July 17, 2025

Mellow Runway

👋🏻

Finished my first draft last week while away in Indiana. Feels good man. And now, I am not gonna look at it for five more weeks. 🙃

"How long you let your book rest—sort of like bread dough between kneadings—is entirely up to you, but I think it should be a minimum of six weeks. During this time your manuscript will be safely shut away in a desk drawer, aging and (one hopes) mellowing...

...you're not ready to go back to the old project until you've gotten so involved in a new one (or re-involved in your day-to-day life) that you've almost forgotten the unreal estate that took up three hours of your every morning or afternoon for a period of three or five or seven months."¹

If Stephen King can do it, so can I, right? I noticed along the way (since this whole essay has taken me so long) that upon my return, I would see new connections, ideas, and be excited all over again; or my mighty red pen was furious and swift with cutting out fluff. It's how I zeroed in on what this essay should be and got rid of the scope creep. I think there is value in waiting and returning.

There are parts of this essay I don't love. It is a first draft, I shouldn't love all of it. I've noted which sections need a spruce or a trim. I think clearing my brain out will let me come back with a fresh eye and make this script all it can be.

King's reasoning is only part of the reason why though. The other is that, I don't plan on releasing this video the very second it is done. I plan on banking it to build up a runway.

"I deleted everything. I now had a really significant backlog, essentially a runway, for a new channel even though it was an old channel, but I was starting from scratch on it. I had made all these videos on CinemaStix; I'd made all these videos on FilmCraft; I'd learned all these things about how I want to make videos that I could make those videos better and make new ones at the same time and be able to put out content frequently and consistently, which was really the key. When you have a video come out that does well, You don't want to be floundering starting the next one in order to ride that wave. You need to already have that next one be coming out. And that's really hard to do when you are making one video at a time and you work and have a family and all that stuff. But if you have a runway, it's a little bit easier."

Last month, I had film essayist Danny Boyd aka CinemaStix on MFP and that's what he said about a runway. Danny tried the YouTube game for awhile, bounced around channels, and in his last effort, he brought all the film essays under the CinemaStix channel as it is today. This back catalog gave him a runway for when a video popped off, he was ready in a timely fashion with another and another and another.

If I had heard this advice before launching the dedicated essay channel, I would have kept my essays unlisted until I had a backlog; would have given me a four video head start. 😅 When thinking about this approach, it makes sense for my current state of life. I don't have the swaths of time to research, play, edit, post in concentrated chunks, but I do have time to do pieces of those as I go along. I believe in the quality of my essays and my videos. I try to structure them to be timeless, so if they sit of a shelf for a bit, they won't get out of date. I'm also going to try and make them more 10-15 minute-ish in length instead of 45~ minutes. That ought to help turnaround too.

The number in my head is 12 for one-a-month pace. That feels like a decent runway. Maybe I'll bump it up to a more round, pleasing number. I don't want to kick the can too far down the road though.

I've set a reminder in Things to review the Astro Bot script in five weeks. While we wait, it is time to pick the next essay.

"If it looks like an alien relic bought at a junk-shop or yard sale where you can hardly remember stopping, you're ready."

Until next time...

This letter is one block from the newsletter Memory Card by Max Roberts. Thoughts? Send me an email at max@maxfrequency.net.

Max is the writer and producer behind Max Frequency. cultivate and curate curiosity—both for himself and for others—by delighting in the details and growing greatness from small beginnings.

He's written a rich history and dive on the making of Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Part II, celebrated the 15th anniversary of Super Smash Bros. Brawl with the voice behind its hype, and examined how Zelda "stole" Fortnite's best mechanic.

Memory Card is a real-ish time, raw, drip feed newsletter of his creative process for telling these stories. It’s how The Thing™ gets made.

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