But this is, for me, also about the adjustment away from the weekly and daily deadlines I’ve been on for the last twenty years. Now I actually have a little bit of time to do something other than write scripts. Not that’s made me a better blogger, oddly enough — I was more productive on warrenellis.com when I was writing eight things at once than I am now. Funny how that’s worked out. Presumbly a result of a mind being overclocked in pursuit of getting all the words out now now now now.
That’s Warren Ellis, from his latest MACHINE VISION (It’s all in caps, apparently) email newsletter, quoted because… Well, because it’s a Friday afternoon and it’s been a long week (I didn’t have the holiday Monday that regular folk did; freelancer, you see), and because I am all too familiar with the mindset of getting all the words out now now now now. It’s something I’ve been struggling with, recently, the problem of (a) meeting deadlines, (b) writing a lot of stuff without it all becoming mush – I’ve really had problems with that this week, and feel like I screwed up at least a couple of times – and most importantly for me, (c) stopping afterwards. What I’ve found myself doing is being trapped in this loop of just feeling constant… anxiety isn’t the right word, but as if my brain is a train that refuses to stop, even though I want to get off. It takes too long to calm down, which is a problem.
Weirdly enough, I’ve discovered that Star Trek novels work; they do something that somebody smart enough to know these things once told me: They give your brain enough to distract it, but not enough to actually tax it, so you get to decelerate and, if you’re lucky, stop every now and again.
Plus, now I can tell you all about the Thallonian Empire and what happened to the crew of Deep Space 9 after the series finished, which is something.