Kirk

Old Fashioned Letters

The Craft of Words /

I am old enough to remember writing letters.

It was also long ago enough that I remember being annoyed by having to write letters. When I was a child, the only time I wrote was to relatives who, in the days when air travel was outrageously expensive, I had only dim memories of. I remember the obligatory Christmas and birthday letters – sitting at the kitchen table writing and shaking out the cramp in my hand. I wrote obligatory letters to my parents from cadet camp in the summer. There was a time set aside for it, and NCOs enforced it. Write or pushups, my friend. Your choice. We all chose to write.

When I was a young man there was a period where I wrote letters. I met a young woman and we wrote letters to each other. These were not love letters, for we were not in love. But she was a prolific correspondent, with many partners. Her letters were delights, and I wish I had managed to keep them. I always hand-wrote my letters to her, although I had access to a typewriter and my handwriting was poor. That was part of the process, the slow and deliberate formation of words and sentences, taking care to arc the Cs and put the top on Rs to distinguish them from Is, which is a problem I still have when I write cursive.

Writing a letter is very different from writing an email. There is little or no quoting. You might write ‘in your letter of 14 January, you say…’ and then copy a line. But most often, you’d say something like in your letter of January 14, you talk of… and then summarize your understanding of what had been said. But even that, as I remember it, was fairly rare.

For me, the process of writing a letter started with the recieving of one. Some people – my first girlfriend was an example of this – tore open the envelope and skimmed the letter as soon as they got it. I never did this for personal letters. I would wait until I had time and space – dinner was simmering on the stove, or I had settled down on the couch in the evening – and then I opened and read the letter. I read it slowly, savoring the words.

I always read a letter at least twice before replying. I will often read it a third time, and a fourth, if it is a good letter. When it was time to write my reply, I would make a cup of something warm and sit at whatever writing surface I had chosen. I always needed a deep surface because I had to support my whole arm.

I took my time, and I wrote what I wanted to say. I wrote as if I was giving a speech to the recipient, with an ear to the tone and the cadence of the words.

A letter is like an essay. A good letter assumes that the reader doesn’t know something, or things, and presents these things in a way that is interesting and informative. They may be trivial things: the weather, Aunt Judy’s hip replacement, the window in the front room… but a good letter illuminates.

And that’s what I miss about writing letters. The slow, deliberate, contemplative process of it.

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An Excerpt

Working /

I’ve not talked a lot about what I’m currently working on. I suppose this isn’t surprising, as it is still about halfway done.

It’s a fantasy novel. The original germ that led to this was something I based some short stories on years ago in another life.

Oom – the largest, oldest, and most corrupt city in ten thousand dimensions.

That was it, that was the germ that started it. What sort of characters would live in such a city? I asked myself. What would they have to be like to survive in such a place? I came up with an unlikely pair. Once I did that, the stories I could write about them opened up.

I stopped writing for many years. This was due to life pressures – or at least that’s what I told myself at the time. Children and grueling work schedules are unforgiving.

When I returned to writing, two years ago, I started with characters I knew. I wrote a weird western, which I will polish and publish shortly before I am ready to publish the current work in progress. I wrote the first book in this fantasy trilogy, and I am partway through the second. It is taking shape nicely, I think. I have discovered some new and interesting characters scratching in the filth of city of Oom.

She loves money above all. The only reason she wants to bind the Company of this Lasko Hool right now is that, in her mind, she is binding them with my money, and keeping twice the binding-fee for herself. But I have the power now, Kooro Ko. I know what you want, and I know why you came to me. I am the only one who could possibly accomplish your end. Ozmooz does not trust you, and he will not be unguarded around you. But I, on the other hand… Kooro Ko, you are a master manipulator. But you need me. You need me, and that gives me power in my hand. The power of death.

Ilith leaned forward until her mouth was a finger’s breadth from Kooro Ko’s perfect lips, and the soft warmth of her breath was on Ilith’s face. To her left, the struggling lantern flame finally gave up, and the room subsided into close darkness.

“I will think on it,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I will think on it. What you suggest is possible, when the time is right.”

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Creaking

Life Itself /

I’ve reached a stage in my life where I have to work to keep my health. I’ve got various complaints and minor problems. Some of them I have sought medical advice and treatment for, and some of them I have just lived with.

About three years ago, I was diagnosed with a heart palpitation. Because of my age – in Canada, about 2100 men my age died of heart disease in 2019 – my GP sent me off to a cardiologist. I went through a battery of tests, which disclosed that the palpitation was annoying but harmless, but I had high blood pressure and some calcium deposits on my arteries. The advice was to lose weight, exercise, and take an array of drugs, including a statin to prevent further plaque. So since that time I have lost weight, exercised, and taken the drugs as prescribed. At my last appointment with the cardiologist, he pronounced my results excellent, and told me he didn’t need to see me any more.

I have an acquaintance. He is five years younger than I am, and about five years ago he was diagnosed with serious arteriosclerosis. He had a triple bypass, and was at that point merely obese. Declaring the problem fixed, he immediately returned to his old ways, drinking heavily, smoking, and eating gigantic large-calorie meals. I just saw him a little while ago. He is now over a hundred pounds overweight, with an umbilical hernia that can’t be operated on because he is so obese. He has to walk with a cane because his legs are so bad.

I just lost my ex-sister in law to advanced diabetes. She was warned repeatedly, and strongly, over twenty years, that she needed to eat more vegetables, stop smoking, exercise, and lose weight. She had been in and out of the hospital over the last year with complications of progressive organ failure due to diabetes. A couple of weeks ago, she fell in her home where her 91 year old mother was taking care of her. They took her to hospital, and she died overnight. She was fifty-five.

I am determineded to stave off the ravages of time as long as I can. I see friends my age who can’t turn their heads, or who can’t climb a flight of stairs without stopping for a breather. As you age, it gets harder and harder to keep things in decent condition. I do pushups most mornings, and it just hurts – in the shoulder, in the elbow, in the wrist – they’re not disabling pains, but it hurts. I work my neck to maintain cervical mobility as much as I can, and it hurts.

The alternative is not to do it. Just avoid that pain. But that doesn’t avoid it – that just moves it along into the future, and makes it worse.

Youth, as they say, is wasted on the young.

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Last Century’s Clothes Horse

Life Itself /

My family sometimes makes fun of me. It’s gentle fun, but fun nonetheless.

I change my clothes often, usually two or three times a day. However, it’s not that I put on clean clothing – rather, I change clothing depending on what I am doing. If I am working in the garden, for example, I have old torn pants that I will put on for that. If I am sitting and writing, I have old, worn clothing that I wear for that – what I consider my ordinary everyday clothing. If people are coming over, or I am going out of the house, I have good clothing that I put on for that.

I do this because wearing ‘good’ clothing to do tasks where they might become dirty makes me deeply uncomfortable. As a result I have clothing that is categorized by how good it is, and whether I

I sat down and thought about this the other day when I got a new t-shirt from a well known manufacturer of quality clothing. I had not bought clothing from them before, in part because I have a lot of trouble spending on clothes. And true to everything that I had read about this company, the t-shirt is very well made. It is exquisitely comfortable. It looks pretty good as t-shirts go. It should last a long time.

And when I went to light the charcoal grill for dinner, I changed it for an old one that is worn thin and bare, the logo cracked and half missing.

I thought about it: why did I do that? Why do I do that, change my pants and shirt two or three times a day? Wearing the old, worn stuff for multiple days between washings?

I realized that this goes back to when I was very young.

I used to think that we were middle class. Not rich, I thought, but pretty well off. There were poor people, and there were rich people, and there was everybody else – they were middle class. We were middle class.

When I look back on it now, I realize that we were not middle class. We would probably be classified now as working poor – my mother worried about money constantly. She managed to scrape up enough to get me, the oldest, new clothing from the Sears catalog every August ready for the school year: one or two outfits. She managed to find enough to get each of my younger brothers something new if I had stained or torn something, but otherwise they got my hand-me-downs. My sister, the only girl, got new clothing, but she had hand-me-down pants and shirts as play clothing.

My mother went absolutely insane if I got grass stains on my school clothing. Eating, playing… I learned to be careful. Back then, parents controlled their children by beating them.

There are other artefacts of this in my personality. I fuss about windows and doors being open or closed. I do this because we ran out of heating oil a few times when I was young. I remember those times, when a visit from the oil truck was a major expense, and I find that I abhor the waste of heat or cool.

And what drives me is fear. The fear of losing something that I can never get back – if I ruin this shirt, there isn’t another one. Heat is expensive… so expensive. If we run out, we could be in the cold.

Even as I write this, I am wearing a t-shirt with a hole under the armpit. It has a few old stains near the hem. I can eat in this shirt, I can sit in my office room and type. I have three newish, nice t-shirts upstairs. I will change into one of them to go out for lunch. I’d like, one day, to get beyond this, but I don’t think it likely.

I’ll also change my pants. My wife will roll her eyes.

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Growing Faint

Life Itself, The Craft of Words /

One of the strange things about the last year and a bit is that we have a shared experience.

That isn’t completely true, of course. Different jurisdictions have attempted to handle the pandemic via different methods. Some countries locked down hard, others less so. Some places mandated masks early, others later.

But we all shared the experience of our regular lives being upended in a short period of time. I, for example, had been looking forward to at least another three weeks of ski season in the sun. And then, within a week, I was in my house, with my family, and we did not go out together. One of us made a trip to the grocery store, masked, once a week.

We saved a lot of money on gasoline.

After the initial shock, I embraced the change. I was one of the lucky, able to work from my home. I set up a home work station right next to the desk I use to write. I got connected and reconfigured my work machine, and for the last year I have been able to do my job just as well as if I had been in the office. Better, actually, because I was never more than a minute from being able to deal with something work-related.

I started a home based exercise program, mostly body weight resistance exercises. I walked on the school field near our house early in the morning. I completed one novel, and started another, longer one. We binged TV shows together.

And yet, last fall, nothing mattered. I couldn’t gather enthusiasm for anything. I couldn’t complete anything – I had a dozen small projects started, and abandoned. Two dozen. More. Nothing seemed important enough to hold my attention.

I was languishing.

Odds are, a good number of you were, too. Hadn’t seen friends in months, hadn’t visited family, couldn’t go to the movies or the mall, couldn’t look at people’s faces when you did venture out into a sterilized world of hand sanitizer, door guards, lineups, masks, and nobody ever touching anyone.

For me, the state of languishing is similar to the state of depression in many ways. The big difference is that for the last year, I haven’t wanted to do things because nothing mattered. When I am depressed, I don’t do things because I can’t. It’s not that there is no point, it’s that they are impossible.

I’m depressed, I thought. That’s all this is, I’m just depressed, and I know how to deal with that. I increased my exercise and used a bright light in the mornings. I replaced my usual lunch of leftovers with a healthy smoothie. I put limits on my screen time, and on social media use.

None of these things helped. I felt better, but I still wasn’t getting anything done. Things still didn’t matter. I started using a reminder list and a schedule, attempting to regiment my life. That helped some, but only a little.

Then two things happened.

  1. I started Mindfulness exercise – at first I meditated for just five minutes a day, then ten, then fifteen. (I use, and recommend, Headspace).
  2. I read an article that my wife forwarded to me. This article. (It’s behind a paywall)

I realized that I was languishing. The things I had been doing to fight depression didn’t work, because I wasn’t depressed. I was in a sort of strange middle ground between doing well and doing really badly. I was in a state of mere existence. Nothing mattered because I couldn’t plan anything. I was in a continual state of reaction, sitting and waiting for the world to do something.

At first, I didn’t recognize the symptoms that we all had in common. Friends mentioned that they were having trouble concentrating. Colleagues reported that even with vaccines on the horizon, they weren’t excited about 2021. A family member was staying up late to watch “National Treasure” again even though she knows the movie by heart. And instead of bouncing out of bed at 6 a.m., I was lying there until 7, playing Words with Friends.

It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.

Adam Grant, ‘There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing’, New York Times, April 2021

The New York Times article described it precisely. Joyless and aimless.

As I write this, in May of 2021, we still haven’t been anywhere. We still wear masks whenever we go out. We haven’t eaten in a restaurant in forever. Haven’t listened to live music for what feels like the last half of my life. But I have made some changes, and things are starting to improve. There’s a reopening plan where I live. Other places in the world have reopened. There is hope.

I continue my daily meditations. Mindfulness practice has helped me enormously.

I have started writing the second volume of my planned trilogy. I managed to give it a title, as well: The Eye of Esheen Khor. (Titles are hard. I may write about titles one of these days.) Progress on it hasn’t been as fast or immersive as the first volume, but I am working on it, and it is improving.

Some believe that naming a thing gives you power over it. I wouldn’t go quite that far with languishing, but I will say that naming it has given me a strategy for fighting it, a strategy that I lacked before.

Like lockdown, I see light at the end of the languishing tunnel.

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Lift Up Your Tools

Technicalities, The Craft of Words /

A writer’s tools are very personal things. I am reminded of years working on the farm where I grew up. My father had his tools, and I couldn’t use them most of the time. We had, for example, two scythes for clearing weeds near fence and irrigation lines. He always used the same one, and as much as I thought I got the worse of the two, whenever I picked up the other one, it just wasn’t comfortable. My writing tools are similar.

I’m writing this using FocusWriter. I’ve configured a theme that makes it look like an old DOS based word processor, with a mono-spaced font in green over a black screen. I started back down this path after reading a paen to WordStar on Robert J Sawyer’s blog.

I have fond memories of writing with simpler tools – although I never published any of it, my earliest writing was on a typewriter. I had a portable Royal on which I wrote both college papers and a number of unpublished short stories. Those stories are still around in a box somewhere – earnest and pretentious, most of them. In the mid-80s I upgraded to an electric Panasonic, though I always fancied an IBM Selectric. The Panasonic featured an integrated type-lift correction tape and you could correct the immediate few letters. I used that machine for years and wrote many more short stories, all of which remain unpublished. Then, in the early 90s I bought my first PC. I did this with the intention of learning to write programs, which I eventually did, but not before I fell in love with simple ANSI text editors that were like WordStar and many of which allowed you to use WordStar keycodes. I found that I really liked the readability of green text on a black background.

When you ran DOS, you could only have one program in memory at one time. Even so-called multitasking environments like DesqView were in reality task-switchers. That had some limitations, but it had some major strengths, too, particularly for the task of writing. When all you have is a word processor in front of you, you have to write. Either that or admit that you’re not actually writing, and get up and go do something else. There’s no bullshit like checking Twitter or responding to a quick email or looking up the weather. Write, or do not.

I have lately been looking to recapture that simplicity of interface, free of distraction. Microsoft Word is useful for some things, and pretty much a necessity for others, but for simple, focused composition, for flow, I find it cluttered and clunky. After reading Sawyer’s column above, I started considering whether I could make WordStar work for me.

To be clear, I never used WordStar back in the day. At the time I acquired my first PC (a 386-33 with 4MB of RAM!) WordStar was already considered obsolete. With people looking forward from single-tasking DOS to multi-tasking environments like OS/2 and Windows, simple 25×80 two color editors seemed archaic.

And yet I found myself leaving Windows (3.0) frequently. I wrote in a shareware editor named Boxer. I wrote thousands and thousands of lines of code in Turbo C++ and Turbo Assembler. There were no distractions – the entirety of your machine was consumed with that single interface, that single task. If you had email, it had to wait until you’d finished what you were doing and had switched programs.
It’s that focus, that flow, that I would like to recapture. When the only tool I had was a typewriter, well, the only thing you could do is write. I would take my coffee and go into the spare room in the townhouse when I had an hour or two, and I would do nothing but write.

Now, at this point I’ve managed to write two first drafts of substantial works on a multitasking Windows machine. But it has been tough going at times. There are advantages to being able to look up a word or research a topic without closing the word processor and starting some other program, but when I’m in the zone, I don’t want anything between me and the flow of the words.

Ultimately I decided that there are too many limitations with WordStar, and with the more modern Windows clone WordTsar, even if the latter was ready for prime-time, which it isn’t. WordStar is limited to the old DOS 8.3 filename convention, for one thing. There are ways around that, but they require some hoop-jumping. Another problem is that an ancient program has no understanding of modern document formats, and WordStar is so old now that few modern programs can read its files. Again, there are ways around that, but once again that requires extra steps… and avoiding extra steps and bits and pieces are what this quest is all about.

So for now I have decided to try FocusWriter. I am composing this on FocusWriter set to a simple green mono-spaced font on a black screen. FocusWriter gets out of your way, hiding its simple toolbars until you mouse over to the edge of the window. There are still phones, of course, and other programs and notifications… but with FocusWriter, the words on the screen have the most important place.

As I finish this blog entry, something else has come to my attention. Freewriter offers what are essentially electronic typewriters – simple screens that accept a stream of input from a keyboard – mechanical, in the case of the original Freewriter. You can’t edit, only write.

Back to the old days… I’m going to have to think about that. Maybe this is what I’ve been looking for all along.

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Dreams Are Strange Things

Life Itself /

It isn’t surprising to me that dreams are thought to be portals to alternate realities, at least of some description. I don’t usually remember my dreams, but when I do, as I do this morning, they are strangely twisted landscapes in which alternative systems of logic apply.

I don’t actually believe that dreams are windows into anything other than the dreamer’s mind: I recall, many years ago, dreaming of a sequence of numbers that, in the dream, won a lottery. I went out and bought a lottery ticket, and kept buying tickets for some weeks. That number did not win anything.

I woke this morning from a dream.

I was returning from prison – I have no idea what I had been imprisoned for. I walked across the parking lot of a gas station under sparse Garry oaks to my townhouse, which seemed to have been built in the parking lot of a 1960’s era strip mall. When I got to the townhouse, I saw that the front steps had been taken away.

“This must have happened while I was in prison,” I said in my dream, with impeccable logic.

I opened the door somehow, though the knob would have been about four feet higher than I could have reached. I managed to climb in by bracing my feet on both sides of the door frame – again, this dream lodging obeyed its own peculiar logic. Once inside, I discovered that someone was in the middle of extensive renovation. A few dream-minutes later, I realized that it was repair, not renovation, for there appeared to be some rot and water damage that were being removed.

The stairs to the upper floor had been replaced, although they were linked together like the slats on a blind, and you could flatten them into a slide or move them back into being stairs just by pushing on them. The entire lower floor was a skeleton, all of the wall board stripped off, and the bare plywood of the floor exposed.

I decided to go upstairs to see what the condition was up there. I flipped the stairs into stairs and started climbing. After a while, I realized that I was climbing past figures cocooned in sleeping bags, figures that looked at me grumpily as I passed. When I reached the upper floor, I found that once again dream logic was present, for the upper floor was at least four times the size of the lower. I did not pause to reflect on the fact that this was not evident from outside the building.

I found that I had a roommate. I was unsurprised by this, so I suppose I must have had a roommate all along and just not thought of it. The unnamed roommate, who bore no resemblance to anyone I can think of other than Cousin Larry from the 80’s sitcom Perfect Strangers, was in his turn surprised to see me. He had no idea I was getting out of prison.

He had been busy, it seems. In addition to repairing or renovating the lower floor, he appeared to have turned the upper floor into a combination of a bed and breakfast and a call center. There were cubicles around, and the walls had been painted dark. Clumps of people gathered and talked, and there was a general swirl of activity that made finding him a little difficult.

There had to be a hundred and fifty people up there on the second floor of my townhouse. My roommate did not seem to consider this unusual, or even remarkable, and he balked at my suggestion that I needed a place to live, and all of these people, including the ones on the stairs, needed to leave.

I woke up, not having resolved this situation.

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A Difficult Year

Life Itself /

It’s been a difficult year. For you, for me, for everybody.

It’s one thing to acknowledge that. We all do, usually in a flippant sort of way. Oh, it’s just more of 2020, we say. Everything is crazy now. That part is true, but it’s a surface truth. Things are crazy right now, but what does that really mean?

I’m the sort of person who you would expect would handle a lockdown pretty well: I’m an introvert, a reader and a writer who makes a day living in a field where he can do his job remotely. I don’t socialize widely, I’m not a party- or bar-goer. I’m just the sort who should be able to survive a lockdown without much trouble.

That’s what I thought.

But that is not what happened. I’ve found myself struggling to stay focused. This isn’t from time to time, either, this is all day every day. I’ve never been someone who needs a lot of social interaction, but the complete lack of connection to anyone outside my immediate family has had a sort of wearing effect on me. I suspect this is true of a large number of people, but I’m not meeting them and talking with them.

Whether we like to admit it or not, we are all social animals. One of the reasons we consider prison (and even more so, solitary confinement) a punishment is precisely because of the social isolation. We employ it as punishment and control for children – that’s what time out is. Isolation for a short time.

I think that no matter where you are on the introversion/extraversion scale, prolonged isolation isn’t good for you. As much as I had fantasies of being alone at stressful times in my life, it isn’t good for me, either.

When the lockdowns started, I got back over an hour a day. I polluted less. I spent less. After the stress of the change, the first couple of months felt freeing – I was able to do my job without leaving my house. I was one of the truly fortunate ones.

But about six months in, I found that I was having real trouble making use of that extra time. I couldn’t get things done. I was in the middle of writing a book – I’d go days where I dithered and only wrote a few words a day. I had periods where I didn’t write anything at all, and other periods where I rewrote, then rewrote again. It wasn’t only that, either. I wasn’t getting things done around my house. Things that I used to take joy in seemed flat and uninteresting.

I realized that I was depressed.

I have battled depression at times in my life. I was a depressed teenager. I went through a significant depression in my twenties that I worked through and ultimately defeated. Since then, I have been able to head it off when I feel it coming on, using techniques I learned in counselling more than thirty years ago. I also suffer from seasonal depression – it was only a few years ago that I recognized this. Now I use a high intensity light for thirty minutes most mornings between October and March, and it definitely helps.

This time it has been a bit different. I think everybody is depressed, or at least more depressed than they were a year ago. You can’t talk to a counsellor face-to-face. I don’t know about you, but for me, teleconferencing is useful, but it doesn’t take the place of actual human interaction.

I miss people’s faces. I miss smiles. I miss cooking for friends.

I decided that what worked thirty-plus years ago wasn’t working for me this time around. I started investigating things that I could do to help myself. I landed on headspace. I realize that this isn’t for everybody, but it has been working for me. Daily meditation has helped me calm jackrabbit thoughts. I am less anxious. And now, two weeks in, I can feel focus starting to return.

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A Small Celebration Is In Order

Words on a Screen /

I wrote ‘The End’ yesterday morning.

It’s not really the end: I’m actually only a third of the way through the story arc. But it is the end of a 110k word fantasy novel that has been months in the writing.

It’s a good feeling, but it leaves me feeling a bit lost. Yesterday, after I wrote those words, I didn’t do anything. I futzed around and thought about what I should write next. I worked on the tool flow that I use, I dug up some references, I moved my ideas file to a new place… that sort of thing.

This morning I’m back at it.

I’ve chosen to call this one The Hanged Man. I don’t seem to be able to come up with titles easily: the writing flows most of the time, but I find titles hard. In one respect, I think that a title centers a work – if you start with a clear idea where the story is going, a title can really solidify that. All this time, I’ve been writing this book as ‘Novel One’, which doesn’t inspire anything.

Part of my problem in this regard is that I like to use something from the story, something that will tweak the reader to say, ah, so that’s the concept from the title! But I’m a seat-of-the-pantser, as they say, and so I don’t know all of the things that will be in the story until I get near the end. It’s a circular logic trap. I don’t know what the title will be until I’ve written the things that would have been informed by the title.

I do need to get better at this. I need to learn how to develop a plot, and how to work to it. This novel started with a developed plot, and about thirty thousand words in, I discovered things about the characters that weren’t in the plot. I liked those things, and so those things stayed and the plot I’d developed went out the window. I suspect this is likely due to an insufficiently developed plot document, and I am going to try to rectify that with novels Two and Three.

Although Novel Two now has a title: The Eye of Esheen Khor.

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A Christmas Break

Life Itself, Words on a Screen /

I seem to take a Christmas break whether I want one or not.

Part of me suspects that the reason that northern hemisphere societies favor a winter solstice festival is the recognition that this is a dark time for the soul. As the light diminishes, human energy goes with it. Some people are more affected by this than others. I am certainly one of those. For example, this simple little blog entry, the one you are reading right now, took me three days to write.

It almost goes without saying (as he says it) that this year has been particularly challenging. I’ve not felt the weight of grey, sodden skies as heavily as this in many, many years. Some years, here in the northwest, the winters are colder, skies clearer, snow more frequent. Other years, like this one, are a seemingly endless train of flat grey storms pelting water, where a rare day of watery sunlight is a thing to be celebrated. These years do dump a lot of snow in the mountains, the better to enjoy my favorite sport, but this year my ability to enjoy that sport is strictly limited.

I have generally found that I fare better over the solstice if I have something outside myself to keep me focused. Usually, the best thing is employment. I’m less productive there, too, as are many people, but at least I have the structure of a prebuilt social environment, and a set of tasks that must be performed. If I leave me to my own devices this time of year, I tend to fall into counterproductive patterns of scattered thinking and half-finished miniprojects.

Given that the goal of my current writing project, now entering its second year, is to replace my day job income with writing income, I will need to establish some better rituals around writing production. If I’ve learned anything about this craft in my sixty years of life, it’s that you can’t wait for inspiration.

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