So, today is Wōdnes-daeg and once again I am going to take what I have been learning and writing about it here. This week, something as introspective as last week, and so, alas, I have no facts to speak of. This entry is going to be about how my email might just be what's been keeping me in my...rut? old habits? poor mindset? It's hard to really explain.
Here's the background for this discovery.
For the first week of the new year I was with old friends from high school and with my fiancee. Needless to say this meant that my regular schedule was interrupted. My daily writing flagged, I didn't create any new articles, and I let my inbox fill up for the most part. When I got back home I felt refreshed and invigorated, and it seemed that all of the energy of adding one to the number that the West chooses to represent the current year was still with me. I still felt as fresh and ready for whatever I had to do as I did a week earlier.
With this feeling pushing me forward I actually had a few relatively productive days. I felt good about what I was doing, and wasn't really stressing out about my pace or how slowly my organizing was going in relation to what I was organizing for (a new job hunt, getting myself into a steadier freelance writing habit, and general things that carried over from 2011).
Tonight, however, I finally decided to get to my email after taking a few days away from it. This hiatus was mostly due to my new found ability to actually say to myself "no, I can just do that tomorrow, it's late, and I should get to bed instead," and actually follow through.
After checking my email, though I felt like my old mindset had returned. That I was just awash in information and paralyzed by there being too much to process. As someone who has been published in print and only on the web via DMS, getting into writing freelance content or SEO specialized stuff is like learning to write in a different language. DMS articles are in a dialect of that language, but the learning curve seems much more merciful. And the possible starting points are far fewer.
Anyway, realizing this about my email consumption makes me think that I should do a few things.
First, seriously consider just short story writing and articles that I know I can write well and forget about branching out into new forms and topics and letting all of the other possibilities lie dormant for now.
Second, re-organize how I go through my email, or sit down and actually look at the myriad of newsletters that I am signed up for to assess whether I should keep them or cut them loose.
Because I am no email addict I think that the second might be more likely. But the first is also appealing.
So, it's really grainy and rather a thin connection, but from all of this I have learned that I am not one who can process a ton of information from multiple channels at once, and that what they say about writing is true - at least as far as my confidence goes. You've got to write what you know.
It's a good thing that I know myself, or this blog would have fewer entries, that's for sure. :/
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