Things I do when I should be writing

the power of resistance

I retired from my full time day job as of Dec 31. In anticipation of this big life change, I had lofty ideas.

I’d spend part of a day each week on the “business” end of writing: marketing the book that’s out there; building my network of contacts; tending to Substack and my other social media platforms; work on making new connections with book clubs who may want to read “The Book of Answers” and then Zoom with the author.

I’d spend time each month on “writing adjacent” activities: the bi-weekly writing sprint group at the local library; meeting with my mentoring client for her sessions on the craft of writing (that really charges my battery, as I get to talk about this thing I love!); I’d attend the book club meetings I’ve already set up .

I’d sit my butt in the chair and get down to the actual work. I moved my most of my scene notes and big picture ideas on to Scrivener in the fall, and know I need to work through my current outline, and follow the story as I’ve plotted it, to get my head more fully back into “The Book of Christmas Cheer”, which is the working title for the current project, which has Rev. Thomas Book with a new congregation, in a new community, and dealing with a death at the church in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

I am actually doing some of the things on that list, along with beginning to build a new daily routine that includes morning strength exercises, meal planning and prep, negotiation/communication about who’s doing the cooking today, afternoon cardio-work, and evening yin yoga to wind down the day.

Today, after my wife left for a morning meeting, I avoided sitting my butt in the writing chair in the following useful ways:

-took down the live Christmas tree and swept up pine needles

-delivered the tree to the drop off at the town arena

-picked up boxes at the grocery store, needed for my ongoing effort to move my office from the basement (which is becoming our yoga/exercise studio) to the spare bedroom. This part of the plan involves purging a lot of books, and only bringing the ones I’ll keep up all those stairs!

-messed with the bluetooth settings on my “old” laptop, which is now dedicated to playing background music for the “author at work”

this the new setup. Bruce Cockburn’s Speechless is playing on the old laptop

-writing this very Substack post, which I will set up to publish next week, in aid of my hopeful plan to post once a week, in gratitude for those subscribers who’ve stuck with me, and even kept paying monthly, while I’ve only posted sporadically

-reset my Apple password, again, because I forgot to write down the new one I set yesterday

I’ve read my Stephen Pressfield, (The War of Art) and I believe I can recognize “resistance” when I see it in my own behaviour. I also tell myself that some of these things actually needed to get done, and I’m beating resistance at its own game, by harnessing it to get the chores done.

I tell myself a lot of stories.

Now it’s time to work on that one about Rev. Tom, and the dead body under the Christmas tree…