Guilty, I feel.
Mood Tools Week 15: Use writerly guilt as a compass.
This week I prioritized everything else in my life over working on my novel.
I did this with some degree of self-awareness after realizing I was feeling antsy about projects that I’d put on the back burner to prioritize working on my novel in this the season of the puppy.
But this season was also supposed to be the 100 Days of Summer.
And while adopt a dog and finish this draft of my novel were both on my list of priorities for the summer, so were launching a summer Substack series about Jeff Vandermeer’s Wonderbook, kicking off my monthly Tenacity Tales1 series, and a myriad repotting tasks for my woefully neglected jungle of houseplants.
I was feeling so antsy to tend to the tasks I’d been rewriting on my weekly to do list that I elevated them from my weekly to-do list to my weekly priority list. I also had some novel work on my goals for the week, but it quickly became clear that I had time to work on my novel OR tend to all the other things that were making me itch, so I chose to scratch my itches.
Which means with the exception of one short writing session, I didn’t work on my novel this week.
Instead, I repotted plants, wrote the first Wonderbook read-along essay, and finalized my first real Tenacity Tale. Also, my husband and I also put the pup in daycare on Saturday to lunch and see a matinee of Oppenheimer,2 I spent a day visiting family I haven’t seen in a while, and I tended to a lot of client work.
So it’s been a full and productive week, but instead of feeling satiated, I feel guilty.
Which leaves me with just one thing to say to my conscious: Cut the shit, would you?
Taking an unscheduled break isn’t ideal, but given I was hugely productive guilt hardly seems like an appropriate or fair response. In fact, this kind of guilt is precisely the reason I tend to make a conscious plan to step away when I need time off—the last two years, I decided to take a couple weeks off at the end of the year before the two weeks started—rather than just thinking I should be working on my novel and then just not—and it’s felt hugely rejuvenating.
Because planning to write and then not writing feels a bit like I imagine it feels to swallow rocks.
Unless maybe I’m thinking about it all wrong.
Maybe what I’m feeling isn’t some cute baby yoda3 guilt but some kind of early warning system that it’s not my conscious that should cut the shit but me.
Maybe guilt is just a compass pointing to my true north.
A reminder that as important as any thing else feels, the novel is my first priority (or my first priority after my husband and Shiloh).
A reminder that maybe its time to get back on track.
A reminder to myself to reread my post about the dangers of all-or-nothing thinking and get back to the work of crossing that finish line!
New Tenacity Tale this Wednesday!
If you go see this in the theater be forewarned that this movie had me choking back tears from about the two hour mark—turns out when a movie feels like a time machine, you feel incredibly impotent as you watch brilliant people make a mistake the world is still paying for generations later. Also be forewarned that your showing may be preceded by a trailer for the new exorcist movie that was so terrifying I’m still freaked out my the images 24 hours later.
Please don’t tell me baby Yoda’s name is Grogu. I know. I simply don’t care.
Cathy, I'm glad you said cut the shit before I did. I would never have been that blunt. But really, this sounds like a week you would celebrate, not berate. Your itches and scratching them sounded to me like the deck clearing we did before a deep dive with Jenna. I'm wondering if your planned long stretches of writing need to incorporate a week every so often to re-clear the decks so you can focus on the writing without the cacophony of unattended tasks playing in the background?