Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

We’re just about a week away from the end of Free Refills season seven. Seven quarters, now, of hitting my quota and putting up a piece every weekday. I’m proud of that. But in the course of asking myself the question, “Is this working?” I found myself asking a related question: “Who is it for?“

That question offered me the insight to see the limitations of my current approach. I get my drafting done. I put my pieces up. But what is the reason I do these things? I do them because I promised that I would. And to whom did I make those promises? Well, I made them to everyone. That’s why I mention them all the time.

But to what extent should you, the reader, even care? Well, to the extent that my example or my writing teaches you something, then I guess you might care. But otherwise, that I publish every day, or that I’m constantly drafting new material, probably interests you exactly to the extent that you care about me and want me to succeed. (And thank you for that; it means a lot.)

All that would suggest that, really, I made those promises to myself. You’ve heard me talk about them, and you’re rooting for me, but if I miss a day or a quota, it’s not going to affect your life much. It isn’t even likely to much affect your impression of me. “So he missed a day,” you’d probably say. “It’s hardly life-or-death.”

So let’s answer my thesis question: What I’ve been doing has been primarily for me. And up until now, that’s been fine. Over the past two years of the Free Refills project, I’ve proved a great deal to myself about myself. I’ve found new levels of dedication and strength. I’ve earned a quiet sense of pride about my work.

But if I want other people, especially people who don’t already know me, to give a shit about it, I need to do my work in service to other people. I need to offer of myself. This will, I’m sure, demand of me a new level of openness, of risk.

I’m ready.

The critical test of the potential relationship between what I’m writing here and actually making money from my writing rests on the question of, “Is what I’m publishing here actually valuable and important for readers?”

Let us first of all note that “valuable” and “important” are deeply subjective and highly dependent on the particular needs, sense of aesthetics, etc., of each specific reader.

So while it is not exactly for me to say what is valuable and what isn’t, I propose that my frequent digressions into issues like, well, exactly what I’m discussing here are likely to be valuable to exactly two kinds of people: people who are trying to explore how one might function as a writer in the modern world, i.e. ways that online publishing requests a different approach from us, both as writers and audience; and people who already care about me, i.e. close friends and family. That my audience seems to consist entirely of friends and family offers some evidentiary support for that above assertion, though in self-contradiction and self-defense I should also admit that I’ve done essentially no promotion at all of what I’ve written here beyond telling friends and family about it, which would tend to restrict the potential for growth into new audiences, particularly audiences who might be inclined to support my financial growth as a writer and artist.

But let’s be honest. A major reason I haven’t promoted what I’m publishing is my sense that by using the process of my practice to explore the utility to myself and to others of said practice, I might be kind of restricting the writing’s utility to anyone but, basically, myself. I’ve rejected “blogging,” as we usually understand the term, as pointless navel gazing, so I haven’t written blogposts. Instead, over the past going-on-two-years, I’ve written many pieces that are something like meta-blogposts, that is, pieces about the pieces themselves, which is sort of like the aforementioned navel starting to gaze in turn at its own navel. The potential audience for that kind of solipsistic exploration would seem to be exactly one (myself), at least until such time as Free Refills itself becomes self-aware, at which point this self-examination will doubtless strike it as useful to the extreme.

(I mean, imagine if someone were to hand you a Book of You, a written exploration of all that you are, have been, hope to achieve, etc., something very directly and personally to and for you, except written entirely by someone else without any participation on your part at all. After you got over the weird, Twilight Zone-type creepiness of the whole thing (e.g. “How did a book dedicated to me and yet written before I was even conscious know to offer such perfectly useful advice at exactly the moment in my life when I needed it the most?”), you’d probably be very appreciative. “What do I do in this situation?” you might ask yourself. “I know!” you’d say. “I’ll consult the manual.” And you’d pull out The Manual of Me.)

Free Refills might even some day thank me. But my readers? That is another thing entirely.

Jerry has said that in his practice he likes working with people who are injured, because they are willing to make changes. The injury is evidence that something they’re doing isn’t working.

Expanding that insight out into the greater world, you can see that a crisis of any sort is also an opportunity. A crisis is clear evidence that something isn’t working, clear evidence that something needs to change.

I assert that our country is in crisis. Even if you supported Trump, you are surely aware that the level of dismay, even anguish, among those who didn’t is profound. Every day, Trump nominates another hard-liner to his Cabinet. While doing so is certainly his prerogative, it’s worth remembering that a majority of the electorate voted against him. A Cabinet far to the right of the mainstream promises only to exacerbate the conflict and ire that our country is rapidly succumbing to.

What we’re doing isn’t working. As Einstein said, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is insane. Sadly, no one in our political system seems to have the ability or wherewithal to respond intelligently and empathetically to what’s happening. The system and the people within it are clearly incapable of making things better. That leaves the rest of us with an opportunity. If there’s to be healing and better days ahead, we require new thinking, new ideas.

The more I think about it, the more certain I am that I want my main work to be writing books. Not necessarily always looking to publish things in dead-tree format, but definitely looking to write with that kind of sweep, that kind of depth. At the very least, if I’m writing non-fiction but I’m not writing something that’s a unified narrative, that is, I’m writing discrete essays, then I’d like to be writing things of sufficient length that I could grab a dozen or fifteen or twenty of them and pull them together and turn them into a book. It’s not a bad way to read, the long-form essay. I take pleasure in reading essays, so I take pleasure in attempting to write them.

So if that (writing books) is the case, then what does that mean for my daily publishing? What do I post, day after day? Because I certainly am not publishing a thousand-word essay every day. That’s much too exhausting, and furthermore probably wouldn’t get read. Do I excerpt from a piece as I write it, showing bits and pieces of the piece while it’s under construction? That’s certainly a possibility, though I don’t know how valuable that would be for other people. On the other hand, much of what I write I determine by asking, “Would I read something like that?” And I would 100% for certain read the as-it-happens here’s-my-process stuff by any number of my favorite writers were they to publish such things day by day. I’d be fascinated by that.

I continue exploring what the publishing aspect of Free Refills should look like going forward.

I continue to believe in the value of having something in front of people every day. I like the idea of people checking in to FR as part of their easing-in-to-work every day as they sit down at their desk. I have a few sites like that myself.

On the other hand, I had an interesting conversation with my friend Kari a few weeks ago, in which she said she checks in to Free Refills only every so often, because she prefers to binge-read a bunch of pieces all at once. And that struck me as interesting, because…well, because I like reading that way too. And I like writing that way–longer pieces, or collections of pieces that make sense together.
The problem is that those two things–having something in front of people every day, and having the kind of material that someone would choose to binge-read–are, while not exactly orthogonal, not exactly complementary either. So how do I manage that? And, let’s not forget, a substantial part of the point of what I’m doing here is to help myself make a living.

From these perspectives, the question of, “What is the goal for a given piece?” becomes more crucial and, at least as I’ve gone about things so far, less clear. I have to admit that the only overarching theme I see connecting my pieces here is that they exist; my main goal with what I’ve been publishing has been to try to write things that (a) I might find compelling as a reader; (b) are of sufficient quality that I can stand behind them; (c) I can get published by my deadline without too much struggle.

For what Free Refills has been so far, making publishing into a practice, in order to get things out there and overcome my perfectionism, has been enough of a reason to keep doing what I’ve been doing. I have to call it a successful practice, too. No matter how much I’ve wanted to avoid dealing with the writing on a given day, I have never missed a deadline.

On the other hand, I’ve been saying for about a year now that it’s time to change the approach. Now, it’s good that I haven’t used that things need to change as an excuse for backsliding. That would be a very bad outcome. But the publishing practice as I currently practice it has just about run its course.

My intention, I want you to know, was to win yesterday. I won the whole day before. I planned to keep my streak alive.

I went to bed inspired, slept deliciously late, and had a sense that the day was a big open field to explore and enjoy. The items on my agenda were completely manageable. I had the goal of exploring a work opportunity in Breckenridge. And of course I wanted to get a few turns in–even with very little terrain open, winter having come so late here, there’s something wonderful about the mountain being empty enough that there’d never ever be a lift line.

Most of all I wanted to get a bunch of writing done. I had a good and simple idea for that day’s piece and a solid initial draft for it; I had every reason to expect that it would be easy to get my piece up for the day. And drafting, which is like a stream of water that sometimes gets dammed up and sometimes flows burblingly down the mountainside has of late found itself burbling right up to and over the edge of a cliff. It has been a rushing waterfall.

So I expected that it would be a deeply productive day. I expected that I’d finally be able to get ahead with my pieces. That I’d take my draft printouts and start figuring out ways to find angels in those blocks of marble. Looking back, this should have drawn me in, because it would have been easy, and because it would have been easy it also could have been fun, and I should be drawn into fun. Choosing fun should be the easiest thing in the world.

But somehow it went awry. It went awry from the earliest part of the morning, and I never got it back on track. The ‘how’ of that awry doesn’t matter too much; I had every intention and opportunity to bring it back, but I never did. Evening came. After some indeterminate time lost in my favorite videogame, I found myself looking at the clock, and it was nearly 9pm, and I hadn’t made dinner yet, and I knew that while I’d get done what I needed to get done for the day, I had squandered an opportunity. Okay, I said. Too bad. I’ll do better tomorrow.

I slept deeply last night but woke up much earlier than I prefer, and soon I was aware that my mind was telling me there was something I needed to explore. That what had happened yesterday was classic avoidance behavior on my part. And as I’d been experiencing it, I’d seen it as avoiding the writing, which, I’ll be honest, even as well as the work has been going for the last two years, I avoid the work all the time. Yes, I always get it done. But there’s a lot of procrastination.

But there was no reason to avoid the writing yesterday. It should have been so easy as to have the potential to be actually joyful. (Writing joyfully. What a concept!) So in those wee hours of first wakefulness, still hoping to get back to sleep, through my reflection on vivid dreams (about nothing obviously related at all–we were trying to keep a couple of sharks alive in an unusually big bathtub), it became clear that it wasn’t the writing that I was avoiding. Avoiding the writing was just a symptom. What I was avoiding was something much bigger. Big enough that I was struggling to get some perspective on it.

A story: I went to college in Connecticut, and one time I was at a party and I met a dude who grew up in Santa Fe. (We New Mexicans were pretty rare in that part of the country.) “Oh, did you like it there?” I asked him. “I hated it,” he said. “There’s nothing big there.” I knew from something he’d said earlier in the conversation that, like many people in that part of Connecticut, the Mecca toward which he prayed was New York City. So I knew what he meant. But still, that utterance was a form of idiocy, and I needed to let him know. So I said to him, “Did you somehow manage to miss the mountains?”

There’s a way that sometimes, when something is big enough, we can find a way not to see it. You need a certain perspective to see the really big things.

Do I have that perspective? Maybe. But on some level I know that whether I am seeing clearly, or whether I am keeping my eyes closed to not see, I have still seen enough. I have seen the avoidance, if not entirely the thing or things I am trying to avoid. The defining characteristic of my avoidance is that I make easy things hard. Thus I do not need, right now, to wait until I fully see all that I am avoiding. All I need to do is a simple practice of allowing. I just need to let allow the easy things to be easy, and the energy will flow.

I wrote last week that the ultimate goal with all this Free Refills stuff is to create/facilitate a legitimate middle class income with my writing, but that isn’t accurate. That’s not the ultimate goal.

The ultimate goal of everything I do here is to live an awesome life. Too often over the course of my time on this planet, I have forgotten to live. I’ve been so afraid of doing it wrong that I’ve failed to do anything at all.

Through my creative life I am creating myself.

I’m politically liberal, and I live in a particularly liberal part of America (Boulder, Colorado), so I acknowledge I live in something of a bubble. Now, I might be wrong about this, but I am guessing that unless you were an enthusiastic Trump supporter and are surrounded only by enthusiastic Trump supporters, you’ve been aware of and perhaps been challenged by the feelings that have come up after the election. The levels of acrimony, conflict and distrust in our country have soared to heretofore unseen levels, and I can see that it’s affecting people, irrespective of where they’re living or their particular political affiliations.

If you’ve found yourself struggling with surges of unpleasant feelings and emotions since the election–despair, hopelessness, anger, disdain for those who think differently from you–know that you’re not alone. Even if the outcome of the election was to your satisfaction, we tend to resonate emotionally along with other people, and emotions, throughout our country, are running extremely high.

However, there are ways to moderate the effects that everything that’s going on has on your sense of balance and center. Here are four techniques that I find helpful.

1. Limit or eliminate media, especially commercial news media and social media.

The major problem with most media in our culture, be it old media like newspapers, magazines, and television, or new media like Facebook and Twitter, is that it’s commercial in nature–it derives its revenue from advertisements. On a fundamental level, you get the information you want–football game, sitcom, news, whatever–by trading some of your time and attention to someone who wants to sell you something.

All of these forms of media make more money the more eyeballs they can aggregate onto their content. And what grabs and holds our attention tends to be things that stimulate the emotions. Thus even the so-called “news” media, ostensibly reporting “facts,” has an incentive to report things that excite the emotions (i.e. generally “bad” news) and to do it in such a way that it amplifies rather than depresses those effects. This is why so much news seems so sensationalistic: because it is.

Furthermore, the effectiveness of an advertisement is much higher when it reaches a psyche that’s out of balance. A centered person will tend to be more shielded from the emotional manipulations that are part and parcel of how advertisements work. So commercial media has an incentive to keep you from center.

Please note that I’m not asserting some grand conspiracy. Rather, I’m pointing out something that simply emerges naturally from a for-profit model in a competitive environment. The media that aggregate the most eyeballs and deliver them most effectively to their advertisers will make the most money. And that will naturally tend to be the kind of things that incite high emotions. There’s a reason media companies pay such enormous sums for the broadcast rights to sporting competitions.

Media in which the costs of participation are particularly low (in both dollar and effort terms) tend to be the most poisonous of all. Twitter and Facebook can be particularly destabilizing. It costs someone nothing to write a repulsive tweet or an agitating Facebook post, but the emotional effect on an audience can be profound.

I recognize that staying away from news media can be especially challenging for people. “But how will I stay informed?” people ask. I’ve asked this question a lot myself. I’ve found it really helpful to ask, of any story I’m considering reading in the news media, “In what way does this piece of information impact my life?” If you take that perspective, you’ll quickly notice that the vast majority of what fills our newspapers, magazines, and television screens is nothing more than unsettling noise. It has no real bearing on our lives at all. But our limbic systems evolved in a world in which any information we were given from an outside source (“There’s a pride of lions in the tall grass over there!”) was apt to be immediately salient to our lives and, often, to our very survival.

2. Take a hot bath.

If you cut down a tree, it’s no longer a tree; now it’s just wood. If you kill a cow, it’s no longer a cow. But water is ever and always water. On a profound level, water is substantially imperturbable. A placid pool of water has the ability to wash off the harsh vibrations of a frenetic world.

Submerging ourselves in water will tend to smooth out and slow down volatile emotions, and relaxing in heat is extra calming. (Hence saunas, hot tubs, and steam baths.) Also, there’s never really anything much to do in a bath–you’re pretty much forced to slow down and stay in one place for a while, which alone can help settle the system. (If you’re inclined to read in the bath, bring along a book, not your phone or tablet.)

A bath is a really simple form of self-care. Don’t be afraid to indulge yourself.

3. Go for a hike in nature, especially among mountains.

The natural world has its own vibrational patterns. The more unspoiled a natural space, the less human energy there, the easier it is to experience nature’s energy. Thus a hike in a forest is more calming than a walk in a park, and both are better than jogging down a busy street.

The Earth is a giant sink for negative energy–there’s a reason we call generally unflappable people “grounded”–but there’s something especially powerful about mountains, places where the ground becomes figure, as it were. Maybe it’s that mountains demand our conscious attention. Too often we lose sight of the Earth as we walk upon it, but you’re not going to fail to notice the slope you’re walking up.

It takes no special training to let the ground ground you. Just go somewhere where your attention can let go of the ephemeral comings-and-goings of humans and meet nature in all its stability and beauty.

4. Center and breathe.

Once you learn to do it, the ability to center is something that’s with you literally everywhere you go. If you find yourself succumbing to deep levels of stress for whatever reason, give yourself permission to step out of the situation for just long enough to find your center and breathe for five to ten breaths. It takes little time, but the effects can be profound.

The techniques (if you can even call them that) that I offer here are all extremely simple to do, but the effects can be profound. If you find yourself struggling, try them. They can only help.

One final thing: during these trying times, do not intentionally scrimp on sleep.

Is my current approach to my work supporting or detracting from my goal of legitimately making a living directly (and indirectly) from my writing? Over the next several pieces, let’s break that question down into particulars.

We’ll start with drafting. I’ve spoken a zillion times about my 5000-words-per-week quota. Is it effective? Is it helpful?

Well, after all these weeks and months of practice, drafting 5,000 words per week is pretty easy. If I get out of my way even a little bit–which is substantially about trusting my intuition–I’ve grown pretty adept at allowing the words to flow. My ability to produce an initial draft, be it zero or first, has improved dramatically. So to the extent that my success depends on the ability to decide on a tack for a piece and then move smartly, then clearly this aspect of my approach is working. So I got that going for me. Which is nice.

If the ultimate goal is to earn a legitimate income from and around my writing, and my work over the next six weeks is supposed to point in that direction, then the obvious question is, “”To what extent has my current approach been supportive of that goal? To what extent has it gotten in the way?”

I’m finding answering this question surprisingly complicated and challenging.