Tag: burnout

IWSG, June 2022, and Some Poetry News

John Winkelman

Yesterday afternoon, for the first time in about three years, and the second time in over 20, I got up in front of an open mic and read some poetry. The reading took place at The Sparrows cafe in Grand Rapids, as part of their monthly “Poetry and Pie” event which takes place on the last Tuesday of every month. The poems I read, “Afternoon Traffic” and “Percussion,” had been previously published so I knew at least one other person had considered them worthy of public exposure.

Two other poets read, and there were at most a dozen people in the cafe, not all of whom were there for the reading. Still, I would call it a success, and the couple of people I talked to enjoyed the event.

I felt somewhat self-conscious, as (due to certain properties inherent in the passage of time) I have always viewed open mic readings as a young person’s pursuit. I have ample evidence to the contrary, of course, as the majority of such events I have attended in the past have included people older than I am now. Or maybe it’s because many of those events have also been slam poetry events, and the participants and audience therein definitely skews younger.

But I plan to read again as time allows, assuming I can come up with material worthy of being read in front of a live audience. If for no other reason than that it was fun.

So: The Insecure Writers Support Group question for June 2022 is:

When the going gets tough writing the story, how do you keep yourself writing to the end? If have not started the writing yet, why do you think that is and what do you think could help you find your groove and start?

I can stumble while writing a story for any number of reasons. Distractions from the mundane world. Suddenly not knowing “what happens next.” Suffering from depression, burnout, exhaustion, or some combination of all three. An acute ennui.

Any one of these (and there are so many more than I have listed) can act as a drag on the creative process. For me (and this is absolutely not a general prescription for all people in all circumstances), I take a step back and put some distance between myself and the work. I don’t necessarily try to solve the issue immediately, because if, for instance, the problem is burnout, that attempt at a solution will just make things worse.

Dwight D. Eisenhower said “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.” This is another way of saying that in trying to solve a problem, first put it in a larger perspective.

Is the problem with the story, or with me? If with me, is it because of something I have control over in any meaningful sense? If with the story, is it something that I can push through or do I need to retrace my steps and rewrite some or all of it?

If, for instance, the problem with the writing is personal motivation, and the lack of motivation comes from depression, then the depression is the issue which needs to be dealt with. Trying to force productivity at the cost of mental and emotional health never, ever ends well (I’m looking at you, managerial corporate culture and late-stage capitalism).

If the problem is with the story, then the story was either insufficiently planned, or (as is usually the case with me) I started writing one story, and halfway through switched to another, and now I have two stories which need to be separated and each dealt with individually.

(The same often happens to me when I write poetry, because most of my poems start out as stream-of-consciousness blocks of text in my journals)

So to sum up, pushing through the blocks when writing usually involves giving myself some space to discover why, exactly, I am having a tough time of it. Modern culture does not encourage, and indeed often punishes, time which is not obviously and specifically productive, but that down’time is essential and allows for healing, re-centering, and growth. And, frankly, for better writing.

On a side note: Being stressed and burned out is okay. We are still in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and though the world seems to be stabilizing (or maybe ramping up the overall sense of denial), we are not yet “post-” anything, and the long tail of fallout from the past two years is just starting to make itself felt. The world is even more stressful than usual. Be kind to yourself and the people around you.

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IWSG, May 2022

John Winkelman

Hello, writing community! Welcome to May, which seemed to appear out of nowhere. Then again, the first two days of May have been overcast, rainy and cold, so it’s like April never left. Or March, for that matter. Then again, the COVID pandemic is still kind of hanging in there, which means today (Wednesday, IWSG day) is March 794, 2020.

Anyway.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for May 2022 is:

It’s the best of times; it’s the worst of times. What are your writer highs (the good times)? And what are your writer lows (the crappy times)?

My writer highs come from being in the zone, or in the flow, as described by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. There are moments in the mornings when I can knock two concepts against each other in my head and from the interaction and intersection of these agents I can pull a page or so of short story, or a new scene for a novel, or the seed of a poem. These moments never seem to be predictable, but they always seem to happen within the first few minutes of a writing session. Which is to say, if I make it more than a few minutes into a writing session, that is the time when I am most likely to achieve the flow state and in that moment I am no longer writing, I am transcribing. I feel like I am in harmony with the world and the words are writing themselves.

The lows are the mornings when I am sleep deprived and still burned out from the day before, and my pen seems too heavy to hold, and someone broke into my house and rearranged all of the keys on my laptop. Or so it seems while in the grip of the ennui which is so easy to fall into and so difficult to pull myself out of. I’m feeling a touch of it right now, coming after a month full of reading and writing poetry, and attending poetry events and talking to poets. I should feel great, but instead I feel friction. I want to write, but I don’t want to write. And petulance looks silly on someone in their mid-fifties.

So the only thing to do is endure the down-times and have faith that the good times will appear again, hopefully soon, and I will be able to get back into the zone.

 

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is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

IWSG, January 2022

John Winkelman

Welcome to the Insecure Writer’s Support Group post for January 2022.

Trying to take advantage of the zeitgeist, I started the new year with specific goals and plans for my writing life for the next six months. I am much more productive and engaged when I have a set routine, though every plan, no matter how flexible or rigorous, is subject to disruption by outside influences.

In 2020 I tried a weekly routine where I would write in the mornings on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, then edit on Thursday and submit on Friday. Saturday and Sunday were rest time, and also “open hours” for cleaning up the odds and ends left over from the week.

Note that these three steps were not all the same writing pieces. I was not starting a poem at the beginning of the week and submitting it at the end. The work I edited was from weeks and months prior, and the works I submitted were from months and years prior.

I liked the feeling of continuity of working on writing from now, the recent past, and the more distant past. But three mornings a week is often simply not enough time. Editing, in my experience, takes at least as much time as writing, and submitting stories and poems is a lot more complicated than simply copying a poem into the body of an email and sending out into the world.

So though having discrete chunks of time for each step of the writing process was useful, the schedule I chose was too fine-grained and I found it difficult to get my head into the correct space for the daily tasks.

So this year I am trying a variation on the previous theme. The first full week of the month is set aside for editing and submitting, and the rest of the month is for writing. This way I can be fully immersed in a given (or several) projects, while setting aside time to let those projects evolve and go out into the world.

Since this is the first full week of the month, this is an editing week, and I am using it to organize and catalog the 40+ poems I wrote in 2021, and see which ones have promise. If I finish with the poetry I will knock the dust off of one of my old short stories, and see if I can’t get it to a place where I can send it out for publication.

This month’s IWSG question is:

What’s the one thing about your writing career you regret the most? Were you able to overcome it?

This is an easy one. The thing about my writing career I regret the most is the years between 1999 and 2013 where I produced almost no creative work at all.

Back in the mid to late 1990s  when I was working at Schuler Books and Music, the majority of my cow-orkers were writers, and we were all full of the kind of creative energy which comes from being part of a close-knit group of over-educated, underpaid creative types at loose ends. We created and attended reading groups, writing groups, book clubs, poetry and music events, plays, and the monthly POT (philosophical, ontological, theological) group meetings where we would stay up until the wee hours discussing topics like love, creativity, responsibility, religion, the past, the future, and the present in all its wondrous and terrible facets. We were (mostly) in our twenties. We had energy for that sort of thing.

Then I started my career as a web developer and programmer, and abruptly all my energy (and time) went to learning how to make things look good and work correctly in a web browser. This was in 1999, at the peak of the DotCom boom and I would regularly work 50-80 hour weeks, and my creative writing output dropped off to practically zero. When I look through my personal journals from that time, there are multiple gaps of several months where I didn’t write at all. And what I did write was mostly short entries complaining about being burned out and exhausted. All of my energy was going into my career, such as it was.

Then in late 2013, fresh off of the end of an extremely toxic relationship and a hellish work project where I was writing code for twelve hour days for weeks at a time without a break, I discovered National Novel Writing Month. I immediately joined a writing group made up of people from the local NaNoWriMo community, and from this experience blossomed Caffeinated Press and The 3288 Review. So as abruptly as my writing career had stalled back in September 1999, it restarted just as abruptly on November 1, 2013.

Those are fourteen years I can never get back, and in my bad moments I resent the hell out of the jobs, employers and managers who demanded so much of my time and creative energy in return for so little compensation. But I do have a stable career now, which allows me sufficient (if not exactly ample) time to write, edit and submit my work. I regret all that wasted time, but what’s past is past and I am writing now. That’s all that matters.

 

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and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

July Doldrums

John Winkelman

The Paris Review, issue 233, Summer 2020

I have lived through many hot summers in Michigan, and though I have experienced many hotter days, I do not remember such a sustained stretch of unnecessarily hot days. I’ve used my air conditioning more this summer than the past two or three combined, and I am sure my electric bill for July will equal my gas bill for February, and that’s saying something. Thus I keep crunching away at my day job in order to pay for conditioned air so that our cat doesn’t melt and my girlfriend doesn’t spontaneously combust, and I don’t keel over of heatstroke.

Right now it is 06:50, Monday, July 20, and I am sitting at the table on my front porch. Poe is on her leash and exploring the potential amusements of chasing the groggy insects which swarmed my porch light, and remain on the windows and doors too hung over from artificial bright lights to attempt the flight home. Wherever home is. A small orange cat chasing flies around in the cool air of the morning is entertainment that money just can’t buy.

Pictured above is the new issue of The Paris Review, which was the only new reading material to arrive at the Library of Winkelman Abbey in the past week. I’ll add it to the big pile of books which I will eventually read when I am no longer employed, assuming that happens before I die, and not well after, as seems increasingly to be the intent of the world.

In reading news I have completely given in to being burned out and am working my way through the Forgotten Realms books written by R.A. Salvatore. In the past week I have finished The Halfling’s Gem, The Legacy, Starless Night, and Siege of Darkness. I have read the entire series previously, and some of the book in the series many times before. This is pure comfort reading. R.A. Salvatore spins a damn fine yarn and thirty years on, his books are still enjoyable.

I also on a whim pulled out and read Saad Z. Hossain‘s remarkable novella The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday. This is one of the best books I have read this year. If you like the works of Ted Chiang and Hannu Rajaniemi, it should be at the top of your reading list.

I haven’t written much this month, due to the afore-mentioned burnout as well as schedule volatility. Now that I am on first shift again I can set aside regular time for creative pursuits and though I am not advancing the narrative of the new novel at the moment I am taking copious notes and fleshing out the plot as well as the world in which the story takes place. I guess that’s progress.

Back to Work, Again

John Winkelman

Vacation is over, and while it was restful and relaxing, I could have used several more weeks of it, including about a thousand more hours of sleep. My planned writing never happened, other than a redo of the first few paragraphs of the first chapter of the new book, which of course I should not do until the first draft is complete, but here we are.

Two books arrived this week. On the left is the latest from my subscription to Deep Vellum, Mike Soto’s A Grave is Given Supper. On the right is local author Jean Davis’ new collection of short stories, Dreams of Stars and Lies.

In reading, I am still indulging in comfort-food book. Right now I am partway through R.A. Salvatore’s The Halfling’s Gem for at least the fifth time. I should reach the end in a couple of days.

While I would rather still be on vacation, my work schedule does give me discrete chunks of time in which to write if I can focus my mind enough to put pen to paper.

And no, I am not recovered from being burned out. Ask me about that one again at the beginning of 2021.

 

Boom, etc.

John Winkelman

The annual ritual of pretending to blow up every goddamn thing in the city is over for the year, or at least until tonight. All political opinions aside, the mode of celebration of Independence day, to wit: simulate acts of destruction, has been done to death. Maybe from now on we as a country should collectively do something constructive with our holiday time. Like volunteer at veteran’s hospital or something.

Nah, that will never happen. This is America! Belligerence is freedom! Compassion is socialism, or something.

Anyway.

Now that the McHenry LARPing is done I can get back to my regular schedule of 4-5 hours of sleep a night, rather than 2-3 as has been the case this past week. No matter what time I go to bed, I am awakened by Poe at cat o’clock, which tends to be in the 4:45 to 5:15 time slot. With my rest time returned to “barely adequate” I may have the focus and mental energy to begin writing my new novel, which I had planned to start last week, before the glacier of burnout calved and filled the ocean of my mind with the icebergs of FUCKIT.

Anyway.

This past week was a good one for books here at the library at Winkelman Abbey. Ten new books, chapbooks and periodicals arrived since last Sunday. On the top left is the super-fun Orconomics by J. Zachary Pike. I recently finished reading the e-book version and liked it so much that I bought a physical copy, in the event that I ever run into Mr. Pike at a convention, assuming conventions ever happen again.

Second from left is the final book in Dyrk Ashton’s Paternus trilogy, Paternus: War of Gods. The first two, Paternus: Rise of Gods and Paternus: Wrath of Gods, were fantastic, so I have high hopes for this one.

In the middle of the top row is LatiNext, the fourth book in the BreakBeat Poets series of anthologies published by Haymarket Books. I cannot recommend this series highly enough. The power, passion, precision, beauty, anger and love in these pages is unequaled in my experience. They are just that good!

Fourth in the top row is The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, which has been on my to-read list for several years. Times being what they are, it seemed the appropriate time to dive in.

On the top right is Captivating Freedom, a collection of essays on the extrusion of the carceral space into the daily lives of “free” or non-incarcerated citizens. I came across this one while reading Jackie Wang’s Carceral Capitalism back in late 2019. I have only read the introduction so far, but it was enough to recognize that there are some important and frightening lessons to be learned therein.

On the lower left is the latest issue of Poetry magazine. Next to it is the latest issue of the ever-wonderful Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, published by Small Beer Press, one of the very best of the small, independent presses in operation today.

The last three in the lower row are Trusting the Mind, A Day in the Life, and The Missionary Sutras, chapbooks of Red Pine’s translations of Buddhist writing, published by Empty Bowl. I have enjoyed Red Pine’s writing and translation for many years, and am always excited to discover something new in which he has had a hand.

(Note that links to author info and purchasing options are collected on the 2020 Books and Reading List.)

In reading news I finished Where Loyalties Lie by Rob J. Hayes, and it was quite good. I didn’t feel that it was quite the equal of The Sword of Kaigen or Orconomics, but it was an enjoyable read all the way through and I recommend it to any fans of pirates and magic. I am also about halfway through Derek Künsken’s The Quantum Magician, and so far really enjoying it. It reminds me a little of Michael Flynn’s The January Dancer, in the way that Künsken treats the dispersion and fragmentation of humanity in a far future set in a boundless space.

A few days ago and purely at random, I pulled up on my Kindle Saga of Old City, Gary Gygax‘s first (and best) Gord the Rogue novel. This is pure comfort reading. It is passably well-written (6/10) for its time (mid- 1980s) and Gygax’s excitement and joy in writing his first novel really comes through. Unfortunately the subsequent books in the series do not measure up to the first, becoming increasingly encumbered by unnecessary hooks and references to the source RPG material. By the last in the series (Dance of Demons) they are nearly unreadable, except as artifacts of the history of fantasy RPG novels.

It is on my bucket list to do a complete re-edit of Saga of Old City and Artifact of Evil, the first two books in the series, and the only two written by Gygax which were published by TSR.

(Note that with reference to 21st century sensibilities, none of these novels aged particularly well)

I have one more week of vacation, and I have reduced my writing expectations from 20,000 words to 10,000 and likely down to 5,000 by the time next Sunday rolls around.

Writing is hard. Starting to write is harder.