This month, I had designs to participate in a bastardized version of NaNoWriMo. My four goals were: to engage with my own work in some form every day; to read every day; to take a walk every day; and to wash dishes every day.

I roughly succeeded—during the first week. Then deliberate pursuit of these habits fell unceremoniously away.

One clear reason is that I prefer to live a more balanced and contextualized life these days. My partner was leaving for 11 days, so we spent several days together: we visited our goddaughter and her moms; we went to pub trivia; we took advantage of Montréal à Table, which gives you a tasting menu at local restaurants for a discounted flat rate. We fit all this into three days, around our day jobs and basic living-related tasks like eating and cleaning. And each—including a full night’s sleep—was more valuable to me than forcing the blood out of the writing stone that day.

It has long concerned me that writing is not the priority to me that it once was. At this rate, I will never achieve my goals of finishing even one novel, let alone several. Being a writer has always been the point. What do I mean, writing is not the priority anymore?

I think I have been focused on the wrong thing. The point of this challenge was to assess what would happen if I did prioritize writing. The answer has been clear: I would write. But other valuable things would be sacrificed. And I have found I am no more willing to make those sacrifices than I am to sacrifice my writing.

I wrote recently about wanting it all, and we have all long discussed the impossibility of having it all. Given this chasm between desire and available time, what does an artist’s life look like in 2025? What does it mean to prioritize one’s art in an age where only a minute fraction of writers can afford not to have a day job? What makes up an artist’s work? What does it mean to live like an artist? Is it simply to work and work some more? This is how I have treated it; but there is also the widely acknowledged adage that one must live to write. So how does one prioritize relationships and experiences around working 35+ hours a week—without feeling like then doing the art is simply more work?

I don’t think we do. I think the writing is the work. It is work. There is no way around this.

But I finally understand that I don’t aspire to simply do the work art demands. I aspire to live in a way that incites it.

*

As one way to stay engaged with my own work, I began rereading some old pieces last weekend. I did not like a lengthy novel attempt from 2017, but I enjoyed analyzing it. I do not recognize myself as the author of that work, but I recognize things I still find compelling within it: questions of identity, belonging, and—the only theme that recurs in every single work I have produced over 22 years—alienation.

I jumped ahead five years to see if I recognized myself there, rereading one of my own self-published romance novels. Here I not only recognized myself as the author—I recognized a level of skill I have been hard-pressed to reproduce since. The book has obvious flaws: it has structural problems, which give it pacing problems. I would cast my sentences differently now. But it still shows a higher degree of line-level competence than I remembered possessing or putting into it at the time.

Even more importantly: I was compelled to keep reading. I hadn’t meant to read the entire thing cover to cover, but I did. I read until I literally could not keep my eyes open, I woke up in the middle of the night and read for 40 minutes, I woke up early to finish the novel in the morning. I then spent Sunday reading the tens of thousands of additional words I wrote in support of the novel—including the 80%-finished novella-length sequel that made me quit self-publishing.

To read that sequel, it is apparent why I quit. The novel itself is a good story; its sequel is merely a character arc. (To me there is a clear difference; another post perhaps.) The sequel is also just much weaker at a line level. The turns of phrase that surprised and delighted me in the novel were categorically absent from the sequel.

I understand why; I needed to write much faster than the year the original novel took me to make self-publishing viable. But I was unable to resolve the problems on the viability timeline. So, faced with putting out work I wasn’t proud of, I chose instead to quit. I wanted to do art; I had no interest in creating a mere product. The opportunity to write novels for a living was not worth the sacrifice of quality and pride in my work.

As it turns out, the novel itself is about exactly this: The novel’s characters, main and supporting, are all trying to balance pursuit of their passions with the associated costs. I hadn’t remembered this. Some even decide the costs aren’t worth it. There’s a scene where the characters confess their love to each other, but even the characters gloss over it because the conversation is actually about whether they’d give up professional pursuit of their passion for any reason. One says yes, while the other—the more devoted to the romance—says no, never: not even for love. This difference in perspective drives the book’s final conflict, and those stated positions are where the characters end the story.

I don’t think I knew I was being quite this coherent when I wrote it (though of course I might have). I seem to have grasped something intuitively that, for all its flaws, made the book still compelling to even my critical eye nearly five years later. Despite recent lacklustre outputs in both my quantity and quality, rereading this novel reminded me that I am in fact capable of writing a barn burner.

Then my brain started to light the fuck up. I became progressively more preoccupied with these characters, their relationships, and their arcs over the following days. I have made a real effort in recent years to cut back on my maladaptive daydreaming and engage more with the real world; but maladaptive daydreaming is also a major engine of my writing. I have not daydreamed about my own writing like this in years, and I have desperately missed feeling so invested in these imagined peoples' lives that I am scarcely able to think of anything else. I have been a long-form writer mostly because it enables me to invest in my characters just so, but writing has felt so much like work since I switched careers that I haven’t managed it.

Yet daydreaming—imagination—is also an integral part of an artist's work. It is part of what distinguishes us from AI: our ability to bear witness, to testify, to translate experience into art, to convey a feeling. Humanity is a species of walking, talking, self-actualizing primary sources, and art is our finest method of communicating what we as individuals know and feel to be true. Ideating is a crucial element of this process: Sitting with an idea and understanding how it feels to us is the first step to communicating that feeling to others.

My central motivation has always been, and remains, to share with others what I spend hours dwelling upon. I strive to do it craftfully and in a way others find compelling. Maladaptive daydreaming is not work to me; but there is a tremendous amount of friction between imagination and story. A completed story is a daydream sanded and sculpted until—if you’re very good, very hardworking, and at least a little bit lucky—the frictional drag can no longer be seen. And that, of course, takes a great deal of work that I think is more easily done when the daydream has been sufficiently indulged.

*

I drafted parts of this newsletter on the train home from an overnight visit to Ottawa. I felt electric: I had seen a dear friend and an interesting concert, I had travelled, my imagination was firing, I love the train. I was in my element. I had not brought my laptop and wished I had so I could get words down. Which words? Any words. Didn’t matter. The feeling, the imagination, the music I was listening to was what mattered. I wrote down my thoughts in an email draft, then was braced with the revelation that this—feeling energized because I was seeing friends, seeing art, seeing a different city first thing in the morning, wishing I had my camera to capture the window washers propelling down the side a government building, listening to good music, enjoying my own company, walking quickly, seeing wild turkeys out the train window—felt sufficiently like I was nurturing my artist side.

It was not much. But I do think it is ultimately a basic matter. Living an artist’s life means seeking out art, being with friends, taking a walk, sitting on trains. It means finding joy and inspiration in defunct works. Most importantly for me in this moment, it means maladaptively daydreaming and taking that shit seriously as, if not creative work, its beginnings.

I made a promise to myself. When I got home, after I got off work, I would write down everything about these characters—every little scene and interaction—that it struck me to write down. I used to do that all the time, which was how I wrote in such volume (and deleted in equal volume). It didn’t have to be good; it didn’t even have to be in the spirit of telling a story. It just had to be on the page. From there, I could do… something. I could sculpt, sand, delete, develop. I could put it in outer space. I could reread contemporary literary works I admire and see if there’s the potential to write in a different genre for a while. The important thing was just to work on something I was excited about, play with it, see what it could do.

For years, I have been trying to write a science fiction novel that I just can’t seem to get off the ground. I am not motivated to write it. I like the idea, but I do not think about the story when I’m not actively looking at the page. This is, I think, because I have been thinking of it not as art but as “my debut novel.”

Despite quitting self-publishing for this exact reason, I have once again reduced my writing practice to producing a product.

It’s ridiculous. There is no longer any reason to do this. I have a job that has nothing to do with these projects. It won’t do, and it ends here.

I have not yet written down my imaginings; I received troubling personal news that took my full attention for a couple days. But as I have been taking my stress-management powerwalks across Montreal each day, I now find my thoughts turning not only what an artist’s life looks like, but what a free life looks like.

This week, the two are the same: it looks like going to a queer film festival, going to a book club where we’re discussing a work in translation with strong themes of—oh baby—alienation. A duo plays at a bar downtown on Mondays; one of them plays the flute so beautifully that I ugly-cried the last time I was there; I hope to repeat the experience. In between, I will work and eat and sleep and fuck and walk and meet a new therapist and wash dishes and get my flu shot to protect the old and young and go to a friend’s for a movie and call my dad and break difficult news and feed the cat and not write enough and not read enough. But if I am lucky and smart with my time, I will read some and write some; and if I am unlucky and stupid with my time, I will still daydream resolutely.

My artist tasks for the week are to love art, walk fast, and daydream. They are not the goals I started the month with, but I like them better.