S01E23: When routines become the dream

In this week’s episode, Samantha and Matilda talk about the differences between their writing life dreams... versus REALITY!

By next week Sam and Matilda will have started to review their finances so they can start to make moves towards instructed business decisions.

Where to find Sam and Matilda:

SAM IG: @sammowrimo

Website: www.samantha-cummings.com

Book to start with: The Deathless - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Deathless-Frances-June/dp/B0915V5L6F

Most recent book: Curse of the Wild (Moons & Magic Book 1) https://amzn.eu/d/fVXwW3j

MATILDA IG: @matildaswiftauthor

Website: MatildaSwift.com

Book to start with: https://books2read.com/TheSlayoftheLand (book #1 of The Heathervale Mysteries)

Most recent book: https://books2read.com/ButterLatethanNever (book #3 of The Slippery Spoon Mysteries)

Mentioned on the show:

Nothing this week, but make sure you check out previous episodes where we list so many free and helpful tools, websites, and other podcasts!

Transcript:

Welcome to your next step of the Self Publishing Mountain.

I'm Matilda Swift, author of Quintessentially British Cozy Mysteries.

And I'm Samantha Cummings, author of Young Adult Books about Magic, Myths and Monsters.

I've written the books, changed their covers, tweaked their blurbs, tried tools from a dozen ad courses, and I'm still not seeing success.

Now, we're working together to plot and plan our way from barely making ends meet to pulling in a living wage.

Join us on our journey where we'll be mastering the pen to snag that paycheck.

Hello and welcome to Pen to Paycheck Authors podcast.

I'm Samantha Cummings, here with my co-host Matilda Swift, and we're here to write our way to financial success.

We're two indie authors with over a dozen books between us and still a long way to go towards the quit-the-day job dream.

If that sounds familiar, listen along for our Mastery Through Missteps journey.

Each week, we will cover a topic to help along the way.

This week's topic is going to be the dream versus the reality of writing days.

But before that, let's do our friends and fringes of the week.

It's never dying.

I love it.

Okay.

Friends and fringes.

I feel like I've got a lot this week.

I think this has been a real week for sort of the ground feels like it's shifting beneath me in a good way and a bad way.

I think changes are a foot.

So I've been working on mindset things for about six months.

And sometimes felt really frustrating that it sort of seems like, oh, nothing's changing.

And then sometimes I can spot like glimmers of things being a bit different.

And this week has definitely felt like a week where it feels like things are starting to pay off in terms of I can see my abilities, like change how I perceive things and how I act around things, which has been really good.

That sounds a bit vague, but it kind of does feel vague as well.

So it feels like why I'm more able to see things positively and I'm more able to plan for success and like really, really start to see that as an option.

And that sounds really sort of minor and trivial, but it's kind of showing up in ways in which I'm able to make decisions that are not coming from a place of panic and they're not coming from a place of insufficiency.

So one thing that sort of feels like a winch this week is that I really feel like I have not cracked my newest book series or my newest book.

So I've got a new book series coming.

And it's definitely something that I feel good about.

And I really like the series.

I think the series has got great legs and is backed up by the fact that like two of my closest comp authors have got similar new series.

So my book is set in a book town and like next to bookshops and two comp authors have got new books set in bookshops.

And these like I would say I've got three close comps and two of them have got these.

So it feels like it's not a wild card.

It's something that definitely feels like people will enjoy it.

People will love it.

But it is not there yet.

And I think previously, if I had thought that, I would have felt really panicked.

But this week, I feel like, no, I absolutely know what the problem is, and that's fine.

And I think I wish I had been able to.

I don't know if I wish this.

I sort of wish I'd been able to see the problem earlier.

But also, I think I want to get better at acknowledging, like, this is my process.

My process is I have to write something where I'm more writing it as a rougher draft than I would for later books in a series.

And as I'm doing that rough draft, that is helping me figure out things about who these characters are, what characters I need in the book, because I've got characters I plan to put in there that they've just never done anything.

And it's like, there's no point like flogging a dead horse as a beautiful expression.

There's no point like insisting on them being in the book if they don't serve any function.

Maybe they'll come in another book, or maybe they'll just be a minor character for this one.

And maybe I need to fill their role with something else.

Also very often when I start a new book that I'm feeling less confident about, it starts in quite a boring place.

And I like, I know when you start a similar place, I need to have a rethink and a restart of this book.

So it's sort of a whinge that I need to do a really big rethinking of this book.

But also, at the moment, I'm just incredibly, incredibly busy in my day job, in my personal life, and still sort of like coming out of this mindset stuff.

And I think that isn't the most creative time.

So I'm really glad that I've done kind of a legwork on this book and this series.

And now I know what I need to go and redo on it.

I am feeling positive and creative about it.

When I think coming from a position of, I feel confident this series is worth the time me working on it, I'm going to go back and do some more work on it.

And I know what that work is going to be.

So it's interesting to see like having the same outcome with very different thoughts behind it.

And I feel much more positive.

So win and win, but overall big win.

How about you?

Yeah, that's a, but that's like a major win, because I know that in the past, when you've struggled to start books, you have sometimes just sack them off, just like flung them away.

So to see something and then still believe in it, but see like that you're struggling, but be okay with that is like amazing, because that's where a lot of people would, like people would fall at that first hurdle.

If they hadn't been working on the same sort of mindset, same things as you.

So I applaud you and that's all you wanted.

I have got major, major wins.

I was on holiday last week.

So I went to Paris and just really enjoyed it was, it was difficult because a vegan in Paris is a difficult thing to be, but it was, it was just really nice to be outside of my own comfort zone, and I honestly truly had an epiphany whilst I was there because I was enjoying it so much by also was, I don't know, epiphany.

I was enjoying it so much and I could see the struggle that I was in, but I could also see like the experience as it was like just just being this amazing experience of being completely out of my comfort zone, completely like very anxious the whole week, if I'm being honest, because when you don't know what you're going to eat.

About food specifically or other things?

Yeah, like just food, like just when you don't know what you're going to eat, it's very stressful.

But I honestly felt like at the end of the week, this is going to be a really long ramble, so apologies, but at the end of the week, I felt like coming back to England and doing all of this stuff that I want to do was going to feel so much easier because that was so hard.

And I got through it, like I got through a week in Paris, feeling really uncomfortable, but enjoying it at the same time.

And just the idea of going home, understanding what people were saying to me and being able to eat whatever food I wanted, I just felt like life is hard, but I can find, like I can appreciate all the easiness that I have at home.

I don't know if that makes any sense, but to me, it was just like, life can be hard and difficult, but there's also great things.

And if I can do a week in Paris.

It's an unexpected challenge, right?

And I think that kind of ties into today's topic in that there's very much the expectation of sort of dreams of the writing life, like this is exactly what I would envision it as.

And like, you think of a trip to Paris as like, I'm going to be like Emily in Paris, I'm going to be wearing a big hat and skipping around the sunshine, eating delicious food and conversing in the French that I definitely haven't forgotten since high school.

And the reality is, French people talk very, very fast, Parisians, especially so, they're very hard to understand on purpose, as is their right.

I would also speak French very fast if I could speak it.

Yes.

And I'm terrible at French.

And yeah, it is a place famous for its food.

And it's also very international cities.

You would think I'll be able to find food there.

And then you get there like, oh, it's just cheese and butter.

I remember now it is not very vegan friendly and very meat heavy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So but I'm saying for writing, you imagine it's going to be this very, very idyllic life.

But there are realities of it that are, even if you're a full-time author, would absolutely not be perfect.

So I think it is a really good time to today's topic.

So let's get into that then.

So what does your dream writing day look like?

And what's the reality?

Oh, okay.

So I have already written this down because I was just saying, before we started recording, I always make notes for myself beforehand because I need some sort of script to keep me on track.

So let me just peruse what I've written.

So what I envision as like my dream day as an author is waking up at like...

Sometimes I really think I want to be a morning person, but I know I'm not.

So I'm going to say waking up at 9am is like the my best world.

I'd love to be a sunrise girl, but I am not.

So I would love to wake up at 9am, or half 8am, 9am, and then go for a long walk with the dog, come home, do yoga, have breakfast, and then just do...

Well, gosh, I'm so riddled with anxieties today.

Sorry.

Yeah, the day has gone completely...

The day has gone.

And then do all of my admin stuff in the morning until 1am.

Just have complete admin only in the morning.

Because I'm not a morning person, and I'm not somebody who is very creative early in the morning.

It takes me so long to get going.

So I know if I had my way, I would just do crappy admin stuff, like reply to emails, set up my social posts, set up my ads and everything.

I can do all of that stuff, so I don't have to really think creatively.

And then after a lovely home-cooked lunch, I would then do my writing.

And then I'd love to write for three or four hours in the afternoon, and just be in my own creative zone until dinner time, and another dog walk, and then reading in the evening.

It's not super fancy or anything.

I would love to just have an afternoon of creativity and then fit the rest of my life around that.

The rest of your life is the creativity.

So it's like, I think the rest of your life is the creativity.

And I think people, especially me, really struggle to factor that in.

So the time in which you are walking the dog is the time in which you're having thoughts, and the time in which you're cooking food is the time when you are using your brain in a way that doesn't necessarily equal words on the page.

But if you didn't do it, you wouldn't get so many words on the page.

And that's really hard to think about.

Before we go on to me, can I say how many words would you be getting written, or how many chapters, or do you measure that way in an ideal day?

I do measure words in a day.

Like an ideal day would be between 3,000 and 5,000 words a day.

That's a lot.

But if I was able to just have...

Yes, because I figured out this year, or like the end of last year, that I can write like a thousand words in 25 minutes.

So like I was doing like 25 minutes sprints, getting around a thousand words in 25 minutes.

I can solidly do 25 minutes sprints for a couple of hours, and feel and make a lot of progress if I have the time to do it, which I don't.

That's where I fall down, is like I only have time to do like an hour's work every night at the moment.

But if I had a few hours, I know that I could consistently knock out a good few thousand words a day.

Let me hear yours.

It is interesting as well because actually in my head, this topic was like factoring in the constraints of my current life, which is a terrible way to think about your dream writing life.

I think it's partly because I am not even following my usual schedule of writing.

I'm really not.

So I'm currently not even in my dream, including a day job writing days, which I would like to be.

So if I were going to have a real, real dream writing days, I think the thing that I'm not certain about is when I would start writing.

I think I haven't had a period of having my dream writing days.

Actually, that's not true, actually.

When I've been on writing retreats with friends, I really have.

So at the moment, I really always think at the weekends, I'm going to write in my perfect schedule.

And then I don't because I have things to do.

And also I'm tired from the week.

So I never have my dream writing days except when I'm on a writing retreat with friends.

And then I find it so easy to follow a very good schedule.

I am really a person who does not acknowledge how much I need a body double.

Just someone to be there on the same schedule as me and doing nothing collaborative, like not even talking, just having someone else have the same schedule.

That will be my dream.

My actual dream will be that I have a writing, you know, companion.

What's the word?

Yeah, yeah, so that's a good word.

But like writing partner, I guess.

Oh, yeah, like just someone who sits there at the same time, writes, a co-worker.

And when I would start early, so I like an early morning, I feel I was raised with so much like Protestant work ethic, that to me, like a 90 year start feels like illegal.

And I hate the weekends, I use myself every weekend.

I think I need a lie in because I'm tired from the weekend.

Also, I have a facility on the weekend, like the night before the weekend, because it's nice a bit of late night and kind of relax a bit.

And then I do it too much and I spend too much time on my phone, I go to bed quite late, then I wake up quite late.

And then I wake up and by the time I've got up and I'll have a read and I'll be like this, productive but also then it feels like time wasting.

If I'm not like up and about until 10, I do that and I'm like, well, the whole day is wasted now.

I'm such a, it's gone, it's disappeared, too late.

I absolutely I'm lying to myself and I hate it and I really, really am trying to get better at it.

But my ideal day because of that, I would start early.

When I've done writing retreats with friends, what works really, really well is to try and have a because I want to be consistent over several days.

We tend to have scheduled everything.

So we'll schedule food and then writing sprints and then conversation time and then even going out for a walk time.

So I will like you have a number of short bursts, but mine will be a little bit longer and I will have mini sprints than that.

So ideally, I would probably write from sort of 9 to 11, then have 11s, you know, one of the many important meals of the day.

And that's maybe just half an hour and then 11.30 to 1.30.

And then I actually quite like a long lunch.

Like I really struggle with just an hour for lunch.

I think I don't get back into the afternoon if I just have a short lunch.

It feels too much like a work day and I come squeezing things in and I don't really I tend to do nothing if I only have an hour, if I have two hours, I'll go and do a walk, run some errands, read a book.

So I like a longer lunch ideally.

And it might be then that we have a conversation session.

So you might have like a talk about your plans or talk about the book that you're currently writing.

So some sort of conversation session like a walk and talk, we'll have those.

Then an afternoon writing session, then again, a conversation over dinner and then maybe even an evening writing session.

So what I'm doing writing with you is we're often trying to get quite a bit of work done because we are maybe on quite a time limit.

I did one with a friend a couple of years ago, where we went to the Airbnb and it was one of those like dream Airbnbs where the hosts are just delightful and they're just charming and friendly.

And you find yourself on like in a we were literally in a meadow, we were in a meadow saying in like a converted barn in the meadow, there were bird feeds everywhere.

There were unusual like animals and plants around and just wild flowers all around us.

And so we would finish writing and then wander barefoot through the through the wildflower meadow and then go and sit and they had like a year and sit in so it was it was it was a dream.

And then Okay, now I'm changing.

That's my dream now.

So we were there for, I think, two and a half days of actual writing time off since I was traveling either end, I think it was two and a half days.

And we both did 13,000 words.

And I write, I think I write much slower than you because I tend to write fewer drafts.

So I will spend more time on my words because they're only really good if you want more draft.

I have had days before where I've written 7,000 words and they needed a lot more editing and I felt I burned out too quickly.

So I probably wouldn't want to do 7,000 word days consistently.

I think 5,000 for me is a good limit and really three, I think if I were consistently working full time, I could get up to like three to five consistently without burning me out.

But I wouldn't mind just having three because if they were going to need less editing at the end, because I find that much more positive for me, I find it very dispiriting to end it with a lot of words I have to delete and spend a lot of time editing.

I was like, oh, why don't you just write this right the first time?

So yeah, right.

And really, if I only wrote 2,000 words a day on weekdays, that's 10,000 words a week, which gives you a book in a couple of months.

And to me, for me, that would need very little editing if I did that pace.

So that is very doable.

And so if you could get up to like twice that speed, fantastic, like really, really golden.

So yeah, I think this is maybe a slight epiphany that I really do need a schedule that I cannot get myself out of.

And I'm not a accountability partner, that's the thing I need an accountability partner.

Yes.

I'm not accountable to myself.

Yeah.

Because yeah, I do, I like to be in my chair a lot.

Yeah, I think that's something that I've never really considered properly like out loud, but I have thought about it in the past is having an outside of my house office.

So a small office, like somewhere in the center of the town that I live in, which I could share with other creative people, where people can just come and go and write together without it being a chatty environment.

That's like a dream I didn't know I had until just now.

But that sort of body doubling that probably exists in some way.

So like where I live, I live in a very, very creative town, everybody here is, if you're not a therapist, which is probably the most common job where I live, if you're not a therapist, you're probably a writer or painter of some sort.

And there are quite a lot of co-working spaces.

And I know people in those are often some sort of creative.

The town hall, which isn't really a town hall, it's a community asset, does have co-working spaces for very cheap.

And I was thinking last winter, I should actually work there for my day job because just the heating was alone.

Actually, it would be cheaper to do that than to work here.

But I've got the cats, I don't really live alone all day because I'm overly fond of them.

So I don't know if I do that.

But I do think that is, I think that is such a big help.

I think one problem I have is that there are, with self publishing, so many things you can be doing.

And I often get sort of like paralyzed by the indecision, like really in a way that I don't, I don't acknowledge enough and I don't seek enough to fix.

Because I think it's not, I'm not, I'm a very decisive person normally.

But because I could be, and these things will take a lot of time, working on my ads, I've got Amazon ads going at the moment that I need to work on, I need to split it up into different sorts of ads, look at the budget, look at the keywords.

I need to do that.

But that is a good few hours work.

I also need to put together a very strong social plan and also need to look at my email automations and really work on those.

Each of those is at least a half day job.

And I don't have that many half days and also, they're so draining and I don't want to do them.

So I don't.

But if I had just decided like I will spend half a day writing and half a day doing a job that I don't want to do necessarily, and they're not even horrible, when I get to them they'll be fine, it's just like, it's that I have to sit down and think about them.

But if I had it, you know, if I were writing full time, I would want to set myself like, at least every like one week a month, like, here's one week where you just do writing in the morning and in the afternoon, or I'd have an admin day a week.

And at the moment, I just sit paralyzed by the ability, inability to do all the things.

I am I have an admin day every Saturday.

So Saturdays are my admin days.

And over the last few weeks, I've kind of like pulled back a little bit because I've been trying to like just get more editing done.

But I do think like having an admin day once a week is really helpful.

It's not enough because I'm still feel like I'm drowning in admin.

But having, I think one of the things that I think would be so beneficial is once you start having an admin couple of hours every day, eventually that would taper off because it would just be instead of doing all the big admin jobs, you'd just be tinkering with admin stuff that you already had going on.

So I would love that.

I would absolutely love to have way more time for admin because it's such a huge part of everything.

I'm just surrounded by post-its of everything that I need to do.

And every single post-it is a day's work, at least, and it's awful.

I imagine just having that built into your everyday is, it really is my dream.

Yeah.

How do you do it?

So even once a week, do you, because I really struggle with the fact that I want to write two days of the weekend, I have a three day weekend on purpose because I want to write two days of the weekend.

And then one day I'll be doing something and it's often seeing friends or family, or it might be going for a walk, like a long walk.

I just don't have time I could fit an admin day in.

How do you fit that around everything else?

I don't have a social life.

Right.

That's where it is.

So I do walk a lot, so obviously I've got a dog, so we walk a lot.

Every morning we go for a walk, a Thursday and Sunday we do mega walks in the morning.

And then when I come back, I don't tend to do anything else on my weekends because my weekends are so precious to me.

And I love alone time, because I work in an office now full of people, which I never used to, we've just acquired loads of new staff.

So now I'm like constantly surrounded by people.

I just don't want to see anybody else at the weekend, I'm spent with talking.

So yeah, I think unfortunately, the payoff for that is not having such a busy social life, which is difficult for you, because you are the most social person I've ever come into contact with.

I mean, I would describe myself the exact opposite.

I very regularly describe myself as being incredibly unsocial.

I think that's why I work from home.

So I don't see anybody during the week.

I do a lot of activities, so I go roller skating on Tuesdays.

That is an anti social activity because I don't talk to anybody.

I talk to people like when I'm sat down, but like generally, I'm just skating by myself.

And then on Wednesdays, I go to a writing group, which is silent writing group, I sit and just write by myself and there's a bit of chat afterwards.

And I'm currently in a play.

And actually, that is not a lot of chat because you're either on stage or you're waiting to be on stage.

So I think I have a lot of activities that are like social adjacent, but still don't really require me to do a lot of talking to people, which works for me.

But also, it doesn't mean that like one day the weekend, I do want to be doing, I don't know, do I want to be?

That's not part of it is I want to be, part of it is it's definitely good for me and part of it is it's sometimes it feels like a social obligation and I feel resentful of it, even though it's a thing I've chosen to do.

Which is, again, something I really want to be working on.

I want to be more present in things I'm choosing to do, whereas I'm constantly feeling like I should be somewhere else.

And that is making me feel very tense.

I'm when I'm not writing, I'm thinking I should be writing.

And when I'm sat at my desk, I'm thinking, well, this is going terribly.

I'm not being creative right now.

I should be doing something like it fill my well and have, you know, have a social life.

And I in my dream life scenario, I think I've now got so much time that I can balance all of that.

That is what that's the dream, right?

And that is probably not true at all.

But that is one thing that I think I wrote that down.

Yeah, I wrote that down when I before we started recording, I was like, I'm going to write something down and remember to say it when we're recording.

So as I've just said, at the weekend, I don't see anybody I'm really antisocial.

But I don't want to be that way.

That's not a dream life for me.

I do want to be social.

And I have worked really hard over the last year to, to really try and break free of I think it's like a hangover from lockdown is getting so self sufficient.

And so like easily, like I just easily spend time on my own, and think that I don't need friends and that was a survival mode.

Like that was the way that I got through lockdown thinking, I don't need to see people.

And that's like I've had a huge hangover with that for the last few years.

So over the last 12 months, I've really tried to get out of that and claw my way back out to seeing people.

And I do, but not as much as I would like I would love to have way more time with friends and family like I always I'm always telling my family, Oh, I can't come around this weekend.

And when they ask why, they live like two minutes down the road, that's the answer is like, because I've got loads of work to do.

Like, yeah, I'm sorry, but I'm working.

But I don't want to be like that.

I want to have time where I can just feel great about spending time with friends and like doing courses.

I love doing courses and learning new things.

I would love to have more time more guilt free time doing that.

Yeah, I think part of me thinks I want to get better at like making my dream writing days happen at the weekends.

I feel like I can't let myself stop work until I've got that.

But also there is the fact that like I do need to have the sort of month long admin time to figure out so many things to like really, really sit down and sort out my abs and abs.

And it's like, when people do that, who've got day jobs, I just don't understand.

Because like I, the only real evenings I have free that are not like writing days are Monday, which is the first day back of the week.

I'm tired.

I'm often like, I try and do a meal prep then I edit this podcast, you know, when I, I often just don't do anything on Monday evenings.

Like it's my own evening kind of very regularly and by myself.

And then Thursdays, which is like the end of my working week and I want to be relaxing.

And I just, but then how much of that is an excuse?

How much of that would I still make an excuse of if I were writing full time and having these like quote unquote dreamer units?

Because I know people say when you go to write full time, you don't do any more writing.

You just find wasteful time.

But like, I would find that relaxing.

I feel exhausted all the time now.

I mean, that's just my general state.

I was saying to you before, like, I feel like after this podcast, it is not even 9pm.

I'm going to go to sleep.

I've been yawning, you know, while I've been talking.

I'm going to go to bed.

But I'm probably not, right?

I'm probably going to go and find something useful to do and keep myself up late and can like perpetuate the cycle until tomorrow and forever and ever and ever.

So I do I do often think like I really want to get my weekend sorted and want to get out of the house and writing because I'm running a cafe by 9am every Saturday, Friday, whatever it is.

Before I let myself think I could be trusted to write full time, and I don't know how much that is true.

I know I can't get a sense of it, but I would, I think I would really, really like to find something some sort of accountability partner.

I have had a friend before who used to write every Friday and we she's a later in the day person like she's not a 9am person and we will both meet about 11am and we would write till about six or seven.

11am is too early for me.

Too early to write.

Horrible time to write.

We take a lunch break as well and chat and that was that felt so productive.

And I do maybe need to actively try and find someone.

I have some friends here we write together on Fridays but like it's very inconsistent because we have very different schedules.

Whereas this friend that I used to write with in Hong Kong, she was a full time writer so I was really just crushing her regular writing days.

But knowing that we'd set up this routine on Fridays meant that I that's just what I did on Fridays.

I didn't do anything else.

There was no question about it because also Friday is a workday for everybody so it's not like there's anything else you can be doing.

So yeah, maybe I need to find, like, to receive more accountability partners because that definitely definitely keeps me far more productive than trying to do it by myself at home when I could just stay in bed or I can find things to do, right?

Like I can, I can read a bit, I can look at my ads and I can half do a dozen things before getting to writing.

But I know that my creativity is more, it's higher first thing in the morning.

So I need to, I need to find a way to tap into that and stop feeling, and then I just feel guilty that I've wasted it and then I don't write in the rest of the day and then it's just a vicious circle.

So I am going to break that and I'm going to find accountability partner, find some master rights.

I also, one thing I want to get better at is like finding or evaluating my energy levels because I have in my head this ideal dream writing day where I get up, tumble out of bed like a Disney princess, birds dress me, I wander downstairs, I just sit at my computer, type, type, type, type, type.

I'm so wide awake and happy and some days I'm not and I, like I have a chronic illness and some days I feel really fatigued.

Some days, like just life has got to you and you just feel tired or you feel uninspired.

And all I try and do is like press play on the same day and that day never accounts for like how do I feel because I don't trust myself enough.

I think if I'm not, this goes back to the whole like productivity obsession that generally is in our culture, because I don't trust myself to be able to say I'm feeling tired.

The voice in my head says, no, you're being lazy, get to work.

And I think that worked when I was like in my 20s and early 30s.

And now I'm approaching 40.

I'm just tired.

I'm just really tired sometimes.

Yeah, it's something that I think I don't suffer from this, but I know a lot of other people who do.

And like you've just said, it's that you think if you failed at something, failed to meet a goal that you had, you think you throw the rest of the day away.

You think that it's ruined, so what's the point?

There's no point trying, whereas obviously it's a mindset thing, but it's very deeply ingrained into people who are scared of getting in trouble for doing things wrong.

And I don't have that mindset.

I assume that everything I do is wrong and I don't care.

So you could definitely take a leaf out of my book and think if you only get to write for 10 minutes or do something for 10 minutes of a day, just do it for 10 minutes and be happy you did it.

I think my worry, I know this isn't a good way of thinking about it, but my worry is that if I let the leash loose, I will just slack off and do nothing.

And that isn't true.

And I need a way to feel better about that because if I get to 10 a.m.

and have nothing and I feel like I wasted a day, I feel like I should throw the whole day away.

I don't, what I keep doing is keep pushing, keep pushing in a way that feels very useless because I'll be like, oh, okay, I'll get to the cafe and I'll do an honest thing on the way.

So I'll do that and then I've already gotten out of the cafe.

And it's like, well, I'll open the document, I'll look at it.

I'm so annoyed.

I've only got an hour now.

But I'll just be annoyed and I'll annoy myself out of like really big if I could be.

I could have had an hour.

And that is plenty of time to do something.

Yeah.

And I just I'm fixated on this like this ideal dream day that I could have.

And that's definitely something I was working on in therapy.

And I do I'm still trying to think about it.

About just letting things be fine.

And yet not being like this punish for failure thing.

It does just feel like that has in the past brought me great success is like pushing myself very, very hard.

Has brought me great academic and life success.

Yes.

So if I let go of it, it feels very hard to release.

I know because I know because you are so academically minded and you do think like the pun you are rewarded for the self-punishment, but you aren't in that cycle, you've basically changed your life.

You're not that person anymore, but you're still acting like that person.

Yeah.

And it's also like I used to do before, like, yeah, when I was living in Hong Kong, I used I didn't start working till 10am.

And I used to write every day in the nearest Starbucks, like two doors down from my office at Starbucks, where I don't mind taking up a table Starbucks for hours for drinking more cup of tea.

I have no bother about that.

I'm sure they'll be fine.

I think capitalism is taking care of them well.

So it's like, yeah, that feels fine.

So I would have a cup of tea for two hours there and write.

And that felt hard.

But that felt like a hard thing that I got locked out of, and like pushing myself to be there, even if I didn't feel great, I would just read, I would read in the cafe.

And that was like time for me before work.

And I've tried to replicate that by having like writing time in my house.

It just doesn't feel the same.

And I'm really struggling to like find the same feeling.

If there was a cafe over the road, I would go there every day.

I would be there.

But I live in a very small, creative community.

People do not want to be up at 6am, surprisingly, I do.

But other people seem not to be.

And I just, I don't know how to keep that same energy.

It absolutely doesn't feel the same way because in the winter, if I want to be at my writing desk at 6am, I have to come downstairs at half five in the cold and turn the radiator on in the room where I'm going to write.

And I don't want to do that.

So then I'm just like, I'll write in bed.

And then writing in bed is not productive.

So I think there's another thing between the dream and the reality of writing days.

There's like the dream, dream writing day.

There's the dream, current situation writing day, and there's where I am currently, which is like, I'm doing nothing.

Like I'm not achieving anything because I'm trying to have the end dream writing day.

I'm failing even to hit the like current situation, ideal writing day.

I'm failing everywhere.

But that's okay, because you're still trying to figure it out.

And I think just having the idea, I know we joke about manifesting, but just having an idea of a good visual of what you think your dream dream day is going to be is at least something to work towards.

I do think that that is helpful.

It does feel very far away and it feels like a fantasy, but I'd rather be working towards a fantasy than just working for someone else for my entire life and being tired and not living, not trying to destroy it.

I'm just such a fantasy striver.

I just desperately would rather believe in that, that it's going to happen.

Yeah, and there are ways to make it happen, right?

I'm always trying to fix everything at once.

I'm a do all the things person.

I don't know if that's come across, maybe.

But what I could just do is just try and fix the weekends.

So if I just found an accountability round on a Friday, which I could do, I'm sure there's plenty of people on here who are also looking for the same thing, I could just put it on my local Facebook group.

Yeah.

And just find someone and say, do you also want to sit in the local library, which is warm and gives you free tea and coffee in winter and has water on tap in summer?

I know it's good, right?

Do you want to come sit there with me?

And I will be at this desk from nine to five every Friday.

And it doesn't matter what you do, it doesn't matter if you can be late.

It's a fantastic, yeah, yeah, I think it's a fantastic and very, very achievable goal just to put a call out and have people potentially show up to co-work together.

We do.

Do it.

My goodness.

Do it.

Epiphany.

Okay, I'm going to do that.

I'm going to get my Friday sorted.

I'm going to do it.

I'm going to wait to do it until I come back from my holiday because I have got play.

I've got a play coming out that I'm in the week after next.

It's a very busy period at work.

So I feel like all I'm doing at the moment is sort of spinning the 10 million plates until I can go on holiday.

So that is definitely...

We can put the call out now and sort it out when I'm back.

Yeah.

It'll be one of your Q3 goals.

I wish it was Q3.

I don't want to really think about Q3.

No.

I am not even named.

I started a Q3 list today.

I looked at my Q2 list for the first time in a few weeks.

Yeah, I've got a very good uptick.

I'm looking at mine.

I'm not happy with it.

No.

So, for, I feel like this is a good place to end, but you've definitely got something to strive towards, and I just have to just keep being positive.

Can you just keep working towards that?

Manifest.

Yeah, I'm going to manifest.

I'm going to do some major manifesting.

I'm going to get on a Pinterest board.

So for next week's topic, we are continuing with this series of Real Life vs Writing, with an episode on budgeting and financial planning.

Oh, do you have any thoughts on this?

I really don't want to do this episode.

That's what I thought on it, but I really need to.

I type up the notes, the script for this.

I type this up, and I notice that you make once a month.

And when I type that up, I say, oh gosh, I can't wait for the episodes to come around.

I've been dreading it coming around.

It will be really good.

And actually, I think it's good to me to do this, like this week, because I've been in such an uncreative period, because I'm trying to do too many things.

I'm actually just going to throw in the towel on being creative.

I'll do little things, but I'm going to stop wasting time punishing myself for what I'm not doing, and find ways to be productive.

I think this is a good time for me to think about financial plans and take a real long hard look at it.

And I've been thinking about it a lot recently, because I'm looking at the future and when I can afford to make different changes and what I want to do in terms of work and writing.

It has been playing around a lot recently, so I think I may be ready to think about it and get some thoughts down and think some in concrete.

I don't think by next week I will have a solution, but I think this will be a good time to talk through the things that I have thought about on the road to that.

How about you?

Yeah, I'm notoriously bad at talking about money and looking at money, and I have a really bad relationship with money.

Even though I'm a saver, I save because I'm scared to spend, and you can't run a business and be scared to spend money.

So this is like a very difficult mindset for me, is the idea of investing in myself.

So I know that I need to look at what money I bring in for my day job and what I'm spending on frivolous things that I could be funneling into my business budget instead.

So that's kind of where I'm going.

Because at the start of the year, I did set up a business account and I do put money in it every month.

That's just purely just for advertising.

So yeah, I just need to build on what I already started, I think.

Okay, I'm looking forward to talking to you next week now.

I think as long as we are both thinking about it, that is maybe the next thing, next step we need to make.

I don't think by next week we will have concrete financial plans.

But I think we are both ready to face up some things.

Yes, yeah.

Oh, I'm so scared.

Well, thank you very much for listening, and make sure to tune in next week.

Goodbye!

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