September 20, 2026

Yeah, I’m gonna be trying on a lot of different names for this.

Today I’m copying V.E. Schwab’s “The Visible Life of” newsletter format. We’ve got sections, people!

Life Lines – Beyond The Work

Dilly and I went to D.C. for his 25th birthday this week. The zoo, a giant mall, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, a rockin’ hotel with a champagne greeting and soaking tub, and a damn good burger. ‘Nuff said.

Well, actually, not ’nuff said, because I left out the part about getting sick. Fortunately it wasn’t until our last day… The streak of travel sickness lives on! Maybe one day, armed with a copious number of vitamin C packets, some earplugs, and the elusive ability to pace my physical exertion, then I will conquer this “free time” travel concept.

We’re heading out of PA soon and back to home, sweet home – Oklahoma. The drop-in might only be for a couple of days to kiss hands and wave to our adoring social circles (go to my aunt’s wedding and a couple of birthday celebrations), but I am so eager to be home. If we’re really lucky, Travel Job Boss will let us work in OK for a few weeks. But I foresee a quick return to PA, and then on to some other midwestern state until December downtime.

Progress Bar – What I’m Working On

The past couple of months, I’ve been vacillating between optimizing every little habit and decision of my day or just honing in on the absolute basics and letting the rest, rest.

Work has been so crazy. With two demanding jobs, I often feel like I really do need to make sure all of my “extra” time is in perfect service of my performance, or my best interests, or only my most meaningful hobbies. Two hours at the end of a long day turns into a workout, shower, tidy, and journal – or it turns into a letter-writing session. Or, if I’m really pumping the breaks, it means watching Gilmore Girls while putting pretty dots down in my FlowArt coloring book. Loving those, by the way.

I’ve found in my optimization rampages that there really are subtle differences in how I feel and perform depending on how I spend my time. Gilmore Girls can be relaxing, but mostly it’s just entertaining. It can fuel my creativity, since watching isn’t really passive for me these days – usually, I’m thinking about the storytelling decisions being made, or the way a line is delivered, or inventing a parallel story and imagining telling it in a different or similar format. But it doesn’t come with strings, unlike almost every other hobby I have right now, which means the goal isn’t to create or improve anything when I’m watching TV. It’s just to enjoy it, and let it bumble around in my brain however it likes.

It really does give me a place to rest my mind – but eventually, when my body recovers from the 100-mile-per-hour sprint I just forced it through, I start to feel anxiety about the way I’m spending my time. Because I want progress. I want it so badly, it’s hard not to think about it every time I make a time-spending decision.

So what brings me progress? That workout. The hard, sweaty, workout that I find most enjoyable when I have a solid hour and a half to work into it. To stretch, walk, languidly browse the equipment, then feel an itch to start something hard. Then do the hard thing, and really, really love it. In between the warm-up, wind-down, and hard things, I like to listen to creativity fodder: an award-winning album, a lecture on writing, a book that’s really engrossing me.

Or I write. Journaling, mostly, as my gateway drug. I want to build and stretch that habit, driven both by an insane desire to archive every meaningful moment of my life and a desire to just barf up some words and see if I can force it to take shape. I want to tell stories, to figure myself out, to make stupid rules about life and break them so I can confess on paper and rewrite them all over again. When I set at a page, I feel like I’m teasing out something ephemeral and stunning. Most of the time, it never fully takes form. But that’s why I collect little pieces, nuggets of thought or story, and strive to put enough in the bucket that it’ll meld into something really cool when I finally sit down to pull it all together.

Or, hear me out, I’m realizing that my work can be part of my creative process. Woah. Mind-blowing, right?

One of my jobs is a remote small business ops gig. With only one person above me in the foodchain, it turns out I actually have a lot of creative freedom. Utilizing it to improve operations and increase our revenue is a fun puzzle to solve – one that I think I’ve been aching for for a long time. All of those business sims I played as a youth, those systems-management games that scratched an itch like no other, and then my early-adulthood obsession with entrepreneurship… It all gets to come full circle here. It’s hard, sometimes, because of how much work I have on my plate between two demanding jobs. It’s easy to grow resentful, or to find myself doing the bare minimum. But last night, I stayed up late indulging in operations workflow improvements. It felt kind of like playing a game.

Turns out, to really milk the gig, I should be pushing myself to creatively invest, and enjoy, at least some of the work that I’m doing.

Craft Table – Thoughts on Writing

I used to think of and approach my writing as distinct categories: the journaling, the blogging, the essay-ing, and the creative writing.

But these days, I don’t really care for distinctions anymore. Now the goal is just to write anything. Blurred lines, incomplete projects and thoughts, short bursts. Get it out.

It’s a way for me to explore my own writer’s landscape. To figure out what I even want to write, once I decide to sit down and pound it out on the keyboard. I’m craving a long project, a completed novel, a series of essays – but I really don’t have a lot of free time these days. So I’m gathering my scraps, biding my time, and scheming for the near future.

In December, Cool Travel Job Company takes some downtime until early March. That means I’ll only have one job, a couple of months to catch up on all of my dearly missed social time, and enough time for one serious hobby.

I’m trying to prep myself for a writing project around then. Maybe my first sloppy novel, which I would have so much fun spending months on the road revising. Getting out a complete story idea is hard for me. My plots have never been textured, because I only ever base them off one or two ideas. Maybe the reason that I’ve never pulled together a novel is just that I was working from a shallow well. This is something I’ve picked up from Brandon Sanderson’s article about plot ideas.

So, I’ve been collecting tidbits of things that I find fascinating. Like dragons, or case studies of normal people (looking forward to reading Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life this winter), or memoirs about food, or nature magic, or questions about God. It’s a weird collection, but maybe that’s what’ll make a niche story. Or a mess. Either way, if I can knock something out and have a draft to dig my teeth into, I’ll be a happy camper. It’s the editing process that I really adore.

The Well, and How I’m Filling It

Work Ambience: This Gran Turismo playlist, SoundScape Fantasy on YouTube

On Repeat: Sammy Rae and the Friends, this Raye album (shoutout to the Hans Zimmer collab)

TV: Gilmore Girls, all the way. This time, I’m watching to notice the stories that Amy Sherman-Palladino chose to tell, and why.

Movies: The Drama and Airplane! (The Drama might have mixed reviews, but there are a lot of interesting decisions that were made in this movie that got my wheels turning. Also, Airplane! is mixed-type comedy gold.)

Books: Stuck in Sanderland. Finishing Mistborn Era 2 (The Lost Metal) and Elantris, then looping back to finally finish the last book of the Stormlight Archives. Aiming to finish the Brandon Sanderson sprint before my winter break, so that I can spend time knocking out the mile-high varied-genre reading list I accumulated the past few months while reading thousands of pages of epic fantasy. It’s time for a change.