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Pre-S (get it? It’s like a PS except it comes at the beginning instead of the end, so, Pre-S): I finished the third draft of my latest novel! Two months ahead of schedule! Cue the fanfare! Will it ever see the light of day? Who the heck knows! All I know is I did a thing! Please clap.

[waits for applause to die down]

Thank you, you’re too kind. And now, for the offer-slash-request (yes, I know I could have just used a / instead of writing out “slash,” but where’s the fun in that? Nowhere, that’s where).

Where was I? Oh, right: would you like to read the first three chapters? Because I may have just saved those three chapters as a PDF document that I’ll be more than happy to send you. Just hit reply to this email and let me know.

(I won’t lie: I was going to create this nifty little form that would automatically kick off this email sequence where the requested PDF would just magically* arrive in your inbox and… yeah, it made my brain hurt, too. So you know what? Email works just nifty with less hassle. This is related to what I wanted to talk about this month, but more on that in a minute.)

(*Totally not magic.)

Now, the request: Once you’ve read the chapters, could you let me know what you think? What questions it left you with? What didn’t seem clear? What just made you go “huh?” Obviously, I can’t hold you to it, but if you would share your thoughts, I’d be grateful.

Right, on with our regularly scheduled program, already in progress.

When to push harder, and when to lower the resistance

I’ve been thinking about resistance lately. Not political or governmental resistance (although, yes, I’ve been thinking about that too, a lot), but resistance inside myself. Because the uncomfortable truth (well, uncomfortable for me, at any rate) is this: the one thing holding me back more than anything else is myself.

Take the example above, where I wanted to do something a bit fancy. Hitting the reply button is way easier, right? So why make it harder than it has to be?

Why make things harder for no good reason?

It made me think of how I exercise. I do yoga and am (slowly) getting back into running—knees, please don’t fail me now—but I also do a lot of weight lifting. Resistance training, in other words. Periodically, I’m supposed to add to the amount of weight I lift. Increase the resistance, in other words. Sometimes, it’s not easy. If I increase a weight by five pounds, for instance, suddenly I can only lift it five or six times, where I could lift it twelve times before. It can get discouraging, and sometimes I drop the weight back down and do more reps.

Is one way better than the other? It probably depends, I don’t know. (I'm not asking for workout advice, by the way.) I have a feeling I should work with the heavier weight doing fewer reps until I can gradually work my way up. That approach may be fine for physical fitness. But does everything in life have to be like that?

I feel myself running into similar situations when it comes to my writing, whether it’s a plot point in a story or how to approach the business of writing. Is it as hard as it sometimes seems, or am I making it harder for myself?

What if, instead of trying to brute-force my way through it, I tried instead to lower my resistance?

And that makes me wonder what else I'm making more difficult than it needs to be.

What I’m reading:

I’m reading a novel called Baker Thief by Claudie Arsenault. It’s a fantasy set in a world where a genderfluid baker makes croissants by day and by night dons a mask and skirt and steals exocores, power sources that may be the trapped souls of witches. It’s really good! I wish I could do nothing but sit at home and read this.

And that’s it for this month. See you in March!