Writing on Empty (Patreon)

I just don't have much in the tank right now. Pandemic and election stress means that I get maybe 2-3 hours of decent energy levels for writing per day and then I need to take a nap or just all it for the day. And that's more or less my max. I know other people are putting up with far worse - I am just being honest about where I am right now and figure it's better to let y'all know than pretend I am still a happy busy little beaver.

For most of July and August, all of the energy I had for work went into promoting ANNIHILATION ARIA. Now that we're more than a month out from the book's release, I've turned my attention to the novel I finished drafting earlier this year. I have excellent notes from a good conversation about the first draft taken in a chat with my agent, but now I'm wading into the work of actually moving from a very messy first draft to something solidly closer to a MSS to submit.

But even on a day when I've slept well and when the world of politics isn't especially on fire, I just don't have a lot of oomph. And lately, things have been especially on fire and it's a struggle to focus at all.

Fortunately, there really isn't any rush. The pandemic has thrown publishing for a loop as well, and though it's an industry where business can mostly continue even in a remote paradigm (unlike theater, live music, TV/film), if it takes me another 6-9 months to revise this book, we'll probably still be in pandemic mode here in the USA.

And the novel in question, being very political, makes it very hard to create any separation between what's going on at the national level and what I'm thinking about in my writing. 

I'm working on finding forms of electoral engagement I can find that don't involve the risk of direct confrontation b/c it's anxiety-making and part of that anxiety is "I can't trust myself to not go off on someone right now" -- a big canvassing faux pax.

If I can't make satisfactory progress on writing *and* can't feel like I'm doing anything about our current political hellscape, about all I have left as recourse is "play a bunch of video games and try to chill out and work later". Which works here and there, but when I come back to Scrivener, I'm still back at that 2-3 hour point.

So maybe that's just what my working life is going to be like for a while. It also means my Patreon content may need to look more like these updates and some excerpts from works in progress than the more thorough essays about the business of publishing. I can probably also do video Q&A, especially if folx want to jump on the stream and ask questions directly (even just in text).

And to try to put a "here's what we can do" spin on it - what are y'all doing to keep your heads above water? That can range from "here's this show that's letting me relax" to "here's I shut out the world". I saw a lot of those kinds of conversations in March/April, but I feel like the accumulated exhaustion and dread are different for me now.