2023-03-01 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Wednesday 🗓 Date: March 1, 2023 📅 Week: Feb 27 – Mar 5, 2023

Blargh I feel like I have nothing really to say. I’m so fucking tired. In the last few weeks I’ve tried really hard to make these morning pages be fiction pages, but I don’t really think that’s what I want at the moment. With fiction I tend to think through all the implications of things, but I kinda want to let them be more free form. It’d be nice to be able to just intuit the implications, but that I think also requires a ton of work. So for now, I’m simply going to let my writing continue on and on, never ceasing.

I’ve noticed how much I use the words just and kinda. Let’s mercilessly destroy those.

I’m going to try and get this done by 8 so that I can go and get breakfast. All I have had today is so fucking much caffeine you wouldn’t believe it.

I went to YUZ yesterday and meditated for the first time in a while. That’s a thing I should bring back.

As for the writing world, I think taking on smaller stories would be helpful for me. Finding something to get from beginning to end in a few thousand words would be so helpful. It’s surprising how short a thousand words is, but also how long. I had a few different ideas for short stories that could be nice, although in many ways my ideas for short stories often end up feeling like character studies or something. Of course, doing “character studies” is probably most what I need. A totally reasonable approach for writing fiction seems like to write several characters, then throw them at each other and see what happens.

The story I think might be worth pursuing first is a story based on the anecdote from 4000 Weeks where a teacher tells students to go to an art gallery and look at a single painting for three hours. My thought was that this student probably picks a painting with a huge crowd. It’s a painting from the 1800s or something, but there are a handful of people who look slightly out of place — weird haircuts, low-cut jeans, 1950s suits, and so on — who are folks who have jumped in to the painting over the years. The MC stares for long enough, then as they get closer and closer, they reach out and end up there.

Of course, exactly how this story will go remains a bit of a mystery to me, but that’s part of the fun, yeah? I felt like there’s a lot of immediacy available there, both in the mind of the protagonist but also potentially in some other people, like other passers-by or the security people who also loiter around the gallery.

But I didn’t want to write that for my morning pages. Morning pages are for dumping words out, and there are some undecided things about the protagonist I probably need to figure out. Well, there’s all sorts of things to figure out, like what painting it is, whether that’s a real painting or not, and why they care, really.

Anyways, enough about writing, what else is happening in life. Oh yeah, I got promoted! That’s exciting, I guess. Things don’t feel all that different, but I make some more money which is cool. Mostly I just get a ton more stock, which is very handy. But like I said, things mostly don’t feel very different. I guess in a way I feel like I deserved this, and honestly I was going to be a little miffed if I didn’t get it, even though I also expected not to get it based on what my manager had said. Hand wave hand wave macroeconomic conditions and so on. But I also got a big fat bonus and all that sort of stuff, so I’m very happy with that.

Ummmmm what else is going on. Thomas is coming out in the summer, I’m giving a rubyfmt talk in a few weeks. I don’t really feel like talking about those, I don’t think. I’ve procrastinated on the rubyfmt talk real hard, I should work on that some.

Anyways. I think I’m sensing a fair amount of resistance to writing, which isn’t something new — I think every writer I’ve ever heard has said something along those lines — but is interesting. I have stories I want to write, and I have enthusiasm about it. I think the hesitancy I have is about the unknown, about some expectation of perfection coming out of a first draft. I have some idea that a book comes out fully-formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. And I know intellectually that that’s hilariously untrue, but I’m struggling to shake this feeling that that’s the way it should be. That I know what the story will look like and just need to put in the hours until it gets there.

Of course, the reality is that “writing” is not a monolithic term, and that there’s writing to learn and writing to show, and that you have to do the former to get to the latter. Again, this is obvious. There’s a reason I’ve talked about having to write every essay I’ve ever written twice, because the first draft shows you what you actually want to write.

So I need to write a draft of this story so I can find out what the story really is, and then I can write the story.

I need the grit to bear down and do it though, which is the part I’m struggling with. I barely have enough time to get through all the things I want to do as-is. I got up at 5:30 today, showered, drank some yerba, went on a walk, and am now writing this. By the time I go and actually get breakfast and maybe even meditate a bit, it’s time to start work. I could write after work, but I know I’ll be sick and tired of staring at a computer screen after work. Maybe I need to hand-write, I don’t know. I don’t think that’s the solution.

I think the real solution is holding work more lightly. I got promoted, I can coast a bit. That’s all fine. There’s so much down time at work anyways, there’s simply no way I can actually be productive the whole 8 hours of my day. I should let myself zone out more, daydream a bit more. That’d honestly probably be good for my work anyways. Half the time I’m just watching youtube videos because I can’t get my mind to focus on a stupid-ass text editor.

I only have a few hundred more words to write, and I’m very hungry for breakfast. The last few weeks, Whole Foods stopped putting the little pieces of fried chicken out for breakfast. This is a tragedy. Yesterday they put them out again. This is a victory. May my good fortune continue to prosper in times like these.

I don’t really even know what else to say at this point. I’m tired, hungry, and have to labor for 8 hours today. That sucks. But also that means I make money which I can eventually like use to retire or something. Whatever that means. Not really retiring, probably just going off into the woods and writing or something. I say that not having written anything.

I vow to no longer write in these morning pages about how I’m not writing. I’m literally writing right now. You absolute buffoon. You gorgeous human being. You absolute lad, king among kings. You dropped this, king. 👑 I wonder if Notion counts the crown emoji as a word. I sure hope so. There should be more emoji in novels. (I don’t actually believe this, but I also want it to happen.) I don’t know how I’d feel about emoji being in a novel. I could either see myself reacting as if it were some horrible affront to the sanctity of the novel, or I could see someone doing something interesting and making me think it was awfully clever or something. I don’t know. Maybe don’t try using it. It simply doesn’t feel useful, but it’s also like concrete poetry if you close your eyes and think about it for a second. I don’t know.

Alrighty, dear non-readers, it is 8:01 in the morning, which means my fried chicken and bacon and homefries are hot and ready downstairs, and I am just shy of my usual 1500 words so I’m going to throw a few extra words in here as a treat. Good night, I love you, you’re not inferior to anyone. See you tomorrow.