December 21st, 2019 – 451

~ Sam Shuttleworth

I am so knackered it hurts. No really, actual pain again. I’m praying that isn’t illness, but that’s about as much as I can do. This has been one of the most intense ends to a year I’ve ever had, and honestly even a year ago I don’t think I’d have coped anywhere near as well as I have done. Still, I feel there is more I can be doing.

Getting back into writing earlier whenever possible would be such a huge win. It’s half 9 and I still haven’t. Yes I’ve chained 55 TSS days but I’d trade that for not getting run down over Christmas. It’s a moral question in a way: I have proved that I can write main content every day, but the trade off is sleep quality. I have until now maintained the latter has to come first. Should it still?

My gut says no. I think this is a progressing step and not a regressing one. But with this potential new normal in place I have a responsibility to shift the habit. Even now after figuring out as much as I have, I don’t know I have the power to do that. But my mantra for those kind of tasks has come through worse:

Try something, and if it doesn’t work, try something else.

Published by Sam Shuttleworth

I’m Sam, and I live to write. I spent most of the first 8 years of my adulthood trying to balance writing with a large amount of crap in my personal life, until towards the end of 2018 I threw everything out and started afresh with just my writing. I built the new me around one goal: I have to write at least 1,000 words a day. I called this goal 1K, and it changed my life. So long as I write a thousand words a day, the day is a success, and atop that I've managed over time to build the life I wanted all those years. My greatest flaws as a writer is I still use too many adjectives, adverbs, connectives as openers, accidental passive voice and I don't force my work down people's throats enough on pain of extreme and unusual torture. My greatest strength is I know my greatest flaws and I'm working on them.