Still ruminating on how to do these status posts and what to do with them. For now, I’m going to be doing a general ramble and then a personal inventory.

So, I did resume Tales of MU when planned, as planned. My plan to get an eight week buffer built up before resuming did not work out. In fact, I wrote yesterday’s chapter yesterday. It was the first long writing I managed in months, though not for lack of trying. I feel like a log jam has broken up, though. I’m going to end this week with at least next week’s done (important, since I won’t be writing next week) and ideally the week after’s, and keep on keeping on until I’ve got my cushion, at which point the plan goes into effect.

I’m keeping myself on track with a “let’s see how high we can run up the score approach”. We’re in the first week of 2016 and I got an update up. We’ll see how many weeks in a row I can get. Focusing on that instead of getting hung up on how many weeks I miss should mean fewer missed weeks.

My general plan for how to proceed is the same as it was back when I announced January 4th for the resumption date. Trying to find the one even pace that I can keep writing at forever doesn’t work. If I try to write quickly all the time, I burn out. If I try to write slowly, I fizzle out. So the plan is to get up a head of steam, build up a backlog, and then coast along until the backlog falls below a certain safety margin. The coasting time will be time to reflect, recuperate, and plan what’s going to happen next, in addition to freeing me to work on other things.

As a sidenote about other things: one of the big problems I had in 2015 was what you might call “priority paralysis”… I tried to make too many things my top priority. Even when I was explicitly saying, “I need to prioritize. I’ll deal with this, and then that, and then the other thing,” my brain was still on, “But… that! And the other thing!” And so ultimately, a lot of days, I did nothing. Literally nothing of consequence. The longer I did nothing, the more crushing my failure to do the things that were so important became, and the harder it became to do anything.

I did not magically master the skill of juggling priorities and switching tasks when the clock hit 12 on New Year’s, so I’m going a bit slow and deliberate when it comes to picking up the obligations that fell. I’m sorry about that. If I could do everything, I’d… do everything. But I can’t. I’m just one person, just me, and I’ll do what I can, when I can. I wouldn’t ask anyone else to do anything more than that, but I have a hard time allowing myself to believe that it’s okay for me to do no more.

State of the Me

My sleep pattern is edging back to normal (just in time to throw it out the window next week, I suppose). I got up only a bit later than my ideal today, and expect to be back to normal tomorrow. We got our first real cold weather of the season the past couple of days. I started getting achy in my joints last week, when what was at that point “the cold front” started moving in, though it’s now much colder than that. The cold is good for my sleep, at least.