Recently, I sat down with my calendar to plan out when, exactly, I’m going to sleep. I work full time third shift, go to an internship three days a week, and take evening classes Monday and Wednesday. I do 988 crisis response on Sundays. It all adds up to a fluctuating sleep schedule that’s rarely eight consecutive hours.
This is, I realize, probably not sustainable, but I’m not sure what to do about that.
Before the school year started, I was killing it with writing. I wrote 86k words in July, 125k in August. (This was a combination of novel, brainstorming, planning, and miscellaneous things.) September has been okay—with about a week left, I’ve written 72k. I get a lot done overnight, schoolwork and writing, but I also know it won’t last. Or, at least, I don’t think it will.
One thing I haven’t done in months: Submissions. I used to at least have a schedule of occasionally getting up the courage (i.e., BAC) to send out a round of query letters, but I haven’t made the time recently. I would have to take PTO, sacrifice precious sleep, or—least plausibly—get up the nerve to do it fully sober.
This is also my third blog entry in two weeks, coming off a hiatus of at least six months, I think, although I don’t remember the exact date of my last one and can’t check because of the whole burning-it-to-the-ground thing. It’s a pace that, while theoretically sustainable, I know I won’t actually maintain, especially because this is largely a self-indulgent outlet. Nobody blogs anymore, I think, but I’m not going to start a Substack for an audience of none (well, at least one—my mother would subscribe) and I got off Twitter back when it was still Twitter; except for a brief return to post from Delaney Hall, I’m not on Facebook. I tried to get into Bluesky and post there occasionally, though not often enough to have anything resembling a following. (I have about 700 followers, thanks to early adopter starter packs; I don’t think I’m so much as a blip on most of their radars.) I lurk on Instagram for updates on my writer friends’ books.
What I mean is that I am about as good at sustaining a platform as I am at platformers, which is to say, not at all.
But here we are, and maybe even if I don’t keep this up, I’ve at least done it for a little bit, which is more than nothing.
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