First, before we get to anything else, can someone check and see if this last SkillShare class is actually live? I posted it, oh, last Friday, I think, and SkillShare wrote back that they’d hidden it because they felt the instructions for the project weren’t explicit enough, so I fixed that and wrote back on Tuesday, and, well, I’ve heard nothing. But I think you can find it in the search–though I don’t know if you can actually sign up for it.
The class is here: https://skl.sh/3ROgPhr
Thank you in advance.
Tuesday we talked about how perhaps some of the reason the beginning of the year contains such promise is because it’s kind of a weird, well, not liminal time, but a period where there’s a bunch of hope coupled with a weird lack of other things to do (due to the holidays being over and normal life not running at full speed yet).
I think we’re hitting that point where life gets back up to speed and everything goes back to normal, and everyone’s productivity falls off to standard levels.
(In fact, at my gym class yesterday, the teacher was like, we’ve made it past the two week drop-off!)
(Though I started going in mid-December so it’s unrelated to any resolutions anyway.)
Actually, when I sat down to write this post, I was like, oh, I haven’t done anything since Tuesday! Which isn’t true, in retrospect, because I did do some painting in my sketch journal and do my critiques for the critique marathon, but something does…feel different.
Which now that I’m typing it up, may just be my own brain getting in the way.
Or, it may be that Tuesday’s blog post was the last thing I did on a very successful Tuesday where I got a ton done, which was a snow day right after the MLK holiday (so two days in a row where I got a ton done, because the spouse was out of the house and the small, mobile ones spent a ton of time on a joint Minecraft project and I was left on my own) and that skewed my perceptions of everything ever.
Consciousness is both a blessing and a curse.
Life has been very life-y the past few days, which isn’t helping. Also, my laptop will NOT talk to the printer which is making it hard to print out chapters for paper editing.
(Also my spouse was like, why do you print them out anyway? And I tried to explain how your brain works differently editing on paper versus on a screen and I think he probably doesn’t believe me. But anyway.)
(Also I can scribble all over paper with a red pen which is very satisfying.)
(Anyway.)
How are you feeling, squider? Do you agree about the first few weeks of January? Is your momentum starting to slow, or is it still smooth sailing?
Oh, I just thought of something else. Maybe part of why the beginning of January is so productive is because you still remember all your goals. Like, invariably when I go over my goals at the end of the year, I find some things that I have completely forgotten about. Like last year, I was going to publish Deep and Blue and then I…didn’t. Just completely spaced it. I don’t know why, but I make goal documents and then I don’t check them periodically (though I have, hopefully, built in a monthly check for this year. Time will tell), and then at the end of the year I am eternally surprised.
(I brought this up on WriYe, where everyone has a thread with their goals at the very beginning, because someone else was mentioning the same thing. Checking goals is, in theory, as easy as looking at your very first post, and yet…)
So! Maybe part of the productivity is you remember all your projects and can make progress on all of them.
Or maybe I should stop worrying about the psychology of goal setting, and just work on my revision.
See you next week, squiders!
