Day: August 3, 2024

I’m at the page before 8am and that means I get to blog early. This is a positive step in getting back to a healthy home routine. I’ve been out of routine for several months–through Italy and back. A great deal of this inability to settle is the inability to have a stable routine I can rely upon in order to help me settle. Here I am now with my calendar and my office space and my hopes that I can work this out somehow. It won’t be a same time every day routine–my work schedule isn’t built for that. More days than not, however, I will have the same chunk of time available to me week to week, or some slight variation thereof.

The basic obstacles at play here are work, kids, and energy level. I feel like I am more of a morning person as of late. Perhaps the inability to sleep past 5:00 AM is a part of that. However it shakes out, the goal is to find that sweet spot where I feel productive and the mind (as brain fogged as it may be) is feeling irie. I need enough time to ramp up, and enough time to really sink into the work I am doing–be it short fiction, game writing, or real novel stuff. That means (for me) a minimum of two hours and a safe block of 3-5 to include breaks. That is a grip of time in a day, and hard to do when I am working. However, I’ll do all I can to make it work. I mean, that’s the entire point of me being functional outside of my relationship and fatherhood. It is the other thing I have.

Some Thoughts:

1. Brain Fog. I did not give the idea much thought. In fact I assumed I’d suddenly slipped into early dementia territory. However, it turns out that Long Covid sufferers may also be dealing with everything going on with me since Covid. Among those issues are the blood pressure issue that seems to defy both medication and exercise (no matter what I do, it appears to react and shift from systolic to diastolic issues based on what I’m paying attention to more) and brain fog–an issue that may be related to the blood/brain barrier, which argues that it is again a blood issue. I’m no doctor, obviously. I do think that I’m smart enough to follow this rabbit hole far enough to be able to have a conversation with one at a later date and start to learn about what can be done.
2. Is being really really frustrated with your kids a symptom of covid too? Maybe that’s just a symptom of fatherhood…

Here’s a thing I know about myself: I like being in control of the story. I like being able to do the weird and let the story go where it wants and let the characters do as they do without worries of another writer changing the plot. This is a key reason why writing in a shared world is good for me. It forces me to create story and character that is so clear cut that any writer can pick up the thread and roll with it. That’s really hard to do, because in story you want to be able to keep a little to yourself. The key is to create personality for the character that is so vivid that other writers know how the characters are going to act. That is a really good thing.

That’s a good side of the issue. Another is the creativity aspect. I feel like I have struggled as of late in terms of being deeply creative. More often than not as of late I have been reading and think: Wow, this is really creative. Why didn’t I think of that. I don’t want to feel that way–I want to be the guy creating madness….