A late night going into a Thursday, when has that ever gone horribly wrong? If I can say one positive, it’s that while it’s far too late to still be up, it’s been for a worthy cause. I’m on the verge of a major project for me, and I can’t state just how monumental it is. I am, hopefully minutes away, from finally having Windows 98 on a Raspberry Pi.

No I’m not joking. That’s a big deal. Why? Because like 50% of my favourite games are from that era, and some won’t run on any new OS, and others, boy do I just wanna experience them as intended. I am hyped for this thing. A happy note to end a, difficult month on.

Oh look, Monday didn’t just magically fox everything, and Tuesday followed suit, who’d have thought? Seriously I feel like a total mess right now. I tried to keep my mood up with a Raspberry Pi project in the evening only to spend 3 hours trying to get any of my SD card readers or cards to work. Needless to say, I failed. So today has been, horrid. Nothing, bad per say if annoying but, I just needed something to go right.

Saying that, something did. I finally decided to sell some of my expensive cards, and instead reinvest into a hobby I’ve had my eye on for years: collecting big box versions of the Lucas Arts adventure games I grew up on, which was pretty much The Secret of Monkey Island onwards. The auction for a lot to get me started ends Thursday, and if I get an SD card working I’m hoping to turn a Pi into a Windows 98 box to boot.

And yet, my mood is awful. It’s not budging and if anything, it’s getting worse. I’ll finish up my writing tasks for today and go crash I think, about all I can do. The whole SD card thing seriously burned me out. It also made me realise just how much stress I’m bottling up. Yikes…

And so the late night trend continues. I had hoped to do better today, but what can you do. The good news is I am still seeming in control, and managed to avoid ordering in tonight from feeling low. Here’s hoping tomorrow I really do end up working in the office. Honestly I just want to get back in there every week day, and hopefully, that’s no far off. We’ll see. For now Imma go rest.

I really do not like killing characters. I’m not one of those writers who won’t, but I’m also not the type to relish in the random scythe. Neither of those approaches are wrong, they’re no different than any other world-or-storycrafting tools, but for me, I get emotionally attached, and then sad when the time comes to lower the axe. I suppose spoilers, but then I haven’t said which project I’m referring to, and it might not be one you’d expect. But suffice to say they deserved better than I gave them, and I feel a bit blue from it.

Other than that, and a late post, today was pretty normal for the most part. I am writing super late yes, but then I am in a bit of a bad patch so no surprises there. I am also aware that I may have to work from home tomorrow as I was pretty run down today, and a late night won’t help that, but I’ll prepare my lunch box in the hopes of otherwise. My mood in general is a lot better than it was on 1K1K, and things like the late-night movie marathon yesterday helped there a lot. I just hope that it really was a blip, and that I can be back to normal now. Tired of being low.

Sorry for the late post. Marathoning horror movies with a friend, so I’ll update tomorrow. Suffice to say, the Conjuring films are fantastic.

A better day, even if I’m blogging at gone eleven in the evening yet again, and even if I imagine this will be a late night. Friday kind of gets a pass on that score. The upside is I was organised, very productive and managed to re-establish my diet routine after a trio of sub-optimal days. I managed to pick up yet another Chatterfang, so that was sweet, and also made a lot of progress in terms of moving on from 1K1K. Honestly, I feel like the blip never happened, outside of the sleep routine being a pinch out of whack.

I’m starting to really fall in love with MAL’s themes and plot. I still think this draft needs a boatload of TLC to fix, but I’m less pessemistic about it than I was going into the meat of the second act. End of the month confident? I think that’s a stretch as I’m estimating closer to 87,000 by the 30th. Still that’s far from bad, and it means I should leap into TBS and finish that, fingers crossed, by 3Y1K. There’s a milestone I know will be smoother, as it’s all about celebrating a successful year, not stretches of time I struggle to get my head around. So with that said, I guess I better start my evening winddown. Here’s hoping tomorrow’s post is earlier.

One advantage of crossing the threshold, it’s never been easier to remember what day number I’m on. I have been wondering if I should even be tracking the number of days in the title still. It never used to be a problem, I have been doing it for almost two years now with no ill-effect, but 1K1K threw me enough to be doubting a lot of things right now. Not 1K itself or any of the main stuff like the blog itself, but more ‘tracking’ things. See, I did some rereading of my old journals, and I noticed something funny. Early on, I decried tracking.

I’ve actually found myself regretful over the years I didn’t track more. If it weren’t for me logging the fact so near the time, I would have lost ‘day one’, purely by not having any kind of record. As it is, while the chain started on day 1, it was only really when the journal started on day 5 I had any tangible evidence. And at the time, my position was ‘I count my words, but that’s just to ensure I hit target. Past that, track nothing’. It was a good sentiment, but it had a fatal flaw it took tracking to fix: tracking lets me improve.

See, tracking what I write, how much and when, which is still a relatively new addition in the latter case, lets me see how I’m doing. If I can see that, I can spot patterns, augment my routine, prioritise. It lets me take an element that works, and carry it forward to make it permanent. But, the number of days? That doesn’t tell me anything. I got hung up on 1K1K, nailed it, and felt empty because what does that really mean in the long term? Who gives a hoot? I can’t learn from reaching day 1,000 because I knew I would on day 10.

So yeah, I’m still a bit of a mess, and I still feel awful from 1K1K, but I learned the most valuable lesson on that day that I could: the number of days doesn’t matter. Every day is a reset. Today is no less special than day 1, 100, 1,000, and it’s no more special than days 278, 191 or 666. They’re just numbers. If I write a thousand words a day, that’s a success. I need to remember that.

Well, I’m in a bad way. Yesterday was, pretty unpleasent all told. Just a massive melancholia drop that not even a day trip to Ore helped with. Today wasn’t a ton better and I’m writing this at about half eleven at night so that gives you some idea where my head is at. I didn’t even go to the shop in the end because I knew after work that I was too depressed to want to be around people. Honestly this might be a WFH Thursday and Friday just so I can work with my head down not being self consious about it.

So what went so wrong? Well, me ignoring the subconsious message I kept telling myself over and over again didn’t help. How many times on here alone have I talked about milestones being arbitary numbers? 10K marks in books, 100s marks in 1K heck, even 1K’s 1,000 target is arbitary. At least the latter is functionally a requirement for the project to mean anything but, why was I so hung up on a thousand days?

The irony is, nothing wen’t wrong. The day on paper went exactly as I’d hoped: AM target, chill day, Ore visit, take out in the evening as a celebration. The latter was the one part that lifted my mood a bit, and the leftovers about the only thing I woke up looking forward to as my mood soured overnight even more. I put too much pressure on the day, and more, I forgot the reason milestones don’t sit well with me: they devalue other achievements. You know why 1K works so well? It’s not even a full chapter, or really a full super short story. At minimum anything I write tends to be 1,500 words. Even my Living Earth Mythos stuff I wrote for target before doing main story content each day was at least 1,200.

By setting up 1K1K, I was not focusing on a ‘new New Year’, like XY1Ks. 1Y1K and 2Y1K have worked for me because they’re my replacements for New Years, a pairing of days I despise. In that they have a clear function: a middle finger to the aformentioned days, and a celebration of achievement based on time, not quantity of days. Sure, you could argue 1K1K was focused on a thousand days, but really, I don’t think in terms of a thousand days. I think in years becuase our calendars work in years, and getting my head around a thousand days at best gave me a minor existential crisis. It didn’t help to think that I’ll only get so many thousands done in my human lifespan. For all I know I’ll die before 10K1K.

And you know what? I’ve learned my lesson. Acknowledging milestones is fine, but keep it super simple. The year markers getting attention, totally fine, as I’m more celebrating how the 27th of September changed my life rather than the exact number of completed days. I think I also got myself hung up on the idea that the first thousand contained a magic I won’t find again. Also rubbish, because I find new stuff all the time. So I think I’ll forget about day 1,000. Day 999 on the other hand, well, that day was special. But, not because it was the same as the emergency services number…

www.1kpublishing.com

Watch this space…

Earliest target in weeks. Not that surprising given, you know, but still an achievement. I don’t think it necessairly heralds hat I’ll be getting back to squarely AM targets just yet but it’s still positive. I just, wish my mood was at the moment.

See, I’m not down, but I am in a very pensive mood. I wondered if 1K1K was going to be more like Christmas or, weirdly, like a funeral. It’s not like the project is ending but, it’s sort of like leaving beta? There is an innocence to it all that hitting this milestone means is behind me. I guess, 1K has been a bit like a second childhood, a do-over that let me pick one skill and min-max the heck out of it. So there’s a melancholia to today, and while not funereal, it’s still all too real, yet somehow surreal too.

This is I guess why I took today off work. I knew I would need time to process it all and, well I do. I would prefer today was celebratory, but I’ll take it as what it ends up being. There’s a lot to reflect on after all, more than just covid. A lot changed in the last two and a half plus years. Most of it was for the better but even then, it’s a lot to process now I stop and take a moment. But I do have a plan on how best to do it. Once I’ve had my lunch, I’ll set off.

My first visit to Ore in two years and a month. Seriously two years, 30 days, if 1K1K came a month ago it’d be right on the money. I’ve no other plans in Hastings, just, go there, and spend some time. Maybe just ten or twenty minutes, maybe the afternoon, I don’t know. Some alone time to think.

You know, most days as I write the title of these posts, I like to double check on the front end of the site that I’m putting the right number after the year. It’s easy enough for me to fix after the fact of course; I can edit any post on this site if I really need to without accidentally bumping it to the current date. But today, funnily enough, I didn’t need to double check that number. It’s, still a little surreal seeing it, even if I only started tracking the day of 1K I was on with day 301 in blog titles. One day I might go back and add in days 133-300 in the titles, but no rush.

When I started 1K, day one moved me into single digits. Of course 1K needed a few days before it could become 1K, as until then it was just a mildly impressive streak. But I was cognizant of hitting 10 days, thus double digits. Granted, I was incredibly unwell around that time, so I was a bit distracted, but it did occur to me. When I hit triple digits, it was the start of 2019, and I was a little distracted by the end of a three year relationship just over a week prior, as well as the collapse of my personal finances. That was, an odd time; I was stable, but rebuilding from bedrock, even if thanks to 1K, I was above absolute zero.

In the 900 days that followed that day, 1K changed a lot, even as the core word count did not. I added the blog on day 133, and then just after 1Y1K, I started doing my editing every day. And then, 1K saved me from losing my mind as the coronavirus more or less obliterated the rest of my life. It’s fair to say a relationship ending and financial disarray were bad, but 2020 somewhat outdid that; 2021 wasn’t much better. I managed to not only regain lucid control beyond just 1K, but also got better than I was before, sorting my routines, my diet, my exercise and my social life in one of the most rapid turn arounds since 1K began. And now, we move into four digits.

The next time I will move up a digit, will be in over twenty four years time. February 11th, 2046. Heck I might not even be alive by then for all I know. But it’s more than that of course. A thousand is funnily enough a number that is quite close to 1K. I’ll only get one day like tomorrow in my whole life. So, I’m glad that I’m writing this before noon the day before, and that all my writing tasks are done for the day. It means as long as I don’t do something silly, I’ll be getting to bed on time, and awake at 7:55am to take in the day. I’ll sit down, write a thousand words, and then, well once that’s done, I go to the station and pick up my ticket. I’m glad that I’m able to travel, and spend a little of this day in the place it all began.