- Slept: 23.30
- Woke: 09.00
- Screenplay pages: 6
- Coding practice: 0
- Piano practice: 0
Today was one of the hard days. Granted, I’m not sure I know when the last easy day was, but it doesn’t matter what your baseline is, some days suck a lot more than others. Same for everyone, everywhere, whether you’re living your best life or fighting your hardest fight.
A huge part of what makes the hard days hard for me is quality of sleep. It’s perfectly common for me to have nights like this where I fail to get into a deep sleep and wake up feeling like I’ve not slept a wink or a blink. When those nights combine with/follow on from nights like Saturday where the quantity of sleep is significantly reduced, well, that’s a recipe for days like today.
Writing
I genuinely can’t believe I actually still managed to write six pages today. I don’t know how I did it, I must have been in some kind of hypnotic state to be able to actually get my imagination working and my fingers hitting the right keys, but looking back on a day like today knowing I managed to do more than nothing is bordering on the miraculous.
Of course, I haven’t read it back yet, so with fresh eyes on a new day it may be utter drivel, but I’m proud of the fact that I managed to do the one thing I really want to prioritise at the moment.
Without much in the way of extrinsic motivation at the moment, I made a promise to myself to do everything I could to finish a screenplay by the end of the year (ideally the end of this month) and I want to keep that promise to myself.
Absent external deadlines, I’ve always had a tendency to let things drift and I’ve been working on this project for long enough1 that I just need to get a first draft done. That requires a level of self-motivation that’s hard for me when I’m struggling as much as I am just now.
Other stuff
We had a surveyor over today to talk through the survey on our new house2 and to check over ours. The Help to Buy scheme we used to buy our current place needs us to provide a surveyor’s valuation to make sure they’re not getting short-changed on the deal when we repay them the loan.
That took a lot of effort not just getting the place clean and tidy enough for someone to visit, but also in pretending not to be as broken as I am today. I think I pulled it off, but boy am I feeling it.
Everything else today – coding, piano etc – has gone right out the window because some days things just aren’t doable and it’s no use pretending they are. I learned a long time ago that pushing yourself to do more than you know yourself to be physically and mentally capable of only leads to a worse day tomorrow. Sometimes that’s unavoidable – or worth the trade-off – but today was not one of those days.
- It’s a drama based on real events from the mid-20th century, so it’s taken a lot of research. The trouble with research is that it’s always hard to tell when enough is enough. At some point it’s time to put it down and start writing. ↩︎
- Potential new house, I should say. Because the way like has treated us over the last four years I’m not counting my chickens until they’re on the dinner table. ↩︎