Grind, Push, Perpetuate - TWIW - 6/9/25 - 6/15/25
A post about resistance, peace, and the Pouring of Time.
Output - Data
Total: 7,742 words (21 pages [4,284] + 3,458 typed)
Days of Writing: 7/7 days (1.000 WrPCT) [Better than any Major League team]
AWD: 1,106/day
Words Added to Avalanche: 1,503
Ratio: 19
Longest Day: 6/13/25 - 1,503 words (21 pages [4,284] + 3,458 typed)
The Still Bleepin’ Counts Award: 6/14/25 - 360 words typed
⥁⥀⥁
Output - Synthesis
Last Week’s Update: On Slumps and Sequences - 5/26/25 - 6/8/25
It was a good week where I looked up and realized I’d written every single day. Some of them were little duck snorts when it comes to their word count, but every last effort matters, no matter the volume.
All this pushing and trying and continuing led to me finishing the Pouring of Time—well, almost. I need to edit it after I’ve had a few days to mull it over and, dare I say, synthesize. The damn thing is complete and ready to be printed, though, so that is an excellent start to the its end.
We’re only four sequences/scenes away from finishing the storyline—hooray! Once it’s done I will have a novella that could stand alone, which means I’ve achieved my goal: make a complete, enclosed story that flies by itself and soars when coupled with the rest of the novel. (I hope.)
Probably my biggest accomplishment this week was writing 10 journals pages in a day. This was the first time I’ve reached double digits since I started keeping track. Though I hit nine a few times, I never got completely over the hump.
This past week was a grind in spite of these accomplishments. Each day I faced down a massive wall of resistance that required me to meditate until I’d better sorted out all the nebulous doubts, worries, and concerns floating through my head about Avalanche.
Part of this resistance was regarding my process itself. It works, but Jesus H. Macy does it get rote doing the same series of steps over and over. Through all this grinding and pushing and continuing, I finally made peace with the boring, see, because the sameness is only sameness because it produces results. With each cycle, sequence, or scene to come, there will always be something new and fresh to get excited about—I only need to have my antennas up in order to receive what’s piquing my interest most, because it ain’t gonna be the infrastructure of the process. Luckily, I work in QA, so I’m a trained professional when it comes to doing the same steps over and over again without thinking it’s insanity, while finding the excitement in the discovery of bugs, issues, and acceptance criteria. So things should turn out alright as long I hold to my mantra:
Don’t quit, keep going.
Don’t quit, keep going.Input - Synthesis
Speaking of insanity, I read enough Kabballah poetry this week to discover its rabbit hole of multi-layered references, one where each thing keeps leading to another while referring back to something and becoming something that will be alluded to later. It’s fascinating in its construction, but it might also make you lose your mind. Like in that movie Pi!
One idea that I latched on to from the poems I read was the Holy Apple Orchard, and the holiness of the apple in general. This is something that Levi would totally love and run with. So now, during editing, I’ll go back and retroactively sow in the apple tree seeds throughout—where like, he brings two of them on their journey north from San Francisco, and he tries to grow an apple orchard, and he sees their health as God’s Approval Meter. There are a bunch of ways to work it in organically when the time comes to work through the 100+ pages of this draft to deepen the layers. But we’re too damn close to finishing this storyline to make a full turn back right now—to paraphrase Listener: “we can’t quit now we’ve gotta climb all night/climb each and every one of their towers and show them your light”
So we will continue to grind, and sure enough we will find the excitement. Even just writing about the writing has started to bubble things up within me.
Input - Data
Book: The Poetry of Kaballah
Starting Page: 139
Ending Page: 159
Days Read: 1
Pages Read: 20
⥁⥀⥁
Book: Omensetter’s Luck by William H. Gass
Starting Page: 90
Ending Page: 123
Days Read: 3
Pages Read: 33
⥁⥀⥁
3/7 days (.428 rPCT) [Pacing the Nationals and Orioles]
Combined Pages Read: 53
Combined Pages Per Day: 17.6
-30-
⥁⥀⥁ Update Archives
⥁⥀⥁ Fiction
⥁⥀⥁ Appendices
⥁⥀⥁Non-Fiction
Each day that dawns is a new time for discovery, for new ideas, for change or acceptance that things are good-not good enough but good. Accept each new dawn with renewal albeit the weariness of a too early alarm.