Last night around 11pm I finally 'pressed send' (is this a phrase from the old vacuum-tube canister days?) on a chapter of my next (co-authored) book. I have been labouring (understand that a lot of 'labouring' involves times when you can't focus on the thing anymore and need to palate-cleanse with dead-fish-eyed tiktok or fb scrolling) over this thing for weeks now, with christmas etc in-between, and I finally think I have covered most of the things that we need to cover. It's 12000 words long, which is long, isn't it. For a chapter. I mean probably too long but it's broken up into five or six sections.
When I go into that kind of writing mode, while clearly and plainly things like tidying up clutter around the room could just as easily palate-cleanse (and would probably be more focussing, tbh) than dead-eyed scrolling, I don't, I like to kid myself I'm on some kind of desperate jag where I have to descend into a clutter maelstrom for the time it takes to get the important task done, it's hysterical overdramatisation finding expression in allowing the environment to decline. Perhaps even facilitating that decline a little just to make everything a little more disarrayed.
Anyway, today I am not going to get onto another chapter, I might take some time to write a book review that I've been putting off for a month, trying very hard to find a way 'in' to the book so to write a review that's interesting in itself, which is the kind of book review I like.
Other things to do today:
Walk 15 000 steps. Well, I finished the year with an average of well over 10 000 steps a day, and I want to match that in 2022. But yesterday, which you'd think would be the ideal day to start, was a non-starter because it was in the high thirties and I don't know how anyone could even crawl in that, it was like swimming in an air fryer. So I have to make up my 2022 average today. Will probably walk to Docklands.
Buy a diary. I need a diary.*
Tidy up the living room, so I can mess it up again when I start on the next chapter. Otherwise I won't know how much I'm progressing because I won't know if that's old chapter one clutter or new chapter two clutter.
Bake bread (gotta love a list for being the provocateur in a conversation with yourself - I had to break off there because I remembered I'd activated, if that's the word for putting yeast in tepid sugary water, some yeast and forgotten about it - I instantly imagined it all running down the sides of the cup but it hadn't). I don't know if I've perfected baking bread but I certainly find it pretty easy to turn out a great loaf these days, I eat too much bread as a result but at least I know what's in it, (yeast, olive oil, flour, salt) however once I commit to baking, I'm tethered more or less to the kitchen for 2-3 hours, because it has to be kneaded/rise, be kneaded and rise again in the baking tin, then be baked for an hour, and those first two steps are not predictable and have to be monitored.
So now I've put my 2 Jan 2022 resolutions on the internet I guess I have to do them. It's a dictatorship!
*I went on eBay yesterday to see if there were any diaries worth caring about because I thought, you know, someone might have hijacked the Diary Express train last month and only now be flogging the spoils, but there was fuck all. Of course I also tried, as I always do, to find a Finnish language diary and all I could find was umpteen Finnish translations of Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
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