Waiting to Unspool — mnchrm vol. li
Incoming Transmission—
Hello fellow wanderers —
I said I’d get back on track, didn’t I?
As part of my return to personal accountability and trying to keep myself on track, I’ve been trying to rethink my ideal schedule. For now, for at least the next two weeks, it seems like I’ll have a consistent-ish work schedule; so I’m trying to plan around this.
My approach is this: make a list of the things I want to do, and then plan out the things I want to do each day, each week. I write, I want to keep writing. I want to write my novel, sure, but also continue writing newsletters and essays, making pitches to web outlets, and return to writing short fiction to send out. Not to mention the book reviews and cultural criticism I’ve started to get into.
I only write a newsletter once a week, and reviews are usually a one-sitting process. But I’d like to work on my novel everyday, or damn near it again. I did for the first draft, and have been inconsistent since then. Time to begin again.
For me, seems like the best plan would be to write fiction in the mornings before work, and critical work in the evenings afterwards. So how much sleep do I need? How much should I get? How much time can I make for personal projects around a shift and meals?
For the past few weeks, I’ve basically felt like I was behind in the count, just trying to bale enough water to keep afloat. Even having the weekends off haven’t been enough to clear out my backlog and get back to balance.
For now, I just have to be even better about working productively, minimizing wasted time, and tracking and prioritizing tasks. If this sounds highly corporate rather than artistic, that’s true. I wish I had better vocabulary for it, but my mind is tainted by capital. Trying to get out of the habit of falling back on the language of productivity, working, etc… but for now, it’s what I’ve got.
I’ve taken up the practice again of carrying around a physical notebook, in my back left pocket, and a pen in my front right. This has been tremendously helpful for a few things.
One of course is in tracking all these tasks. Making a to-do list, prioritizing it, and grouping like-tasks. It’s a judgement call whether or not it’s better to stop writing to go read / do something else, even if that’s the higher priority. Mostly, I try and work from highest to lowest priority — though sometimes I will start or mix in smaller, easier tasks that I know I can just bang out to build or carry momentum — or potentially doing all the same tasks at once if I know I’ve hit a flowstate.
The other great thing about having a pocket notebook at all times is just recording all errant thoughts I have. My mind just flits around from topic to topic, reflecting on something I’ve recently learned or heard, or at best drawing connections between areas of interest. Most of the time, I just let these drift off, like a Zen ascetic, unwilling to take the time to stop and record these on my phone or convinced the useful ideas will come back to me.
With this notebook, though, I find myself much more willing to crack its spine and jot a note down that I’d usually deem too unimportant or irrelevant to get my phone out to record, or just too stupid to be worthwhile (“Why is the pigeon relegated to the street while the dove is heralded?”, one such note reads).
What exactly makes me more willing to write it down physically, especially when my phone does all these tasks and much more, arguable much better? I don’t know. Perhaps part of it is the single-focused nature of it, the book of notes being just that, whereas the phone is an potential endless loop just waiting to unspool. And I’m sure part of it is simply the physicality aspect of it, of putting ink to page rather than altering pixels.
For whatever reason, it’s been working well for me.
Last week, I had the pleasure of seeing the film PROMARE, the debut feature effort from vaulted anime production house Studio Trigger. This film is such a delight. It’s a film that pushes beyond the genre conventions of an anime film, and becomes something I want to recommend to everyone.
It’s fast and fun, deeply self-aware, and just a joy from start to finish. I wrote a little mini-review of it on my Twitter as I often do, if you’re interested in that kind of thing.
I try to go to any anime films that get screened in the US, even if only for a day, because I’d like to “vote with my dollars” in a sense and make them more wide-spread. Even having this films be limited one or two day events is a huge step up from not being shown in the US at all.
I went alone, snagging one of the last tickets, up on the top row, nestled against the projection booth. I was shocked; could the majority of the theater really be sold? And would that many come? I’d gone to more than one of these screenings where I’d be in a crowd of three, so I was skeptical.
But by the time the lights dimmed, and especially by the time the intro credits began to play, the theater was as full as predicted. Few came alone. Most were in groups of four or five, or meeting up with friends that had already gotten there.
For me, anime has long been a sort of solitary pleasure of mine. I didn’t really start watching until I was already in college, so I missed the telltale-nerd groups in middle and high school to share with. More and more, the “real” world is becoming disjointed for people, especially those in my generation, and out of college and with a tenuous work environment, it’s not clear where kids my age are supposed to “make friends”.
Even the forums have been burned down, clear cut to pave the way for Reddit and Facebook.
I’m sort of a solitary guy, so this doesn’t bother me all that much. But there are times where I’d like a stronger sense of community.
Lest I forget that just the weekend prior I’d gone to an example of one of the most connective events in human relationships, in a tradition that is still honored, known as “marriage”. I’m young, with a small family, so this was only the second wedding I’ve been invited to and attended in my life.
I’m just getting to the age where my friends and peers are getting married, or at least considering it. However, the couple from the past weekend are friends I made online, on Twitter, who later became some of my closest real-life friends.
It was sort of a surreal moment, one that goes to show that it’s all the real-world, now. It’s moments like this, and some of the other friends I’ve made online that I try and keep close to my heart, to remind myself of the idyllic vision that the internet can be: connecting people, communities, and knowledge.
We just have to work hard to make the world we want to live in.
Fight on, friends.
Your faithful commander,
— I
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