“So quiet in my Sekrit Writing Room”

My pal, Fred Kiesche (@FredKiesche) made the following remark on Twitter this morning,

@jamietr Figured you were, but you’ve been so quiet in your Sekrit Writing Room I couldn’t be sure.

— Fred Kiesche (@FredKiesche) July 17, 2015

and at once I felt guilty for neglecting to post here more frequently. So I figured the least I could do was offer some explanation as to why I haven’t been posting as much as I used it.

1. The day job has been very busy. I’ve been doing more and more project management and less and less hands-on software development, which I think shows career progress, but also means that my days are just busier. Each time I reach a new level of busyness, I feel certain that I’ve finally hit a plateau–only to discover that the trail continues on up and up. More time at work means less time here with you all.

2. My energy level has been a little lower lately. Ten days ago, I gave up caffeine cold-turkey. I did this once before, back in 2004. I gave up caffeine for over 6 years. I started up with it again in 2010 during NaNoWriMo. My relationship with caffeine is akin to how I’ve heard an alcoholic’s relationship to liquor described: I don’t want just one Coke, I want five. The only way for me to cut back is to cut it out entirely. Which I did on the last day of our vacation. I have now been caffeine-free for ten days. The headaches have mostly passed, as has the grumpiness, but I feel unusually sluggish throughout the day.

3. Summer schedule is chaotic. Kids are in camp, hours get shifted to cover the times that they are not in camp. During the school year we maintain a very regular schedule. Right now it is precariously controlled chaos. That becomes a little draining.

4. I’ve been doing a lot more reading. On average, I probably get in between 50-60 hours of Audible listening¹ each month. In June I had over 80 hour, and July is on pace to hit 100 hours. I’ve been reading enormous amounts of nonfiction. I’ve been working my way through a period of American history that I am least familiar with (the Civil War through the Great Depression), although not quite chronologically. I find the reading fascinating, and can almost always been seeing with my earbuds in place, listening to one book or another. Of course that much reading means less time for other stuff.

5. I started reading the newspaper again. After 15 years of not reading newspapers, I started again. I started, coincidentally, right around the time I gave up caffeine, but I really think that is a coincidence. What started me up again was Doris Kearns Goodwin’s excellent book The Bully Pulpit, which describes the relationship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, as well as the birth of investigative journalism. Reading about Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Ray Stannard Baker, and muckraking journalism jumpstarted my desire to read the papers again–although I don’t deceive myself into believing I am getting Tarbell, Steffens, or Baker in what I read. Reading the paper takes up more time, however, and is yet another thing I’ve been doing in my Sekrit Writing Room.

6. Fighting tooth and claw with the novel draft. I am still writing every day, although considerably less each day than last month. As of today I’ve written for 725 consecutive days, and will, in 5 more days, hit 730–or two years without missing a day. Novel writing is the hardest thing in the world for me. But I’m not giving up. I’m fighting back with everything I’ve got. Sometimes, thought, it wears me down to the point where I just don’t feel like posting.

7. I’m traveling more. The family recently returned from a vacation in New York and Massachusetts. On Sunday, I fly to Los Angeles for a week for work. Travel takes something out of me, and places writing high on the list of things to get done early in the day so that I don’t miss it later.

8. I feel like I don’t have as much to say as I used to. I used to post 2 or 3 times a day. Many of those posts, however, were frivolous. When I post today, I want it to be about something meaningful. So I’ve hesitated to post here to tell you what I had for breakfast, or to rant about some bad customer service experience I had. There is no originality in that, and I don’t want to bore you. Sometimes, I’ll jot down a note to write about something that captures my interest that moment, only to reflect on it later, thinking, nah, this really isn’t something interesting. I’d love to write more here, but the writer in me does not want to bore an audience.

I’ve found that this comes and goes in waves. This blog is nearly 10 years old. There have been periods of time where I posted for years without missing a day, and periods where I didn’t post for a month at a time. The pendulum swings back and forth. When things settle down in my head, things will probably resume something like a more normal schedule here, too.

In the meantime, I am alive, I am still writing, and I am still very much committed to, and appreciative of, the folks who come here each day to read what I’ve written.