(Upon Turning in my MANUSCRIPT!)
I remember Cat Valente posting once (was it back in the LiveJournal days? Later?) about working from home. How a thing that helped her get up and work was getting dressed and making her bed. That stuck with me for a long time… possibly because, for the most part, it’s far easier not to get dressed and make your bed when you’re working from home.
Wearing pajamas all day and falling into an unmade bed at the end of it doesn’t make me actively unhappy. It doesn’t make me feel blue or full of ennui. But on those days that I do get dressed and make my bed, I feel… perked. More activated. A slight but palpable sense of well-being. But doing this regularly? That requires planning.
Not bed-making, exactly. I do that more spontaneously, especially if there are rumpled sheets in my BRAIN that want straightening. And I usually only make my bed if I remember to open the blinds at the beginning of the day. Otherwise, I tend to avoid my bedroom. Because it’s dark. That threshold of autumnal shadow is like a physical barrier to me sometimes. This is the time of year I turn on all the lights in the house—at least, in whatever room I want to be active in.
Dressing in the morning is far easier for me, if I lay out clothes the night before. This seems a part of some larger methodology. Like… accomplishing necessary tasks is far easier if I make a list first. Sticking to a calorie count is easier if I do meal-planning first. Writing is easier if I set a schedule for myself. (Not easy. Easier.)
And you know what all that takes?
Organization. Ahead of time. Which requires planning time to organize.
Back during Covid, when our friend Mir was living with us, we were all watching the TV show What We Do In the Shadows and trying to figure out what kind of vampire we are.
Mir, for example, was “extravert vampire.” She could teach three online classes in a row, hold two virtual 3-hour rehearsals, and then went to sit on the bed and chat till midnight. (Whereas I, having been shut up in one corner of my bedroom writing books with headphones, trying to block out the sound of two teachers teaching virtually all day in the rest of the house, wanted nothing to do with any more noise or activity, which is odd—you’d think it’d be the opposite—but there you have it.)
Carlos was “Atomic Elbow vampire,” as he derived great pleasure from asking politely “May I please Atomic-Elbow you?” and then doing fake WWW moves on the couch to whomever happened to be sitting there.
And me?
I was “Calendar Vampire.”
Alas, it’s not just a Covid thing. It happens at night. I’m about to fall asleep, and then suddenly I’m thinking about plans for this weekend, or something happening later on in the month, or possibly next year, or a few million years in the future when the Earth falls into the Sun.
And then I just have to talk about it. To Carlos. Who is falling asleep. I want to make plans. I want to write it all down in my CALENDAR. So I don’t forget.
I don’t know if it’s a kind of anxiety or maybe… sadism? (Poor Carlos!) But it’s almost inevitable. I’m the one who keeps the calendar, who wants family meetings, who… makes lists. I’m good at it, I like it, I derive some pleasure and energy out of it.
But doing at night, like that, is something else. Some leftover nervours energy spilling out as my body relaxes. Maybe a byproduct of trying to account, constantly, for every moment of my day. So I don’t waste it. (This is not to say I don’t waste time. I do. A lot. I’d love to do that less.)
I find it exhausting: the effort of constant self-motivation that working from home requires. It’s endless. It’s relentless. HOW DO PARENTS DO IT? Especially writer parents? Especially writer parents who have full-time jobs????
Anyway, whatever this is in me, all I can say is… I’ve noticed it’s 100X worse during deadlines. Because everything, but EVERYTHING, requires internal self-motivation. Even HAPPINESS. Everything requires a certain amount of brain hacking.
So, like… I like doing dishes. Dishes are a time when I can listen to an audiobook. They’re a small, accomplishable task, that I can do standing up, off my butt, away from screens.
But doing dishes can also be an excuse for not-writing. (Any chore can become this. There is a fine balance between “sacred ritual of transition from the domestic mundane to the creative space” and “flagrant procrastination of one’s duties.”)
Sometimes, when I’m on deadline, I have to force myself not to do dishes. Because dishes become more pleasurable than writing. Because one can finish a load of dishes in 15 minutes. Unlike a manuscript.
But do too many dishes, and it will lead to… cleaning. Yes, cleaning! Which will lead to me emerging from some overstuffed NYC closet four hours later, happily exhausted and feeling a little more organized, but with ZERO pages having been written, followed by an overwhelming, crushing, instantaneous guilt that overrides the pleasure of having cleaned. Which makes writing even harder.
So in these last few months, I’ve found myself avoiding doing dishes during writing hours—not because they’re a chore, but because they’re a pleasure. Which I still find weird.
The problem is… writing requires so much self-motivation that rewarding myself before writing actually helps make writing happen. But rewarding myself too much before writing means writing never happens. All of these internal micro-calculations before I even sit down kind of… messes with my brain.
But denying small pleasures leads to denying greater pleasures, because I feel like I don’t deserve them. Which I think is ultimately unhealthy. I’ve observed that happening, but felt powerless to stop it.
For months now, I have neglected my snail-mail correspondence, which I find deeply pleasurable. I have neglected writing in my journal—because that’s writing for pleasure, not for purpose. I have neglected making appointments for, say, hair cuts. Even though every time for the last year whenever I comb my hair, I think, “I really need a hair cut,” as the ends get inches-deep in rags and tatters.
But! Good news! Now that I’m finished with this manuscript and it’s turned in, I find myself doing all kinds of pleasurable things again. Like dishes. And laundry. And lists of tasks! And getting dressed in the morning—complete with self-adornment! And reading books by a friend, yes, because I have to blurb them, but also because I want to.
And writing. Because I have another thing I want to finish, which will turn into a deadline soon enough. So isn’t it great to write it before it turns into a deadline? It’s almost like… writing for pleasure. (In fact, it is. No “almost” about it.)
All of which to say… I haven’t quite figured out how to hack my own self entirely. I know that writing in a journal or writing a letter or writing a poem before I get to my so-called “real writing” makes writing go better. I know that taking a weekend off (or choosing which days of the week are to act as “weekend”) is important, so that resentment doesn’t grow, so I’m not sitting at my computer, blank-brained and sullen, wishing I were elsewhere.
You see, I know these things. But the guilt of not writing while on deadline is like a stain on the pleasure of writing when I do get it to it… and pleasure is actually the thing that makes my writing happen at its smoothest, speediest, and most efficient!
I was never a “bleed out on the page” kind of writer. I’m a hedonist. A sybarite! A gosh-darned voluptuary. Like Jessica Rabbit says, “I can’t help it. I’m just drawn that way.”
A quick side note on the subject of blurbing books: this is another thing I love. Also, it’s a thing I sort of consider one of my sacred duties.
When I was just starting out, people I’d grown up reading agreed to blurb me. People who’d won awards. People who were storied… legends… practically demi-gods! Where would I be, now, without them?
It is therefore my duty to be that blurby sort person for other writers: not just the ones starting out (although I admit a soft spot for them), but for the established writers who are so brilliant and beautiful and wonderful but still somehow like SFF’s best kept secrets.
I don’t WANT them to be secret. I want their books shouted from the rooftops. And hey… I HAVE A ROOFTOP. Metaphorically. It’s called “blurbing.”
But that said, over the years, I have also met with my limits. I can tell they’re my limits, because if I surpass them, I start feeling overwhelmed, resentful, exhausted, and guilty… none of which I knew when I started.
Here are some boundaries that work for me:
- I like to be asked to blurb a book about 3 months in advance.
- I don’t like to blurb more than one book a month.
- I like to take June, July, and August off blurbing entirely.
Isn’t that funny?
But I’ve always been slower when I’m reading “to assignment.”
In high school I couldn’t figure it out: I’d read two books a day for pleasure, but it would take me a whole month to read a book for a book report. And a blurb is like a book report.
Meanwhile, I find it very difficult to read for pleasure when I have a blurb due. So either I stop reading entirely, or I read ONLY for empty pleasure but feel bad about it the entire time. This leaves little time, as you may imagine, for the really interesting, challenging, exploratory reading that makes reading so truly rewarding.
But if I have promised too many blurbs, and I have to read MSes for my writing group, and I have a few books to prep for recording audiobooks, all I have is duty-reading. And I can’t seem to make “duty-reading” and “pleasure-reading” activate the SAME PARTS OF MY BRAIN. It would be SO COOL if I could.
Especially because reading for pleasure is, yes, YET ANOTHER PATH to energizing my own writing and therefore making my job… more efficient.
There is such a… a bizarre machinery about this brain business.
These last two books in the Saint Death series… I don’t think I could have written them at all without making daily appointments with other writers to body-mirror with them.
Monday through Friday, 5-7 AM, I write with three lady horror writers (they’re not afraid of NOTHIN, not even the DAWN). And Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, I write in a virtual silent zoom with some other friends from 10:30-3:30. And every other day, and sometimes on these SAME days, I write with Carlos in a cafe and then in a library!
This makes guarding my non-writing time… very precious.
Lists are required. Plans. Plans to have NO PLANS, perhaps most importantly of all.
Planned “No Plan” time is the recipe for what my father once called “fertile boredom,” the wellspring of my creativity.
Especially if I can unplug from phone and computer during that time.
Even more especially if I can direct that unplugged time to long walks in which I’m NOT listening to audiobooks.
LOL. I live in hope. But I am a hopeless addict in some ways. Right now, particularly, to audiobooks and playing Slay the Spire. I have now lost count of how many times I have deleted that app from my phone.
All of which to say… YAY! I’ve finally made a hair appointment. It’s been over a year. Soon, I shall no longer have ragged ends. I feel a bit chagrined about it all really. But I’m trying not to be. I’m trying to be kinder to myself. And so… I hope that for you, too. More kindness. All around. For any reason.
And with that, friends, I leave you—most affectionately!
Yours truly,
C. S. E. Cooney
