To Do

clean the kitchen
10 minute workout
1. put the garbage out

Faker

Feeling a bit disingenuous this morning, like the energy and gung-ho-ness I’m feeling is all fakey artificial. I don’t really do perky, at least not lately, and I’m just waiting for someone to come and smack me bank into my grumpy funk.

What’s odd is that I don’t have any vocabulary to describe the feeling. The best I can do is to say that it’s a sort of pre-emptive shame for the moment later on today when I come back to this file and read over these words and feel embarrassed at how chatty and nattery these words are.

My neighbourhood is mostly rental houses and a few of those are students. Since they are still at the age when people are alive and have fun, they sometimes have gatherings and drink alcohol together. Occasionally they will stand outside and smoke cigarettes together and talk. And if I have a window open I can hear them talking fairly clearly and although the words are distinguishable, all it sounds like to me is chittering birds.

Blah blah nana lana blahna blah bana lala bala ba.

I personaly hate this aspect of human conversation, the head-nodding, everybody-loves-everybody, ‘right, yeah, totally, you’re totally right’ aspect. It’s prosocial and it feels nice, but it’s also mostly pretty vapid talking for the sake of talking. This is normal mammalian behaviour and I know that they’re just establishing and maintaining positive emotional connections to ward off the crushing darkness of solitary existence, but it’s still a bit annoying.

Yeah, Kinda

I didn’t actually do anything on my to do list but put the garbage out. This is not unusual, because a to do list only works if you remember to check it, which I don’t, ever.

The experiment with cacao is going well. Getting a nice, gentle high with very little gittery spike bullshit and no noticeable crash afterwards. I taper slowly into a relaxed calm in the evening, but maintain a decent amount of energy even then. Main thing: I don’t feel like a fucking methhead doing power screams and randomly dropping to do pushups and running around in circles because I have so much fucking energy.

This is all confounded by the major variable of how my sessions go for the day, as well as things like whether a story gets accepted or rejected.

Low hanging fruit

My approach to most things usually works out, if I stick to it. There is some merit to the idea of nothing-to-lose, aim-high submissions to Azimov’s, Clarke’s, and Analog, but given that that’s everyone’s plan—on top of all of the legit and big-name writer’s who also submit stories to them—it’s pretty much guaranteed that I’ll get rejected. So why do something where I have no chance of success when I can do something where that chance is non-zero? If the point for now is to get published, then go where they will publish you. Get your name in lights first and work your way up from there. Even if those lights are dim, flickering, and off-off-off-off broadway. All that matters is that I’m on stage and learning how to keep the lights on.

Too many projects

This is my essential problem and if ever there were a reason to suspect that I’m a bit ADD, it would be this. I have 4 novels on the go, two albums I’m recording, I’m in the middle of submitting 30-ish stories for publication, I’m re-negotiating my mortgage, re-submitting my taxes for last year, and trying to build up my business. And then I’m also trying to get myself back to playing squash 3 times a week. What the fuck am I even thinking? It is simply not possible to do all of these things at the same time. I will never be a one-at-a-time person, but this is fucking ridiculous. No wonder I’m burned out and have no ideas for anything and no motivation to record.

So here’s the priority list:

Business listing pages
Mortgage
Taxes
Stories
Squash
Corianna
Ray
Albums

Now, a bunch of these things are asynchronous. The mortgage lady at the bank is doing some research for me, so I’m waiting on that. The stories are going one at a time and most of the work right now is re-formatting the docs to fit the correct format. Well, not really a bunch. The story submissions take 20 minutes each, but that will go faster as I get some practice.