Why I'm Halving My Publishing Schedule To Get Better.

Some words on re-grounding, on humility, and polar bear pizzas.

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What does resolve look like to you? “Work harder.” What if working harder means to give myself rest?

A pizza delivery boy from southeast Pennsylvania gets a phone call from the North Pole. The hungry polar bear on the line says I need a large pie: half penguin, half seal. The delivery boy’s boss says the pizza needs to be there in an hour. The boy gets the pizza from the kitchen. The boy has a bike. The boy’s bike tires are flat.

The boy is committed to delivering this pizza.

The boy battles storms and Canada and gets the pizza to an iceberg in the Arctic in an hour. The polar bear says, “This pizza is cold. Do you really expect me to tip you for a cold pizza? Look at this. This seal is soggy. Unacceptable.”  

I feel like this delivery boy.

I could be reflecting positively on the rugged journey of taking a pizza through the wilderness, through storms and Canada, and delivering it whole. In an hour. Instead, I’m going, “Where are the polar bears who want my pizza?”

Every online writer guru whispering tantric success stories in the ears of unknown writers is saying, consistency, consistency, consistency is key to growth. Five months into a weekly posting schedule, I’m going, “Am I here to collect subscribers like they’re baseball cards, and I, the ponytailed sweat-panted eBay flipper, must stand awkwardly by the Target shelf until the subscriber restock guy arrives?”

Define growth. What growth looks like to me is creating at a pace that feels like it’s channeling my imagination rather than depleting it, and then hoping that my diligent work on this craft draws in the people who want to share in a dark, hopeful, wild, fantastic bighearted world. And I think you, the reader, see this emotion reflected in the story. The care, the experimentation, the playfulness. Everything that makes creating a need and a joy. The second stage of that progress is doing it well enough to afford an exotic moss-covered cottage atop a Middle-earthen mountain.

The avenue to writing growth, to me, is to treat it like it’s my job. Can’t think straight? Doesn’t matter – I gotta sit there for the hour I’ve committed and stare at the screen. The plot makes no sense? Doesn’t matter – write it down and sort it out later. Creative routine is like protein for the gym rat writer. “Inspiration” is just another word for the guy who only goes for a run the day after New Year’s.

Here’s what has me writing polar bear pizza analogies into an essay-ramble-lament-to-Gandalf:

I wrote every day before and after work for six days to complete an 8,600-word story – to hit my deadline. The Saturday, I worked ten hours, came home, and then edited into the evening for four hours. I bonked out 1,800 words and read back through. I loved it. Did I feel accomplished? Yeah. How could you write about a contract bodyguard sasquatch who’s terrified of getting shaved by children in Chewbacca masks without feeling accomplished? You just can’t.

Then why was my face doing the scrunch-face I-wanna-cry-now thing?     

I told my rational brain that I’d done so much and done it well, and my body told me that it wanted to lay down in a side alley in the rain and hold all the belongings of my soul close to my chest in a soggy paper bag. I felt overextended, and like I was writing indebted to my deadline. For the reader. For growth.

Did J.R.R. Tolkien check in with his readers to see if they still liked him after he went silent for weeks to work on a story at his pace? I doubt it. He may have had anxieties. I don’t know. Any writer that found a significant audience – was their output dictated by their fans? I think they did what they liked first and their creation was paramount. They had a story that meant something to them. Their self-discovery, their expression. And when people didn’t know or like the work, the artist said, I don’t care, this is what I want to do.

The deceptive part is when “putting in the work” doesn’t mean “write harder.” When it means sitting still to let the sediment settle. Keeping oneself full.

These writers who found their readers – did they have quiet breakdowns as they pawed at a bowl of spaghetti in a dark room? Was their emotional stability steadier than mine, or am I just saying the part every writer does alone out loud?

Maybe, at some point, Tolkien asked himself as he sat there by the typewriter, if it was really necessary to write an elvish genealogy that makes James Joyce’s prose look like a Charlotte International Airport paperback. But he wanted to, so he did it. It made him feel something first. That’s what mattered.

And so. In the land of forever adjustments, I escalated my output from two posts per month to four over the summer – two nonfiction, and two fiction. I’ve been operating with the practice that to reach the dream, I must hustle harder. I must be prolific. 7 a.m. every Sunday. Or else.

Nah.

When I write a story and put the laptop away, and go sit on the couch in tears, maybe that’s telling me something. If they enjoy the stories, they will stay for the stories, Jon. If what you offer is authentic. If it is grounded in you. Write something inauthentic and the internet will sniff you out and shit in your coffin before they bury you in it. Or you’ll hear silence, because you’re not being true to your voice, and it’s corrupting the story.

You will not feel satisfied because you will be looking outside of yourself for validation from this quiet individual practice that helps you feel whole.  

The struggle of this method, the staying true, is that the closer the work is to my core, the harder it feels to be rejected. It is devastating, the alienation, it’s true. I saw an essay last week that went along the lines of, “Do you really want the emotional risks that come with being a full-time creator?” I didn’t know how to respond to that in my head. I thought, “What’s the alternative? Not try? Not do the thing that makes my endorphins dance like the green jellies in 1997’s Flubber?”

Defining success, for me, is a difficult metric. How do I quantify wanting to make people laugh and cry? Can I jar that up like lightning bugs?

Staying grounded in writing exactly what and how I want to write, it looks like this: I’m cutting my schedule from four posts every five weeks to two per month. For now, I’m choosing the Irreverently Vulnerable interviews that other writers have been kind enough to do with me, and the Stomp Roams stories that are here for you to sink into with a coffee, or a beer, next to a fire, on a cozy couch, on a covered porch, out in a cottage, on the subway train next to the guy with the face tattoo and yellow python around his neck. Any of those things are integral to what drives me so hard to do it. The ultimate creator turn-on:

Someone wants to sit down and feel things from my story.

I am trusting that the people who value a misfit Sasquatch who is lonely, sensitive, outcasted, loving, and prone to binges of highway robbery - will see the honesty in his wanders and gather around for it. And if not? Hey, there’s always a job opening for a North Pole delivery boy.

I thank each of the readers who have supported me this year. To adapt a favorite line from Freddie Mercury:

These stories are only for beautiful people. That means all of you.

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