Preamble: So I've actually had several half-written posts sitting in my drafts queue for well over a year now. Some touched on writing-related insights, others were just borderline random nerd-outs, but there was at least a tentative plan to get them polished up and posted on a quarterly basis starting in 2020. Little things like that help keep the creative juices flowing when my regular 9-to-5 drudgery makes it tough to stay motivated. Plus, it's at least a kind of accountability, even if that's the equivalent of online journaling or whatever we call blogging these days. I suppose it's a greater, more impactful level of accountability to myself since writing things out like this feels vastly more permanent and tangible. Kind of like etching my to-do list and other musings in (digital) stone for future reference. As a TBI guy, I'm always worried about forgetting stuff, and this helps me look back, remember, and refocus when I need to. And then the pandemic hit.
I've thankfully been able to get vaccinated and boosted without issue, and I was able to work remotely for most of 2020 and nearly two-thirds of the way through 2021, which was enormously protective in practical terms and good for (my) morale. But I'm back in the office now and finding that the chronic stress and uncertainty of those "lost years" has worn me down in unexpected ways. All that lingering, amorphous fear and anxiety have hardened into something much more insidious and difficult to shake. It feels like an awful chimera of PTSD and the siege mentality born from a collective trauma that only half the country fully acknowledges. Or at least that's how I conceptualize it; mental health theory is admittedly well outside my lane. My actual academic background in political science has often inured me to how often people vote and otherwise act against their own self-interests, but the enduring and deeply nihilistic wave of anti-vaxxing and anti-masking sentiment in the US has still been difficult to accept on any rational level. Seeing that pattern endlessly repeat itself as cases spike again (and again) is sobering and disheartening in the extreme, even for my world-weary and cynical pragmatism.
Fortunately, both my state government and local employer were very proactive with their mitigation efforts. The kind of administrative work I do can mostly be accomplished remotely, and it was far easier to tackle contract writing and other focus-intensive tasks while at home (being a max-level introvert and tech-savvy nerd surely helps here, too). That near-total lack of interruptions was the kind of blissful flow state that even a proper office and good noise suppression headphones can't match, and it's at least part of the reason I often spend my nights typing away at a draft or my worldbuilding compendium while humming along to my favorite tunes. But many other folks weren't even half so fortunate, and I want to acknowledge my privilege explicitly here. More people should be able to WFH, and as a society, we should push for more flexible work schedules, a truly livable wage, and better work-life balance all around.
But with all that said, I've been extremely lucky so far. Although it's disappointing how few folks in our community seem to be masking these days, I haven't gotten sick or, by extension, knowingly risked getting anyone else sick this entire time (although I wish more people prioritized that second part at least as much as the first). The specter of asymptomatic infections is hard to dismiss entirely, but that's much less of a concern when I'm rarely around anyone but PROTH and still mask regularly in public. My fairly extreme introversion and lack of any kids (minus our fur babies) have made this period of relative isolation much easier to deal with. Frankly, it also confirmed something I've always assumed about myself: working on writing projects from home is the ideal end game. I fucking love it. Full stop. Similarly, until I can make homegrown self-publishing happen, tackling my regular 9-to-5 duties as remotely as possible is the next best thing, so I'm on the lookout for any hybrid or fully remote roles with my current employer.
Unsurprisingly, progress on the RW project stalled out during COVID. My motivation to write had, at least until very recently, fallen into the same black hole that gobbled up aspirational content for the Orbital HQ. I kept a completely unrelated side project kinda-sorta in motion during this period, but even that slowed to a glacial pace compared to where I was at with it in 2019. But because that work has progressed at least somewhat over the last 18 months, I'm focused on its completion now so that I can return to RW drafting more fully by the end of the year. This authorial side hustle is being done under a pen name and is mostly a trial balloon for an experimental story. It's also an opportunity to get more comfortable with using Scrivener to compile a manuscript and the actual self-publishing process on Amazon, which I think will benefit from a low-stakes "trial run" before anything related to the RW sees the light of day. I don't plan on discussing the side hustle's particulars here, although I'm looking forward to the experience and seeing whether or not it's worth continuing in any capacity. As Mr. McCall would say: "Progress, not perfection."
So what have I done beyond not-writing and stressing about the pandemic? A veritable shitload of gaming.
I normally number my weekly game time in the tens of hours anyway, but those tallies exploded during COVID. My Steam, GOG, Epic, and Ubisoft profiles tell a clear but sobering tale of how I prefer to cope with health and job-related anxiety. Now don't get me wrong here: gaming is a fun, imaginative distraction that helps to tune out shitty real-life stuff pretty much on-demand. Full marks for that. Movies, TV shows, and books do that for me to a lesser extent, but gaming has always topped the list. The bit about distraction cuts both ways, though, and I find it's gotten a little too easy to stay distracted.
I could go on, but this surely paints an instructive enough picture: these are only some of the games I've chewed through of late, and that doesn't leave much time for passion projects. So I've been trying to find a better balance between work and play during my off-hours. That has meant a more explicit writing schedule, setting reminders, and directly linking the "reward" of game time with the completion of drafting work, Orbital HQ content, or other support tasks that I already enjoy doing but have too often neglected. I'm a lot more intentional about this stuff now, largely because building up positive, self-reinforcing loops that help me feel and actually be more efficacious seems like the better longer-term strategy. My hope – and dare I say, plan – is to counteract the unproductive inertia I've built up since 2020 by displacing it with better, more sustainable work habits going forward. I'm not an especially motivated person by nature, so I don't have much raw ambition to fall back on. I do, however, fall into habits easily, so I may as well make those tendencies and compulsive tics more productive than not.
Of course, there's nothing special or revelatory about this; it's really just figuring out what healthier habits look like in practice for me and how best to implement them. Some of these insights have even helped me at my day job, where smarter triage is critical for dealing with staffing shortages, increased workloads, and simple self-care. I even used a habit-building app for a few months – no, really: it's a cute pixel art service called Habitica – to help corral writing tasks and consolidate my typical mess of to-do lists into a single spot. I've since moved on to a leaner, less distracting utility called Dynalist and limited use of Google's "Tasks" and "Keep" services, but the specifics don't even matter here. This "slow but steady" approach isn't particularly sexy or showy, but so far it's keeping me fresher on the material, more motivated, and seems to synergize well with my tendency to want things planned out in advance. I wouldn't call it a perfect approach, and there is clearly a balance that needs to be struck between finding the right tools to support my work and not unproductively fixating on the tools themselves, but this particular kind of structure already feels better and is forcing me to break my writing objectives into smaller and more measurable chunks in the service of larger project-related goals. I'm hesitant to call any of this SMART, if only because that sounds so pretentious and I've generally been terrible about self-imposed deadlines, but that's at least the gist of what I'm moving toward.
The initial draft of this post covered my thoughts on a "modern mythology" of superheroes and dystopias. It drew parallels between our media and real-life instances of heroism and villainy, and the ways in which that kind of media can be enormously gratifying but also dangerously limiting in how it influences our ability to understand and tackle real-life structural problems. I'd like to return to that subject in another post after I've had the chance for more substantive rewrites, but I think this is plenty for today.
I wish you folks luck in dealing with whatever roadblocks life throws your way. Whether COVID-related or otherwise, I hope you find a way past it. Oh, and maybe flip it the bird in your rearview mirror as you drive by. Just a thought.
Orbital HQ, out.
