it’s also because I’m contantly pursuing what my version of that shelf of perfectly matching notebooks is. Every time I make a change, I’m thinking ‘this is it, this is the thing that I’m going to stick with forever and one day I’ll be able to look back at this glorious archive’.
But if there’s one thing the last few years have taught me is that change is constant. Family, jobs, finances, responsibilities. It’s always changing and maybe it’s insane to think I can find this one perfect system for work that I never have to change. Maybe change is just something I’m going to have to figure out how to cope with.
For a while I’ve been trying to do everything in Obsidian and for the most part, I’ve figured out ways to do that. Or at least have it be my source of truth. But stuff is changing again in my life and it’s not working for me at the moment.
When this kind of thing has happened in the past it turns into a whole soul searching thing where I have to admit that what I was doing before isn’t going to be my ‘forever system’ and that I was wrong to commit to it. But I don’t have to do that. It’s up to me how I frame that stuff. And the truth is that for a while it was working perfectly, and if everything hadn’t changed, it would probably have continued working. But things have changed and I need to change with them.
Obsidian as an everything tool was fine, but now it isn’t. I need different tools and systems to get the things done that I need to get done. And that’s fine. Maybe in a few months the current setup will feel like overkill and that doesn’t mean it was always wrong, only that it’s wrong for that hypothetical point in the future.
Who knows, maybe in a few months time I’ll be back to being all in with Obsidian, or maybe even back to using analog tools. I don’t know what things are going to be like then, just like I didn’t know what life was going to be like now, back in January.
It has been a while since I published a book and a few years since I was doing it regularly. Although I have been writing the whole time, it just hasn’t been coming together. I couldn’t tell you how many half-finished manuscripts and abandoned drafts are scattered around my office.
I jumped from tool to tool. Some stuff is in notebooks, buried on the shelves amongst stacks of other half-filled books. There are things written in Scrivener, in Markdown, in Google Docs.
It’s easy for me to look back now and see that it’s all a symptom of other stuff going on in my life, but it felt like the cause at the time and there’s every chance I’m not over it yet. I feel like I’ve settled on a system now, but maybe in a months time this will just be another failed project to throw in with the rest. Most of the time we’re pretty crap at seeing what’s really going on while it’s happening.
But right now I’ve got a system and although it might be temporary, there’s one thing about it I’m fairly sure is going to stick around: going slower.
When I started publishing thirteen years ago, I went fast. At my peak I was publishing a book a month while holding down a full time job and all the other stuff I had going on. And it was fun and exciting but it was totally unsustainable. Even before other stuff happened, I was dropping projects half done and the pace of publishing was slowing.
That’s the biggest change right now. I don’t feel like I’m in a race anymore and I’m optimising for enjoyment. Which I think come out in the writing.
I’ve always felt more comfortable writing by hand. The slower pace forces me to think more about what I’m writing. The dread of the blank page and blinking cursor just doesn’t exist when I’ve got a pen in my hand. Everything feels more relaxed.
There is a lot of flexibility with my new system. My current WIP started in a notebook, now I’m working on the same story in GoodNotes. Neither contains the full draft but it doesn’t matter because at the end of each writing block, I take what I’ve written and convert it to plain text using Claude, then copy and paste that into Obsidian.
That text file in Obsidian is the source of truth. It doesn’t actually matter whether I use a notebook, GoodNotes, or scraps of paper, as long as it ends up in that file. In theory, if I decide I do want to start writing on a computer again, I can do it without missing a beat.
It’s slower, but that doesn’t matter because I find it much easier to be consistent. And it’s better for me to write 800 words every day than it is to write 3,000 words one day, 2,000 words the next, and then nothing for the rest of the week.
The next step is figuring out the editing process because I want to do that with the same approach. Slow and consistent, not quick and sporadic.
AI is a thing I’m still trying to figure out. I’ve gone from curious to skeptical to loathing. Right now I’m not sure where I stand because on the one hand it seems inevitable, but on the other it is an ethical nightmare built from stolen data and consuming the worlds resources more quickly than any other technology ever has. Conflicted barely covers it.
But if I’m being honest, there is one thing I’ve started using it for and it does it better than any other tool I’ve ever used: OCR.
I’ve always loved the idea of hand writing books. In the past I have completed first drafts of stories on paper and although I enjoyed the process, I could never bring myself to take the next step and type the thing up for editing. So all those stories (not many, but a few) are still sitting in a drawer somewhere or, more likely, lost forever. But this is where AI comes in. I can take a photo of a page, ask it to convert it to text and it does, with something close to 100% accuracy.
It has opened up this whole new way of working for me and I’m still not sure how I feel about it, but I can’t argue with the results.
What I’ve been doing with my current story is writing in GoodNotes on my iPad, exporting the page as a picture, and pasting that into Claude for the OCR conversion. So I now have close to 8,000 words of editable text that I can start editing without having to type anything.
Doing it this way does lose one of the advantages of writing by hand: the natural second draft you automatically create when typing it up, but I’ve never really gotten to that stage so I’m not losing anything. And I think my writing is better when I work by hand than typing, so I’m already better off.
I am conflicted though and maybe there are some less ethically questionable options out there. But this is the first time I’ve seen how AI can aid me creatively without actually having any input in the process. It’s not writing anything for me, it’s taking words I have already written and changing the format.
There is absolutely no way I will ever let AI create words for me, but this is a useful little service it can provide.
Although I am still getting up and writing my 1,000 words every day (and fulfilling the goal of my challenge) I am being less strict about the planning and editing aspect of things and accepting that there are some days when I can’t do those.
That’s working out pretty well for me. Today I sat down and worked on planning The List (that title is going to change really soon) for a lot longer than 20 minutes. I got a lot done and now think I’ll probably be ready to start work on it when I finish the first draft of The Storm (which will probably also have a title change).
It’s not working out so well on the editing side because I don’t love doing that so it’s easier to put off. I might need to figure out a daily goal for that again, just so I can keep publishing stories.
Giving myself more flexibility around this stuff is really helping in a lot of ways. Most importantly though is I’m feeling less stressed out about it all. That’s important because there are a lot of other things going on in life at the moment and although I am still trying to follow my five lessons and the sixth I have to accept that writing is an entirely voluntary thing right now so it can’t be the number one priority every day.
Another thing that’s probably contributing to my sense of calm is that I have decided to do a digital detox. Basically that means that I am avoiding all non-essential online activity. So no reading the news, no scrolling Reddit or any other social media, no YouTube, nothing. I’m only a couple of days into that, but it is already making a big difference to the amount of time I have for things like reading and writing.
I think a relaxed approach is generally better. A bit like driving 5mph under the speed limit. Over the course of a whole journey, it doesn’t make that much difference to the time you arrive, but it’s way less stressful and more enjoyable.
In retrospect, it was stupid to think it was over. The kidney stone is still inside me. Yesterday was a bad day, I ended up going to the GP and then working from home. I felt rough all day but I managed to get some things done.
I feel better today, and I appreciate that, but I don’t know what tomorrow will be like.
I guess I have to take each day as it comes until this thing is finally out of me. It’s frustrating, to say the least, but it could be worse. At least the pain isn’t as bad as it was when I ended up in hospital. At least I am able to focus for more than a few minutes at a time.
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Latest release: [The Last Outpost][1]
Currently Writing:
The Storm: a cozy apocalypse novella. Today’s progress: 1,127 / 11,342
The List: a dark fantasy novella. PLANNING
Son of Mars: a science-fiction short story about the construction of a colony on Mars. EDITING
My latest release, The Last Outpost, is available to buy now on Kindle.
Alex is the navigation officer aboard The Calico, a colonial supply ship. He’s far from home and can’t shake the feeling that he doesn’t belong. After dropping out of university on Mars, Alex joined the ESDC, hoping to find purpose among the stars. Instead he found himself on The Calico, in love with Eden, the XO, and desperate for a place to call his own.
Life in deep space isn’t what he imagined.
When The Calico arrives at a remote colony on Enceladus for what should be a routine supply drop, the crew discovers something far more troubling: there’s no one there.
Alex, Eden and a pilot called Jack descend to the icy colony and the mystery deepens. Where did the colonists go? What strange secrets lie beneath the surface of the moon?
Caught between his sense of longing, and a growing sense of danger, Alex must confront his most deeply held beliefs. Can he find his place in the vastness of the solar system, or is he doomed to wander, forever searching for something he can never reach?
A few days ago I wrote about the five lessons that I have started using. Today I am starting a sixth that I learned about in a YouTube video by Alexis Kingsley which is well worth watching if you have three minutes to spare.
The lesson is to create an environment where success is inevitable. She describes it like planting a seed and providing all the water, soil, and sunlight it needs in order to bloom. That’s what I am trying to do for writing. As yet, I don’t have any practical idea for what that means, but it’s such an interesting idea that I want to keep coming back to it and seeing if it is something that I can put in place.
—
On the writing side of things, I am making good progress with The Storm, and I have really turned a corner with my planning for The List. I have come up with some changes that are going to have a big impact on that story. The Last Outpost has now been submitted to Amazon, and I’m just waiting for it to be approved. Hopefully it will be available from tomorrow.
An very early start today. I woke up before 4am and couldn’t get back to sleep so at 0430 I got up and started writing. I managed to get a decent amount done, altough it remains to be see whether those 1,000 words are worth anything.
I am making good progress with planning The List, although it is taking a lot longer than I thought it would. I like the core idea, but I need to get under the surface of the characters and the world before I can actually put it all together. Still thinking it is a novella and potentially the start of a series.
Almost done with publishing The Last Outpost. That should be available to buy from Monday.
I went back to work today for the first time in almost two weeks. It was good to be back in that environment and to have a block of time in the day that is spoken for. I like all the people I work with as well, which really helps.
Without really meaning to, I have found myself spending a lot less attention on the news and things. It is probably doing my mental health a lot of good. I’m not giving myself any official rules or restrictions around it, but I am enjoying some time away from all the terrible things in the world that I can’t do anything about.
Obviously, I recognise that I am extremely lucky to be able to take that break because the people that are impacted don’t have that option. On the other hand, me being depressed and anxious all the time isn’t going to do them any good either.
