Hey guys,
I’ve talked about this elsewhere, but I wanted to make a post for those who aren’t on my Patreon, or Royal Road, and don’t subscribe to my Inner Circle newsletter.
A couple weeks ago, I had a bit of an epiphany.
I find myself often talking about how I’m tired. I’m aware of the need for rest and recuperation, but I talk about how I’m “working hard” to try and maintain my work life balance (with limited success.) If I take breaks, it’s in the name of necessity, because I’ve had it beat into my stubborn blockhead that it actually is necessary. And when I have extra energy, I almost always spend it trying to catch up, or to get ahead.
I’ve said it before, but deep down I’m resentful of the fact that my mind and body can’t withstand me pushing at 100%, 7 days a week, indefinitely.
I’ve been waffling back and forth around 80% of my max energy for a while, having frequent low dips when I push even a little too hard that take me out for a day or two. I’ve done a lot of stuff to try and get back to 100%, and it has helped bring me up from like 20% to something workable, but I haven’t gone back to what I would consider “normal.”
There have been many potential causes these last couple years for this, including: pretty severe S.A.D., Covid (and possibly long Covid), Vitamin B&D deficiency, my father dying, my mother having some very dramatic life issues and almost dying, me moving to a new house…you know, STUFF. I’ve done everything I could think of to “fix” myself and it has helped a lot, and I have a few more ideas to explore with the help of a doctor (thyroid issues? some other nutrient deficiency?), but my current state has been starting to feel like the new normal.
And I realized, Maybe I’m going about this whole thing wrong.
My epiphany was that maybe I need to stop pushing as hard as possible, doing as much as possible, and setting large goals for myself. Maybe, to actually recuperate my mental and creative energy, I need to rest.
So I asked myself the mind-blowing question, “What is the minimum you could do? What if you actively tried to take extended rest, instead of just a day or two here and there, and didn’t push yourself to exhaustion on the days you do work?”
I mean, I know it kind of sounds obvious, but I never thought of it. Every time I heard people talk about working less as part of self care, re-energizing, and the creative process, in my mind I kind of always morphed it into, “Work faster, work more efficiently, and then rest optimally, so you can secretly work more.” Even when people I respect directly said it, I wasn’t really hearing it. Even when I said it as advice to others, I felt that working less was something one did so that later, they could again work more.
So I looked at my calendar for 2025, which was already full of projects, and cut pretty much anything that wasn’t writing and publishing, with some minor admin and marketing work. I cut some bonus content I had wanted to write, too, moving my wordcount goals from about 300k to 210k. All in all, I removed about 50% of the work I was planning to try to do. I decided to call it the Year of Doing Less and I was super excited and relieved when looking at it.
A schedule where I could work 7-8 hour days, rest on the weekends, and take 6 weeks of staycation time to do other things, or just sit around and read in my back yard all day.
It was just a huge metaphorical exhalation. I would still be working steadily, except for the 6 weeks of planned stay-cation time, but it seemed doable without stress.
And that feeling made me realize how exhausted I really was, even more.
But that was 2025, and for the rest of 2024, I was still on crunch time, working like 50+ hour weeks to finish everything on my plate.
But then, I was talking about it with my guy, how I was so tired but I still had to keep pushing to write PGTS while also finishing The Catastrophe Collector book on time so that I could publish before the Amazon deadline–they punish you for having to cancel a preorder, and they don’t allow you to push out the deadline more than 30 days like all the other platforms do.
And I realized that Amazon’s punishment wasn’t really a good enough reason to keep killing myself.
I am still going to write The Catastrophe Collector Book 2, and then at least 1 more book in this spinoff series. (Any more than that will depend on how sales go at that point.) Book 2 is fully plotted, mostly written, and just needs a few more weeks of work from me to be ready.
But instead of coming out now, I’m going to serialize the book on my Patreon next year, and then publish when it’s ready. Fitting those extra weeks into the Year of Doing Less, working around A Practical Guide to Sorcery’s needs, means that it might not come out as a published book until November or so.
You can still preorder the Catastrophe Collector 2 on any platform that allows preorders, including Azalea Ellis Books, except Amazon.
I’m still going to be posting the weekly chapter of PGTS, except for a couple weeks’ break after the launch of a new book. PGTS Book 5: A Cauldron of Bitterness, is still coming out in a few months.
I also still want to do those other projects I initially had planned (like special edition hardcovers with illustrations and new bonus content) but they’re just going to be pushed out into the future.
Feel free to ask questions if you guys have any. 