I’ve been in an unusual place with work for the last week or so, in part through necessity — I’m waiting for a number of responses before moving forward with things that need to be moved forward, and yes, that’s somewhat frustrating, thanks for asking — and in part through choice, because I’ve been taking care of something that’s been hanging over me for a few months now, and I went into it with the it’s about time mindset that proves to be very rewarding when you’re finally in the middle of it and it’s going well.
I’m talking in riddles because this is a thing that isn’t a thing yet, it’s essentially prep work for a project that might not even happen in the end, and I don’t want to jinx anything by talking out of turn just yet. Suffice to say, what I’m working on is a different kind of work than what I’m used to, requiring a different mindset that I’m still getting used to, and it’s… been a strange and rewarding experience, at least so far.
On the one hand, I’m working at a faster rate than I have been for some time — my daily word count is probably somewhere around what I was doing before COVID struck and my freelance work dried up, if not a little more, but that includes me reworking and deleting, then rewriting, work from the previous day or so — but the final goal is significantly further away than the average project I’ve been involved in, in ways that are at once thrilling and impossibly scary.
I’ve been working in the short term for more than a decade now — writing with the expectation that what I’m working on will see print (well, virtual print) that day or maybe a couple of days out at most. Even simply recalibrating so that everything isn’t quite as immediate makes everything I’m doing feel different, in such a way that it all feels brand new again. A change might not be as good as a rest, but apparently it can be recharging at the very least.