Monster Blog is unleashed!
Water plus dirt equals MUD!!!!!
Blogasaurus!!! It eats other blogs! (Mostly this one!)
Chill as Chris smashes season two over season one's head. ("Let's do this like Brutus!")
Stick around afterward and hear Smashing Fascists sing their Doom Metal eighties sit-com covers.
HERE♩ WE ARE…FACE TO FACE….♬ A COUPLE OF SILVER SPOONS! **GUITAR RIFF**
Oh also there will be fitness stuff.
The blog is moving to WordPress and changing names, largely due to my getting married and taking HER name in a middle finger to patriarchy and marriage traditions that had everything to do with property transfer.
Fear not though. Writing About Writing will live on (although a few characters and series will not be making the move). It will become one part of a much larger blog that will touch on my priesthood to The Morrigan (a pagan Irish deity) general woo woo* stuff, tarot, social justice (I'm a social justice BARD—because of course I am), fitness—including my own adventures running and CPT career, and any stab I make or have made at fiction.
*Salutes* "General Woo Woo"
And they're coming soon!
I'm so excited to open the curtains, but it'll be just a little longer. What I can tell you is that what I thought was going to be a month coming, looks a lot more like it's going to MAYBE early April and might even roll out next week.
In the meantime, the folks who kept the bills paid around here have been saints of patience while tragedies in my life were going off like microwavable popcorn in the last half of the second minute. I'm going to focus on some of the rewards I've promised them like the "Inside Scoop" Newsletter and an early access article.
So Rhapsody is better. I'm not in the middle of a medical crisis. And copy of The Muppet Christmas Carol is missing. Clearly, it's time to get back to writing. However, that turns out to be a lot harder because of all this other stuff that has cluttered up my schedule in the meantime. I didn't just have five empty hours a day waiting for me like "Insert Writing Here." I have to go and get rid of things to make room for it, sweeping my calendar clear like it's a desk of bills and I'm Steve Martin in The Jerk.
What? Too '70s for you? My 46-year-old references aren't "hip" enough for you?
Well anyway, I sat down with my priorities and my calendar and I made some really hard choices.
The 7-10 Split (Finding Four to Five Hours a Day—Not Twelve)
First let me start by saying my days will be shorter now. I'm not trying to find 8-16 hours a day to write. Even my overachiever ass was having trouble with that. The vortex of writing noisily slurped up everything and swallowed it down….uh….but not in the fun way. Noisy fun slurping would be so much better.
I'm in a very different place than I was five years ago. That place is Concord. Which is nothing like Richmond. (Haha, little Bay Area humor there.)
Okay but really though. Cancer. Miscarriages. Death (not mine). These things make you look at life a little differently. Even before I met Rhapsody, I was starting to realize that I could pay the bills writing only if I had absolutely no work/life balance and my "innie" worked twelve-, fourteen-, or even sixteen-hour days. Sometimes I would wake up, wander downstairs and spend a whole day on an article without ever changing out of my pajamas. It was high pressure and low reward.
I technically made ends meet, but only technically. There was an AWFUL lot of extra money watching The Contrarian that paid for brand-name peanut butter and Prada paperclips.
True story: I ended up in Urgent Care after a series of sleepwalking incidents and the doctor got about five questions in before it was obvious even to me that I needed more rest, more sleep, and less stress. I actually got told I was going to get heart disease and die early if I didn't learn to chill the fuck out. Now I pay attention to my sleep hygiene so I don't wake up binge-watching Iron Fist Season 2 (~shudder~).
But something funny happened when I forced a work/life balance—particularly one that involved a little bit of physical activity. You would think the less I wrote, the less I would get written, but that's not how it shook out. I started to notice that I could do the same amount of writing in less time. Give me sixteen hours, and I'd finish up around 15:55. Give me twelve hours, I'd finish up around 11:55. Give me six hours, and I'd finish up around 5:55.
I mean EVENTUALLY I would run out of time before I finished. I can't write a five-hundred-page novel in an afternoon just because there's a stopwatch ticking off the seconds. But my productivity almost always involved absolutely exactly as much procrastination as the job could handle, whether that was five hours or five days.
Not only that, but my head felt clearer after a good walk and between that and the way the smaller container of a deadline "put a lid on the pot" I was able to get a lot more done in a lot less time. After about four hours, I reached a point of diminishing returns. (Or, to be more accurate to my ADHD ass, it was only under deadline with four hours REMAINING that I achieved a point of maximum increasing returns.) So I started trying to exercise more and more and even took up running.
Then I fell in love, moved, had a miscarriage (well, Rhapsody did) and got cancer, my liver blew up, Rhapsody's boss was killed in a robbery, we got evicted by a landlord who wanted to flip the house we were in but not pay a relocation fee, and then chronic pain struck DURING the move and didn't go away until surgery. Good times.
After cancer, I decided I wanted a whole new thing. Not a change from writing—I still want to write—an addition. An "equal partner" in my career. A yin to my yang. A Bert to my Ernie. A donkey to my Shrek. A Chewbacca to my… okay, you get the point. I still want to write, but I wanted to stop living my financial life so close to the edge (even though I was technically "making it"), and I wanted a second job (not a side gig, but a full 50%, half-and-half job) that was as FAR AWAY from sitting in a chair as I could possibly get.
I also had some other guidance and direction that I speak of in my other blog. My calling to serve The Morrigan became clearer, and one of the things I was called to do was create a container from which I could do the work of being a priest. Everything from training as a death doula to continuing to be a loud and obnoxious writer to martial arts. One of those things was to help people find fitness (and try to make it as accessible as possible, but I'll get into that elsewhere). So I went back to school, got a Certified Personal Trainer certificate, took my NASM test, and took on clients.
So now I spend time working out and teaching others to work out. I write MUCH faster in a lot less time. I still need to find time to work, but I only need to find FOUR HOURS.
Will I write a little less? Probably.
Will I be happier and more well balanced. Almost certainly.
Will I binge watch Season Two of Iron Fist ever again? Absofuckinglutely not.
Easy Changes
The first round of changes wasn't really going to be much effort. They just took a little recalibration. I spent a long time with a lot of buffer time between activities just because you never knew when plans were going to explode and a day was going to take a sharp right turn into Whatthefuckersville. By eight in the morning, a day of classes and work could turn into staying home to nurse Rhapsody through a panic attack, a handhold to the doctor, or a step-up to take care of the kids because the pain was just too great.
I spent tons of time on frivolous phone games and time wasters just trying to regulate my nervous system from the last panic or crisis and keep myself from getting too deep into anything before the next one cropped up.
But Rhapsody had surgery and is feeling much better. Last weekend she danced all night and then woke up and walked around the neighborhood for three hours. The grief has faded to a dull ache. She is a little worried about what's next since it's been four years of needing to get through [the next thing] in order to survive, but these are like the background radiation of generalized anxiety, and not a special version of pain or grief.
And my own nervous system's response to that unrelenting couple of years is starting to calm. I don't need an hour to wake up in the morning just so I can face the day. I don't need to keep the afternoon open any longer because I might need 90 minutes in the middle to do school pick up. I don't need to be "on call," and that means I don't need to be playing phone games for hours or just giving my fourth rewatch of Supernatural a thousand-yard stare. My trauma response isn't hair trigger, ever ready for another several hours of being in a support role and then a couple more of regulating myself.
The problem is that I did this for years. If it wasn't one thing, it was another. Adaptations turned into habits. And habits turned into lifestyle. Eventually you stop trying to jump right back on the horse because what is the point? So now, after years of taking it slow because it might blow up, I'm used to moving at snail pace, and it's hard to hit the ground running. I have to make a conscious effort to crack my overcautious cadence open and undo it all for a little bit of focus and urgency. But if I can tighten things up again, I'll gain a lot of time in moments here and there just by being a little more disciplined about how I use my time, a little more determined to get some work done, and less distractible by things I needed for the last few years to calm me.
Estimated time gain: 3-4 hours/week
Tougher Changes
So once the easy changes were identified, it was time to really get to work. When a schedule is bleeding, there are usually two reasons for it. 1) You're spending time on things that aren't a priority. 2) You have no idea how much time you're spending on anything—priority or not.
In my case, both these things were true.
So step one was to track where my time was going and step two was to make a list of priorities. These are MY priorities. Yours might be different, include more family time, include more downtime… whatever.
Priorities
(*A lot of The Morrigan Priest Duties are double dips with other things. I can write a social justice article and it's priest work and writing, for example. [The Morrigan is big on social justice.] Or when I go to the Unitarian Universalist Church, it is because the pagan community—even here in the very woo-woo, alternative Bay Area—is pretty scattered, disorganized, and largely into their own thing rather than community, so it is the compromise I have made to find a community of like-minded, multi-denominational, queer-friendly, leftist-activist folks to be of service to AS a priest while I begin the work of decades building something local and intentional.)
What combing through my calendar this carefully meant was that I needed to make sure my time reflected my priorities. Not just a matter of not wasting time, but was I spending a lot of time on something far down the list from higher priorities that were getting neglected? Here are a couple of examples:
1-My service to my community through the UU Church is important to me, but if I sign up for every march, vigil, sit in, "know your rights" class, volunteer opportunity, food distribution across their LGBTQ+, POC, and help-for-the-unhoused activism, I would be doing that a couple of hours a day and three to five hours each day on weekends. That's wonderful, but I have other things I want to be doing as much and sometimes more than church activism, so I need to spread those things out and go to one or two a week instead of every one I get an email about. I want to go, be seen as reliable, learn to organize, and also do a lot of other things too.
2- I want to run really long distances—half and full marathons—but I'm going to have to give those up. They take months of training and involve more and more hours of running and cross-training every week until they eat 10-15 hours a week of time. I had to make the tough choice that the time investments for me to run those kinds of races were going to take too much time away from things I want to do more. I'll stick to 5k's, 5 miles, and the occasional long run of 8-10 miles and set my goals within that container. Maybe someday I can push for longer distances.
There are a half a dozen or so more choices that were like this—they're activities I want to do but that are clearly down the priority scale. Now that I'm writing, SOMETHING has to get bumped, and if I'm not deliberate about what it is, I'll end up scratching my head at where the time has gone.
Estimated time gain: 1-2 hours/day
The Really REALLY Hard Choices
So that left nothing but really hard choices.
And I mean REALLY hard choices.
Up till now was Kirby's Dream Land and now we were on to Dark Souls.
Things I wanted to do held up against other things I also wanted to do…and one of them HAD to go. The stuff that stings to admit you're not in a place to do. The stuff that HURTS to give up. It's not enough to say, "Hey I want to be a writer more than a death doula, so that training will have to wait until I have a little more free time." No, that's child's play compared to this shit. These are choices that require a careful examination of my priorities and the most strategic way to serve them, and the grudging admission that I can't do everything I want to do. That required just acknowledging that my time was going towards lower priority shit. This requires strategy and planning.
For example, I wanted to stay in school. There are more fitness certificates I want to get to be the best certified person trainer I can be, and I may want to get a nutrition certificate as well. Eventually I want to open my own community outreach gym/martial arts studio/woo-woo center that is accessible to lower- income folks, and I can imagine an associates in kinesiology will help immeasurably with that. I like the routine that classes bring to a week. I even just like BEING a student. Taking my work to the library or cafeteria and working in a change of environment. But right now, that's just six hours a week I don't have. I've got the certificate I need to take on clients and make money RIGHT NOW. So school isn't urgent compared to other things I want to do.
And I had to admit that right now was not a good time for high-intensity dating. Technically, I have the TIME to date. But it's not just a matter of holes in the calendar where dates could go. There's so much energy expended in capital-R Relationships™. Particularly as you start to get past the "whatever's offered" stage and talk about what each of you wants. That hypothetical person would have to slide effortlessly into my life (local [but truly], kitchen table, experienced at non-monogamy, etc.), and I'm feeling pretty picky right now. I don't need a relationship to feel full and content. So while I'm technically open to the possibility, I have a lot of other things that are pulling my focus right now. Anyway, it's not like I wouldn't bang half my friends if they wanted to. That's a lot less emotional investment, is still pretty fun, and fits my life better at the moment.
Dropping school (for now at least) and giving up dating (for now at least) are huge. They're both things I really want to be doing, but they need to be sacrificed if I'm going to get back to writing. They put a lot of time back on my schedule.
Estimated time gain: 10-15 hours/week
The Final Answer
I ended up with at least three hours every day and big chunks of time on Thursday and Friday. Weekends are configurable but now include enough time to get some writing done. My Monday-Wednesday are going to be a little light in the writing department. I'll need to make sure my big articles are getting written between Thursday and Sunday.
It wasn't easy, but writing is worth it. And if you are trying to make writing The Thing You Do™--or even just An Important Thing You Do™, at some point….eventually…you're going to have to do something LIKE this. We all have to check in once in a while and see if our priorities match up with our activities. I can't tell you what YOU will give up and what you will keep, but maybe my process can help you streamline the things that are not priorities in your life. Most things in world out there are literally made to be just a little too addictive and creep in without you noticing.
But writing is worth the effort.
If you're writing AS a full-time job—or if you want to be—it probably takes you full-time-job amounts of time to get the writing done that you need to. One of the strangest misconceptions writers seem to labor under about making money writing (one that I am constantly calling out here) is that one can make Full Time Salary™ with Weekend Warrior™ effort. You can get published. You can finish your book. You can PUBLISH your book. You can get paid—maybe even enough to pay a bill every month with the fruits of your wordsmithery labor. But you won't be taking summers in the French Riviera if you don't work hard and almost every day. If you're a household name, you might be able to rest on your laurels for a few years making asynchronous income, but I fucking PROMISE you that you also didn't get to be a household name by working ten hours a week.
And let me tell you, when you're not writing full-time, other stuff seeps in. (And, of course, though I tell this as a cautionary tale and for the sake of transparency in my process, I should point out that by "you," I mean ME….but I probably also mean you, so be careful.) I never stopped writing every day (another drum I bang all the time), but boy did I drop off of trying to get posts up and sit down for ten to twelve hours and edit and do all the hard work of the space in between writing for pleasure and publication. I just made sure I was keeping the habit so that the tools of process (and maybe a few tools of craft) would still be waiting for me when I came back.
Most are.
A few are stiff and rusty.
A couple I'm going to have to start over on.
It could be worse. And if I hadn't written every day, it WOULD be worse. And if I'd written more, it would be better, but that's where your own life balance and priorities come in. I wasn't willing to tell someone I loved (going through the worst thing they'd ever been through in their life) that they needed to find someone else to talk to about it. Maybe you make different choices.
Now…..I am all too well aware that I have been writing a long line of "Here's what went wrong in the LAST few months…" posts spanning all the way back to 2021. Miscarriages. Cancer. Terrible breakups. Liver disease. Death of boss-friends. Evictions. Debilitating chronic pain. Multiple surgeries and recovery—both me and Rhapsody. Tons of pain and anxiety. I don't want to bore you with another post like that. In the words of Mrs. Landingham: "So you're having a little bit of a decade."
And it wasn't all bad. In there I fell in love a couple of times and took some trips and got to pivot completely on my career by going back to school for a year to get a certificate.
But in that time of writing much much less, other stuff oozed into all the cracks…and not in the fun way.
It wasn't like I ever said, "Hey, I'm going to do this other thinginstead of getting back to writing."
[Okay, actually, that's not true. There was that year of community college where I very deliberately said, "I don't want to take three years to become a certified personal trainer, so I'm going to do this all in one year even if it eats up some my writing time—which holy hells did it ever.]
But other than that very minor incident—hardly worth mentioning really—with the nine months off, I didn't ever deliberately sacrifice my writing time to other things. It wasn't like I was making a choice. It just sort of happened. I took on minor things in the cracks and crannies, since I was doing a lot less writing anyway. A commitment here. A diversion there. A weekly hike. A daily run. "Yeah, I can take the kids to school every morning." "Sure, I can help out with that." A sense of how much I could put on my plate that wasn't based on needing hours a day to write.
One more thing.
One more thing.
One more thing.
Mostly I was sick or in support mode…or sometimes both. Hospitalized. Doing chores. Running errands. Helping process grief or chronic pain. And it wasn't all bad either—sometimes I watched Daredevil because Rhapsody was tired of Love Is Blind and we were both home. Stuff just kind of dribbled into my schedule and once it got in there, it became VERY hard to get it back out. In the last year, I repeatedly noticed that on days where I wanted to write—where I was really excited about it—but there just wasn't time. I was running from thing to thing to thing and then my day would end. And every week I said "Okay, I'm going to be better on the weekend when I have time." And every weekend I would run ragged after the kids and say, "Okay, I'm going to be better during the week when the kids are gone and I have a routine."
Months of this.
And loved ones…. Loved ones. Oh dear sweet loved ones. They ARE loved—and they love you, I promise—but they can smell free time like a shark with a drop of blood. And if you're not wrapping your arms around that time, declaring it writing time instead of "free" time, and growling at them when they get close, like Rocco when you reach towards his bowl for that bacon the kids slipped him…you're going to have that precious time taken away by the most well-intentioned, well-meaning, deeply-loving, sincere people in your lives who just don't understand why it is that you can't do this ONE thing for them during all that "free" time you have.
Suddenly, I'm ready to write and champing at the bit to write and humping the WALLS to write, and my schedule is saying, "When, Chris? When would this writing happen?"
I'm a writer. I write. I have to write. If I don't write, it feels like a part of me is broken. So finding the time I'd lost to so many other things was the highest priority of February, and I wouldn't rest until I figured it out. I know a lot of people talk about writing in these terms, but when you take a look at their actual lives, they don't get much writing done. And I was about to be one of those people, speaking in florid, purple prose about how much I loved writing while doing little of it.
And so I took to my schedule. Every reclaimed hour its own battle of wills and Tetris'ed logistics.
I'm not going to tell you what matters in your own life or what might be more important than writing in a moment or in a week or in a month or in a year. That's for you to decide. I've heard people tell me there's no time to write when they play 8 hours of video games a day, and they're clearly kidding themselves, and I've seen people keep at it every day but the scheduled date of their own abdominal surgery and they're clearly more dedicated than me. Most everything else is in the liminal space between those two extremes, and I'm not here to judge what makes a "real" writer. Real is someone who writes.
What I can tell you is that if you're not writing daily—or very very close to it—you probably won't be able to quit your day job. And that on a long enough timeline, your priorities WILL become self-evident.
If you write roughly a page a day for 20 years—which is a reasonable pace for well revised and edited work—and take a year off to help a loved one through cancer, your body of work will be 6935 pages instead of 7200.
If, on the other hand, you let paycheck-earning work, family, and leisure time take precedence (and I'm not saying you shouldn't—we all live life according to our values and priorities), and only manage to come to the page six or seven weekends a year, and write the same page every day, then your body of work in the same 20 years will be only 240 pages.
At the beginning of February, I hit a crisis point. There just wasn't enough time for all of it and I HAD to write. I tried to add writing and four units into my already-busy schedule and the whole thing collapsed like a lung in a medical drama. And I had to have my Coming to Jesus The Morrigan moment.
OKAY SO WHAT WERE THE ACTUAL CHOICES???
On to part 2
- My journey as a certified personal trainer
- Writing about Health and Fitness (generally)
- Writing about Running (my posts specifically about running and running goals)
- Election stuff
- Polyamory (Ethical Nonmonogamy)
- The Morrigan and Pagan Priesthood
- Buy Me Lunch Answers [My deep dive into identity intersections and what labels (and going beyond labels) means to me]
- Reviewish [My always behind the curve reviews of media—some of it woefully outdated]
And old favorites like:
- Social Justice Bard
- Personal Updates
- And of course Writing About Writing
I know if you've been paying attention at all for about the last oh….three years at least, you know that a lot has been going on. I don't mean like 2016 a lot with breakups and rising fascism. That WAS a lot, but it turned out that was a lot in the way that England is "cold" when you're coming from Barbados. There's still Siberia to go. I'm talking 2022. When cancer, miscarriage, death, eviction, and other stuff started landing. One disaster after another just kept pouring in like distant relatives at the holidays passing off fruitcake. Let's not dwell on that. It sucked. I got knocked down. I got up. It sucked more. I got knocked down more. I got up more. Rinse. Repeat. Here I am now feeling Sisyphus-caliber shredded…but like metaphorically, you understand. You push a rock all day, you get pretty swol.
.jpeg) |
| 2025: Coming to a blogger near you! |
I am metaphorically swol AF.
After cancer, death, miscarriage, evictions, and more, I started to realize that what I wanted to do was NOT just go back to exactly what I had been doing—pedalling my flying machine ever faster writing about writing just to make ends almost barely meet. My entire year back in school to become a certified personal trainer was exactly because I couldn't keep doing twelve- and fifteen-hour-days in my chair, seven days a week, just to barely scrape out the bills. I want to write. I want to write about WRITING. But that's not all I want to do with every day. There are going to be other parts of my life too.
One of those things, nontrivially, is the fact that I have become a priest of The Morrigan. My calling involves duties that go beyond writing and broaden the scope of the writing that I am already doing. I will be doing the work, but primarily I'm a writer, so even as I learn to incorporate divination and death doula-ing into my practice, I will also write about those insights and my—occasionally alarming—spiritual journey. Yes, there will be Social Justice Bard posts, personal updates. If anything, my duties as a priest to a deity steeped in sovereignty and battle will necessitate stepping things up on the social justice front. Yes, there will be those weird goofy posts where Writing About Writing is somehow a place with a weird ass cast of characters. And yes, there will be deep thoughts about writing itself somehow shoehorned into a 12 item listicle for the perfect clickbait…
…but I also want to write more about nonmonogamy, my own explorations through identity, my OWN fitness and health struggles, including pushing fifty but trying to be a better runner, and even the reviews on popular media I got into right before the wheels came off the bus. And fuck, I spent a year getting this personal-training skill set….I might as well write about it.
Everything will be labeled (so you can skip past the parts you're less into), and you might see a deluge of "Menu level" posts in the coming weeks as I set up the pages that will link out to everything that is to come.
This process will form the backbone of a new chapter here at Writing About Writing. We're moving forward, but we're not going exactly where we were before. The train will still stop at all the old and familiar destinations, but we've added a few more stops along the way.
All aboard.
.jpeg) |
| High speed rail will be discussed in the nonmonogamy section. Oh wait…that's high speed railING. Carry on. |
This is that story. I will tell you that there will be medical procedures, emesis, trauma, and an objective discussion of weight gain and loss (not as a goal but simply as a matter of fact). If any of those things sound like they would be upsetting to you or ignite some of your own traumas, then you may just want to read to the bold section heading, and call it a day.
I'm okay now. My full recovery took about three weeks even though I was discharged after five days. And right when I was feeling better, I picked up an upper respiratory infection that knocked me out for another several days. Doing school on top of everything else was hard enough. Being BEHIND on school has been its own super nightmare. There are a lot of things I'm behind on in my life. I sort of thought that being bedridden was going to give me the time to get to all those things I'm usually too busy running around to do, but as it kind of turns out, that's unicorn rainbow spew. It isn't real. What actually happens is that whatever reason you're bedridden in the first place is going to make it pretty hard to do anything but convalesce.
So right now I'm behind on…well, everything. Everything. From phone calls to peeps to school to, of course, writing. I had to prioritize the academic classes I'm taking and spend two weeks doing five weeks of work (in five different classes), and it's only been in the last couple of days (since finishing my second midterm on Wednesday…which I did not do that well on) that I've not felt desperately behind. And now I'm moving into the last two weeks, so I'm feeling the pressure from other directions.
[If you're looking for the writerly wisdom for all this, I try to bring it home below.]
Okay, but what happened? (Trigger warnings above)
I typically have low platelets and have to be careful—very careful—if I'm bleeding more than just a little. For me a bad cut can turn life threatening. I'm not supposed to go skydiving, and my career of juggling chainsaws was cut tragically short.
 |
| The greatest dream I ever had was torn to shreds like the torso of my friend Aspen (who can't even juggle balls) trying to pull this off one Tuesday afternoon in early March. So tragic. Do not even attempt to contain your tears. |
It's all part of having a jackhole liver. My liver is cirrhotic, and we don't really know why. (I found out that this is true for almost a third of people with cirrhosis.) There are a couple of possibilities, but no solid answers. But one thing is for sure. It spends a lot of time taking drags off of cigarettes and saying in an outrageous French accent, "Ah yez. I remember ze early aughties. Back when ze platelets flowed like wine in a Sex and ze City episode. Oh Miranda! Zoze were ze dayz."
Well, it turns out that ANOTHER thing that can happen from having a messed-up liver is that veins can start pushing into your stomach—eventually far enough that their lining is eroded, and they start filling the digestive tract with blood. When your stomach is full of blood, the results can be….dramatic.
Like exorcist dramatic.
 |
| Hello. I'm here because there's literally no "throwing up blood" GIF that isn't absolutely awful. Let's just focus on my cuteness. Mew! |
Anyway, I did that in the waiting room of the Emergency Room after being too dizzy to walk, and needless to say, I didn't end up waiting as long as the guy who skinned his thumb "really really bad."
Five transfused units of blood later, they had me stable enough to do an endoscopy, discover the problem, plan this really cool procedure to like fill my veins with Krazy Glue or some shit, so they'd wither and stop fucking bleeding into my stomach. There were a couple of days of observation before they sent me home with a fistful of diuretics to keep down the fluid in my peritoneal cavity, and home I went to try to recover. I was 20 pounds of fluid over my admission weight when I was discharged. (Which was bananas because I had had about three meals in five days and one of them was a "liquid" meal—which means you get some sugar-free jello and a cup of broth.) Once the diuretics started, over the next four days, I peed out like 30 pounds of liquid. (Like, no seriously—thirty pounds of fluid can make you bloated like you wouldn't believe. It's like four GALLONS and change.) I went from looking like a stuffed sausage to my skin kind of hanging off my bones a little.
So that was fun.
And yeah, right when I was almost better, there was an upper respiratory infection. Not a cold—this was the real fucking deal. Fevers of 102 at night and coughing up a lung. I think my white blood cell count was tanked from the hospital, because everyone in two households got this infection but I was the one it absolutely leveled like a papier-mâché reproduction of Tokyo in the final reel of a Godzilla movie.
Okay, no more gory details. Back to the touchy feely.
Where do I go from here?
I get back up.
I dust myself off.
I keep writing.
I've lost a lot of income in the last couple of years as I recover from cancer, then "ha ha, no, REALLY" recover from the trauma of cancer, pivot on my career goals, get buried under school work, and lose weeks of productivity to everything from helping my nesting partner grieve the brutal killing of their boss and friend to being hospitalized.
I get it. I haven't been writing the way I used to and the economy has shifted even further away from most working class being able to make ends meet. People I know (including me), who used to have a few hundred dollars of discretionary income every month, are now barely getting by, and several of us trying not to bleed out our entire savings before we learn a new skill set. Even folks who were infinitely patient with my lack of updates through my cancer have noticed that I've fallen way off from then. I would never expect people to hang on ever, but it's been especially understandable lately.
I'll rebuild that crowdfunding when I'm able to re-establish a regular practice of writing. I'm still determined to keep all my work (other than some newsletters) free and pass the hat instead of going traditional publishing or paywalls or anything like that. There may be some compilations made into ebooks, but the source material will always be available.
So more than ever, I'm writing because that's what I do. Because I love it. I'm writing because not writing is the real difficulty, and I feel depressed and anxious if I neglect it. Maybe it's not much more than a Facebook post on any given day. Maybe it's for school. Maybe it's one more half-done article. But I sit and I write. It's not for money—that's dwindling. It's not for fame—whatever snippet of online infamy I once has disappeared these last couple of years when I stopped putting out two or three articles a week.
Now it's just me and the writing.
Which is all it ever is for most people.
And even though THIS isn't the most prolific time in my life and no one is asking me right now how I write like I'm running out of time, the wheel will turn. Life will shift and there will be time and energy (together…in the same room) again. And I will still have the habit and the routine and the discipline. But that will combine with the opportunity. And that's when things get exciting.
A lot of people can write (or sing or do their art) as long as everything's pretty smooth sailing. What a dedicated writer (or singer or artist) has to confront is how to handle things when the waters are choppy. Life is going to happen, and at some point, it's going to happen HARD. Someone's going to die. You're going to get very sick. You'll have a kid or two. Your world will turn upside down. That's when it's easy to quit…or maybe take a break that ends up lasting the rest of your life.
And I'm not here to tell you what to do in those moments or what makes you "real" or how much you really care about your writing (or art) if you can't find the time or energy. I'm not here to tell you to get back on the horse in X amount of time. I'm not that inspiration-porn problematic for one, and moreso, I'd obviously I'd be a hypocrite if I tried.
What I AM going to tell you is that when that absolutely mind-numbing moment of shut down or overwhelm or frenetic chaos or debilitating depression/anxiety/whatever clears, and you have your first lucid thoughts after the upheaval….if those thoughts are of writing (or music, or art), hold onto that.
There's more there about what makes you tick there than you know.
I know better than to say, "I'm back." (Honestly, this jinxes things, and I fucking refuse to give myself the kiss of death on blogging for the NEXT month.) So I'm NOT back. I'm absolutely not in any way feeling ready to get back to writing. I certainly don't expect to have a post up tomorrow, and under no circumstances can you expect a little more out of me next week.
Nope.
HOWEVER….One thing I do know is that when I AM transitioning from a period of lower productivity and trying to get back into the routine and habit of writing—which, again, I am certainly NOT trying to do right now—mailbox posts are a lot like rolling the car downhill to pop the clutch. It just gives me a bit of a start to have that question. Trying to do a cold start on a ten-thousand-word dialogue post when I've been procrastinating for three years is WAY too daunting, but putting out a few mailbox questions while I let that percolate and get it outlined…that's a lot more manageable. So if I were hypothetically trying to bring myself back from the throes of miscarriages, cancer, surgery, cancer recovery, medical trauma, helping a loved one through the loss of a friend to sudden violent traumatic death, and too be honest, the brink of an absolute mental health implosion, some mailbox questions would be a good way to kind of get the ball rolling. Hypothetically. Not that I'm doing that. Because I'm not back.
Nope.
SO SEND YOUR QUESTIONS to chris.brecheen@gmail.com and I will answer them on The Mailbox. Don't forget to label them with the email title, "WAW Mailbox." (Which is not just an arbitrary rule that I made up to make your lives complicated. This is so I can find them in my mailbox archives and I don't have to try to dig through 5898 emails—seventy-four of which are unread as of today at noon—to find them.) Questions about writing—process, craft, grammar, linguistics, creativity, reading, art. Also, I'm still a few questions shy of my latest 20 questions compilation, so you can even send me any burning NON-writing questions you've had.
Let's not light this candle. Let's not kick these tires or light these fires. Let's not hit the ground running. You will not be seeing some serious shit, even if this baby hits 88 miles an hour…which it won't be. I'm not back.
Nope.
But send me your questions. You know…just in case.
For those of you who have enjoyed my woo woo posts about The Morrigan over on NOT Writing About Writing, there will be a lot more where those came from. This work and that I'm dedicated to and a spiritual practice that over the last three years, I haven't so much built as has claimed me—sometimes kicking and screaming and definitely with a double heaping scoop of existential "But I'm a fucking atheist!" confusion. I'm also taking an intensive class on Morrigan lore from a native Irish priest for the next six months, so I imagine particularly focused attention for a time.
I have joined a martial arts school. Clearly what I need as a middle aged human who never has a moment of free time for myself is to master Krav Maga—because that makes sense and isn't at all ridiculous. I'm not sure exactly when I'll be going to classes, but I have to pay the same amount whether I work in with one class a month or eight classes a week, so I'll probably be trying to get my money's worth.
I am returning to school. I feel like I'm in a 80's knife commercial. "But wait!!!! There's MORE!!!" I'm going back to school for some certifications (not another degree), that will see me learning to be a fitness coach and eventually a personal trainer. I'm going to go part time since I'll have so much else going on concurrently, so it'll be a year (Spring 2024) before I have my first certificate and two years (Spring 2025) before I have both.
I'm doing some research to become a death doula. I'm still in the initial research phases of what this even means (I've seen everything from a six week course online to six month course in person to the information that you just go DO it) so I don't know how long this education process is going to be or how intense it will be once I start it, but I've done something in helping Rhapsody deal with the loss of Jen and walking with her through that feels important and like work I want to do.
I'm (really) going to start focusing on fiction. I've been threatening to pull this trigger for years, and the last two have simply been non stop nightmares with moving, miscarriages, cancer, surgery, major break ups, death, and intense grief.
I have a number of side projects. Before I got sick in 2021 (which turned out to be cancer), I had started the process of a number of compilation ebooks that would bundle a handful of my articles under a particular theme, give them a fresh revision and a new coat of paint and bundle them for a couple of bucks to anyone who wanted. All the articles would still be online—because I've committed to always keeping my writing free and accessible—but it just might be in a slightly easier format.
Summer has begun. I'm not sure where exactly my writing schedule is going to land, but summer is always a little bit interesting. Treble and Clef are young boys who would love it if we just let them do fifteen hours of screen time a day and their eyeballs could melt into rapturous zombie goo—and they also have a habit of making it everyone's fucking problem if we deign to deny them this experience—so trying to balance their demand for constant stimulation (or screens) will probably be a challenge of its own, vaguely akin to herding cats…on espresso.
Rhapsody is still in the grief. Though Rhapsody has moved through some of the largest and most intimidating early feelings of denial and anxiety, there is still a long ways to go. I am not her only person, but I am her main person and often the one who takes up the slack when the feelings are particularly intense. Though things have been getting slowly better, and I want to emphasize that I'm not a victim and have made a choice to be actively supportive, sometimes that has involved hours a day of of simply holding her through deeply intense and uncomfortable emotions. I expect this will continue to improve, but I don't imagine it'll just go away.
We are on a road trip. I am so hypersensitive to how my time "off" has come on the heels of a three-week, HARD bout of intense grief support that has required most of my waking attention in either childcare or holding space, and I've barely been writing as it is. But this trip has been in the works for months and I was never going to be particularly on. So I'm writing on the road (literally as Rhapsody drives) right now and will grab moments whenever I can, but I won't have good and solid seat time until the 25th.
This is all to say that while Writing About Writing will absolutely continue forth, bringing you articles about craft and process and other facets of writing, there is going to be a lot of other things starting to go on too.
Stay tuned!!
Big enough news that I'm going to shake up the usual Patreon rewards. THIS will be my April newsletter, which usually only goes out to my Patrons. However, this month I'm going to be publishing it on the blog to share the big news. All my other rewards will "red shift." The folks who usually get just the newsletters will be seeing some selfies. The folks who are up for early access will get to see The Inside Scoop (a sort of deeper and more personal newsletter).
April waved as it drove by. I'm not even exactly sure what the hell happened. One minute I was sitting down hoping that I didn't get any unkind pranks and the next, people were wishing me a happy Beltane. It was an entire month of "blink and you'll miss it."
If you've been following my story, you know that one of my partners, Rhapsody, lost their boss and friend in a violent robbery in early February. She stepped up to run the bakery with the owner gone. That's it's ENTIRE own harrowing story of overwork, stress, and difficulty, but what it meant was that I stepped up in a lot of ways too—with everything from extra childcare to grief support. Three months passed with a strange effect of being both ten years and about a week.
And that was just the latest absolute shocking tragedy in a string of huge setbacks and life events.
It's been months now—years really—of just one thing after another. A big move complete with massive emotional adjustments on the part of four people—two of them kids, a miscarriage, cancer, surgery and recovery (including PTSD), a huge health scare from my mother, a very impactful breakup and then this. And if I'm going to be perfectly honest, there have been some good moments in there that ALSO distracted me from my writing. I let myself get caught up in some new relationship energy when I met Rhapsody, and I kind of avoided work for a couple of months. And every time I've felt a LITTLE better these past couple of years, I've first tried to reconnect with my personal relationships instead of diving fully into the grind. There have been ups and downs, but it wouldn't be fair to say that my productivity has always been low because of the bad stuff.
Still, almost every time I'm feeling ready to get back into the saddle, another round of something awful hits—and it's usually something next level. It's not like a bad day on Facebook kind of stuff. Sometimes I feel ready to write and the schedule goes bananas. Sometimes the schedule is forgiving, but I'm struggling with anxiety and barely able to keep my mind on one thing long enough to write a post a week. It's been unrelenting.
 |
| Fucking Nandor! |
But there is news. Great news. (No, I don't want to jinx it. I'll just call it BIG news, and we will look nervously at the sky and refuse to get excited.) A great shift is coming to my writing time. I will have SO much more of it.
Since early February, I've stepped up to help. I held space, cancelled plans when shit fell apart (some of which were writing plans), took on more with the kids, and generally threw most of my time into trying to get through the moment. I don't want that to sound like a victim narrative. I chose to be there for my partner. I chose to step back from my writing career for a little longer, even though I had lost so much time from the cancer and all the trials and tribulations before.
But bakery was hurting her—killing her really, in a non-hyperbolic sense. Our culture has a socially acceptable form of self harm in work and productivity. We let our mental health suffer for "the hustle." And the situation was untenable and unsustanable. So Rhapsody made a decision to step away at least for a while, take some well needed time "off," and then decide if she came back what her role would be. (That's "off" as in full time parent of two kids and a custody schedule that really only gives her one full day off every two weeks.) She is going to be home for at least a couple of months, able to handle so much more of the kid time and not be on the knife's edge of debilitating anxiety, dealing with daily panic attacks, and needing serious drugs just to function.
The shift should seem almost instantaneous given how much time I suddenly have to write. And there are other plans and schemes afoot (although to get in on those early, you really WILL need to become a patron), but this feels like the best (nope, not gonna jinx it) biggest news that's come to my writing schedule in two years.
And for those of you who didn't know what my writing output was like before two years ago…
Pay the Writer- Do you want to get some money to the writer? My income is entirely donation based, so it's the only way I keep writing.
Mission Statement- Why is Writing About Writing even here? What am I hoping to accomplish. And why am I so generous about giving all this free advice?
Disclaimery Stuff- Am I using an image that belongs to you? Did you find a grammar mistake? Do you hate my computer-illiterate layout and formatting errors?
Update Schedule- How often can you expect an update? What gets posted on which days? Why was there no Wednesday post and just Chris doing Jazz fingers?
Comment Policy- Please check ahead of time what the policy is on comments--both why I may simply delete them and why I may put feature them in a future article. And why mean abusive anonymous comments get mocked more than mean signed ones.
Advertise on WAW- Technically speaking, I don't do advertisement, and it's going to take a pretty sweet deal to get me to try. I turned ads off as soon as my crowdfunding income could cover the bills (sort of––I still have a nanny side gig too). The sorts of ads Blogger and Google would stick on my page made me feel a little dirty. To date, I've only gotten spam offers, but if you actually have a product that I actually might be willing to endorse and a generous enough offer to make it worth my while, I will "sell out" a little.
.jpg)
I'm always looking for someone to give me a day off from this accursed job. (Even though the time "off" usually doesn't start until/unless someone has been blogging for me for a while.) Be sure to read the post about guest blogging thoroughly. I don't make enough to pay my guest bloggers more than a few dollars before I see how their article is going to do, but if it does well, I won't keep the fruits of your labor either.
I Would Love to Guest Blog for You
The same mostly goes for blogging for you, although I have a slightly different set of requirements for that since I'm the one doing the writing.
Other stuff (Podcasts/Panels/Classes/Lectures/Interviews)
I'd probably love to do your thing, but check in on the requirements.
This was my original mission statement:
The mission of this Blog is to provide a place where I can (each is its own link):
.jpeg) |
| Jen Angel in Angel Cakes. |
I mentioned this in my last post before I went a bit silent, but the co-worker and good friend of Rhapsody sustained fatal injuries in a robbery. She died on Feb 9th.
Rhapsody has returned to the bakery that Jen owned with the intention of carrying on the business with all the employees. She has been stepping up to much greater responsibilities, trying to piece together all the lessons of running a bakery that she hadn't yet been taught, and processing the barely-fathomable grief of the sudden and violent loss of of a very close friend at the same time.
I live with Rhapsody and her two boys. I knew Jen, but not the way Rhapsody did, and mine has been a support role. I've been watching the kids a LOT more, taking on some extra chores, trying to organize help offers, and just being available and holding space.
My writing has felt the impact of this month.
I have a few half done articles, (including one about Jen and Angel Cakes and some terrible behavior on the part of some very scared people that should be showing up this week). I do take my own advice about writing daily through adversity. But clearly I had to put life on pause, and I could not focus—nevermind focus for several hours a day.
While grief is a fickle monster, and I can't predict a smooth transition, Rhapsody has returned to work and the boys are back in school (after being sick for a while). I've had a few moments here and there to tuck myself away and smith a few words. It will probably be a reduced schedule at first and then ramp up. I would also expect some hiccups along the way.
I wanted to make sure I have an update for everyone as we head into March. I know it's been quiet. This story was national news, but it touched me in a very personal way.
Thank you all for your patience.
The boss and good friend of my nesting partner—who I call "Rhapsody" here in the blog—was the victim of a violent robbery, is in critical condition, on life support, and not expected to recover. Rhapsody is dealing with anger, grief, overwhelm, on top of uncertainty about the future of her job and the state of our household expenses, and I am in full support mode.
The blog may need a couple of days before it's back up and running.
For those interested in helping: of course all the usual ways are still wonderful, but also right now, it would be great if we could fund this Gofundme. The allotment of financial support will help Jen's partner and mom deal with expenses but will also help the business stay open and keep the employes of the bakery employed.
Note: Hi there, Mr. Elephant. I guess we should address you.
