105: The Folly of Waiting for Better Seasons
12/2/2015
Wow. I totally blew off my November schedule, and now the nothingness is spreading into December. I finished only two chapters in all of November – Chapter 42: The Terms, on November 11th, then Chapter 41: The Sleeping Hut on the 16th. I just blew off the whole month. No excuses. I wasn’t even having fun or doing anything else remotely interesting. I just worked hard at not working. I hated it, and felt shitty about it, of course, but the idea of working on the book was even more unappealing.
So, what do you do with that? It’s December now and when I tried forcing things I got a third of my rough draft for chapter 43: Counsel, then I drifted away again. Today I did nothing.
I want this book done badly, but obviously not enough. Not as much as I want to avoid working on it. I’m just waiting for my fire to flare up, but it doesn’t work. I know, I spent all of November waiting for that. Forcing myself doesn’t work either, unless I can find the strength to force myself every day and for every hour of work… It’s just not happening. I’m not happy when I’m not working. I’m not happy when I am working. So, what do you do with that?
Try again tomorrow, I guess. Try to try?
Yoda would slap me.
Present-Day Reflection
9/7/2026
Sometimes words fail me because there are too many voices shouting in my head at the same time. This is where meditation, a good night’s sleep, and exercise helps a lot. Stillness and quiet are often all I need to hear my own inner voice. And it’s from there that my best writing comes.
But that has more to do with finding the right words and speaking with my own voice. For content issues, the problem often lies in availability and waiting for the right season. Timing is everything in such cases. Writing is relatively easy when I have nothing very specific I’m trying to achieve, as with journaling or writing letters to friends and family. But when I’m looking for an exact type of fruit for my novels, I often find I have to wait for the right season. And if there’s nothing in bloom that works for what I need, I’m simply out of luck.
This is the trouble with forcing things. Such as forcing a specific type of content in accordance with a pre-existing outline. Adding the pressure of a deadline on top of that doesn’t help either.
I can’t force the seasons, but I can choose what I want to work on. Luckily, something as massive as the Batu Saga has a lot of different facets – a lot of different types of things that need to be worked on at any given time. And there’s always several things that are in bloom to choose from.
It just doesn’t pay to demand a specific harvest before its season.
