If I’m Not Out There, Where Am I?

It’s one of those weeks where I feel as if I’m preparing for a lot of things, on the work front. I’m still doing a lot of things, but most of them are behind the scenes and not for public consumption — a chunk of this week is actually being spent helping out someone else on their project, entirely behind the scenes, which feels like double-plus not for public consumption — which is something that always leaves me filled with a strange nervous energy, as if failing to produce something that’ll be read by the internet at large is an actual problem that I need to correct as quickly as possible.

Objectively, I know that’s not true, of course; there’s nothing in any of my current contracts that suggests that I have to produce a certain amount of material to be published on a daily schedule. (I do, however, have a lot of deadlines on a number of things to write over the next few weeks; eight or so, by last count, which means that I’ll have to buckle down and make things happen sooner rather than later. But still.) And yet, I’m in recovery for being an internet writer who grew up in an era where daily publication was a must to stay alive and keep a career going. Years later, I still feel as if something has gone wrong if I’m not putting my name out there, day after day.

I assume there’s some kind of study that’s been done on this by someone, just as I assume that I’m not the only person who’s gone through this. After all, there are generations of writers, online and print, who’ve transitioned from daily deadlines to something more relaxed; with that many going before me, there’s no chance that I’m the only one who’s experiencing these kinds of jitters. In fact, maybe I could look into that and then turn that into a story to write for someone. That could work, couldn’t it?

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