A Missed Week
While I announced this only to myself, my intention was to post weekly on Wednesdays, hearkening back in some small way to the "Wednesday Weekly Recommended Reading" series that I originally conceived of as a kind of backbone support to whatever else I might write here. I’d kept up the new weekly posting consistently for (let’s count…) six weeks (not bad), and this week I missed the mark, posting this paltry thing on a Saturday. Some observations and comments:
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I feel OK about missing the target publication date, but less so about having fallen out of the practice of working on posts/essays throughout the week such that I would more or less always have something more or less ready to go.
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This may be a lesson in saving content: I did post the Duras thing on a Friday, thinking that book review/comment content could be "bonus," but maybe the lesson here is that I actually am probably only good for one post a week, for now.
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This is also a lesson in content design; I think I got too excited about the ventilated prose essay; I don’t mean for all posts to be that long, in-depth, researched, whatever. I think I set that as a bar for myself when in fact that was always meant to be somewhat exceptional, or at least posts like that were meant to be exceptional (for: I do have more planned, half-written, forthcoming). But if I’m to keep up the regular publishing practice, setting the bar very high in terms of time and effort is going to make that much harder than it needs to be, given this blog’s position in the overall hierarchy of my creative and other priorities.
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I managed OK the rather insane week during which I interviewed, but the actual first week of the new job (I started a new job this week) kicked my butt rather more in terms of mental energy and general time-management.
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That being said, though I have not really written toward/on projects meant for this little blog, I have continued doing my regularly scheduled reading (Wide Sargasso Sea was so, so good) and fiction writing, which, in terms of personal priorities, makes sense: this is one of the things that’s going to be nudged off the plate when it gets too full. And I feel perfectly at peace with that.
This is all to say I’m still thinking a lot about practice but, also, routine. Prior to this change I’d been working at the same place, albeit in a few different roles, for nearly six years (six years minus two days exactly), and after the pandemic eased enough for us to get back into some kind of office, my routines were set. I am very much a creature of habit. I am not (yet) used to working all week from home (though I do intend to find some other places from which to work). I am not (yet) used to the irregular, customer-driven meeting schedules at the new place (as for the last few years I’d mostly only ever had a few meetings a week, nearly all internal and release-driven). I am not (yet) up to speed at work (to be fair: it’s been all of four days), and there is a lot of content and application I need to get my arms around quickly. But. I have figured out how to keep reading and writing, at least in some small way(s). I have not yet built routines around my practice(s), but this will come. I mean for fuck’s sake: I haven’t even had a full five-day workweek yet.
So I’m late, so what. Tonight we’ll go dancing. Next week will be an opportunity to practice, to get back on the horse. I hope to finish the draft about platform ownership, or maybe semantic markup for poetry, but I probably won’t have time. Which is fine. There’ll be something else. It’s practice.