Sabbatical Update 2

Last month I talked about our struggle to exit the vacation mindset when we meant to. Since then, my focus has improved significantly.

Habit stacking

The solution is habit stacking.

The idea is to take a habit you already do, and stack the new, desired habit onto it. Here's how I implemented that over the course of September:

• After breakfast: reading
• After lunch: writing
• After dinner: music

Now, this didn't happen exactly this way every day. In particular, I swapped the order of reading and writing frequently enough that I may just revise my goal schedule accordingly. But the key benefit here was that every time I finished a meal, my brain went, "Okay, now we do a sabbatical project thing!"

Reading

I finally finished The Fifth Sacred Thing last month, and now it will live permanently rent-free in my head forever, alongside the only other two books that have rewritten my brain this powerfully: The Dispossessed and Parable of the Sower.

The Fifth Sacred Thing has a lot in common with Parable of the Sower in terms of being a post-collapse world in which our protagonists are trying to drive a better society than the one that precipitated the collapse. The key difference is that Parable of the Sower starts in a dystopia, and sees our protagonists trying to build a utopia out of the ashes, while The Fifth Sacred Thing starts with a utopia, and sees our protagonists defending it against the encroachment of dystopia.

The Fifth Sacred Thing also wrestles fearlessly with the heady questions of the role of violence in society, the benefits (and limitations) of nonviolent resistance, and the contrast between collectivist and dominator mindsets. Ever since Trump was elected president in 2016, I've struggled with the question of how to deal with people whose only understood language seems to be force. The Fifth Sacred Thing tackles exactly that question, and I ate it up like a starving man being served a feast.

Fun fact: The Fifth Sacred Thing is written by author and spiritual leader Starhawk. From 2009-2012, I was the lead designer on a video game that was also named Starhawk. The two have no relation.

I've also been reading -- but haven't yet finished -- Below the Edge of Darkness, a memoir about deep sea exploration and the study of bioluminescence. This one is part personal fascination and part research: I'm working on a short story that follows a deep sea salvage crew, and this kind of eyewitness description of deep sea dives lends invaluable context that I'd never realistically have access to in my own lived experience.

I am still struggling with getting enough reading time. One of the things I want to do to support my writing work is make sure I'm reading a few of the current lit mags in my areas of genre focus, which are mainly speculative fiction and horror. I've subscribed to Apex, Asimov's, Uncanny Magazine, and Cosmic Horror Monthly, but I've done a very poor job of keeping up with them.

I also need to do a better job of making notes and reviews of books I've read. Since the start of this year, I've been pretty consistent at logging what I've read on StoryGraph, but in the asbence of good notes, I've found myself looking back on older entries in my reading log and wondering what exactly I got out of that book, other than the general feeling of, "Yeah, I remember that being enjoyable." I don't know that I need to do full-on critiques of everything I read, but it might be worthwhile to write one- or two-sentence summaries of scenes as I go, and then impressions as they arise, to help in synthesizing a more useful overall impression once I've finished.

Writing

I started a year-long speculative fiction writing workshop with Seattle's Hugo House at the end of September. We've only done an introductory session so far, so it's early days, but I'm very excited about this one. My writing goals for the sabbatical include actually producing fiction (of course), but also learning better processes and habits for doing that consistently, and building a community of writers and readers outside of, and disconnected from, the video games industry. The workshop is an opportunity to push all three goals forward in a big way.

I'm currently working on a short story about a deep sea salvage crew that gets far more than they bargained for. Its stunningly creative working title is: The Deep. (There's no point wasting time on fancy working titles; they're just project identifiers, not public-facing brands.) This story combines my fascination about the deep sea with my love of dark speculative fiction. It's got notes of cosmic horror, but I'm trying hard to develop a fresh angle that avoids typical "sea monster" tropes. I'll be submitting this piece for workshop critique in late October, which means I'm actually writing to a deadline for the first time... ever? (Probably ever.)

Something unexpected that's emerged from this process is that my concept of an outline, a draft, and how the two relate to each other, has started to shift dramatically.

When I wrote as a kid I was an absolute pantser; as an adult, I learned more about story structure and became much more of a plotter, which eventually became a problem as I would tend to get "stuck in the outline", meaning I'd work the outline to death but struggle to ever make the jump to writing a draft of actual prose.

With The Deep, I started building an outline as usual, but then snippets of dialogue started popping into my head for certain scenes, and for lack of a better place to put them -- since I hadn't "officially" started drafting yet -- I just plopped them into their place in the middle of the outline. After a bit of that, I realized the outline was becoming the draft, slowly but surely, and in a totally chaotic, not-at-all-linear order.

This may not be a revelation to anyone else, but it was a revelation to me: the outline and the draft don't have to be different things, and that means there's no big scary gap to cross trying to get from one to the other. The outline is the draft.

English provides no words sufficient to describe the degree of mental relief this discovery has given me. This unlocks so much.

Music

Sabbaticals are periods of exploration and experimentation, not periods of rigid production. That means being open to new experiences, new directions, and new goals.

Music has shot up dramatically in importance for me over the past month. We started inviting a group of friends every Sunday night to play music and sing together; after a few successful ad hoc sessions, we formalized it and named it 🎵Staff Meeting🎵, because we're all tech industry refugees and huge dorks.

Playing music together has yielded two clear benefits:

• It's a lot of fun, and while I initially thought the group setting would be anxiety-inducing -- because self-consciousness -- it's turned out to be pleasantly relaxing and very confidence-building.
• My musical skill has increased so much faster in the group setting than it ever did in a purely solo setting. Playing in a group exercises different skills, and exercises skills differently. This is huge.

My wife bought a ukulele a few months ago. At the beginning of September, I decided to give it a go, and I learned to play Lava, which is a super-easy beginner uke song.

One thing led to another, and now I have an acoustic guitar, I'm working my way through the excellent lessons on Fender Play, and I'm learning a guitar arrangement of one of my favorite classics, Hallelujah.

I took adult piano lessons from Deborah Gandolfo a couple years ago and learned a ton about both performance and theory, before the demands of my job at Bungie forced me to quit lessons for lack of time and energy. Since picking up the guitar, I've found a bunch of those piano lessons coming back in a whole new way, fusing with the new guitar lessons to create musical rocket fuel that's massively accelerated and improved my intuition of music theory and my understanding of both instruments. There are so many unexpected insights to be gained from looking at the guitar in a piano-y way, and looking at the piano in a guitar-y way.

I always thought focusing on one instrument for the long haul would be the best way to become a really good musician, but now I think learning two or three very different instruments might be a better path toward that goal.

Lastly, at Staff Meeting we've typically had four people, including me, and I've been the only one who doesn't sing. I never learned, I don't love my vocal tone, and I feel super self-conscious and un-confident about this aspect of music. This past weekend, though, my wife decided the jig was finally up and it was time for me to try. I got a quick crash course in breath and tone control, and then the digital tuner came out and it was time to try some scales.

And you know what? I actually did fine! It took a couple tries to hit the first note of the scale, but once I had it, I was able to run the rest of the scale pretty accurately, and even do some intervals. (My piano training with Deborah focused heavily on hearing and internalizing intervals, which helped massively here.) Then we did a few songs, and I did way better than I think any of us expected. I'm no virtuoso, but I expected to bomb so hard that no one would ever ask me to try singing again, and instead, I've got a whole new skill to explore.

All of this has been so rewarding that I'm feeling like I want to make music a bigger part of my sabbatical goals going forward, and that means adjusting some of my other goals to make room. In last month's update, I closed out by talking about three storytelling projects: a written one, an audio one, and a visual one. The written one is currently The Deep, but I think the audio and/or visual ones are likely going to take a backburner to make room for more guitar and singing practice, and we'll see if that progresses toward songwriting, which I have a keen interest in, and now believe is much more possible than I did a month ago.

Takeaways

When I was still at Bungie and contemplating taking this sabbatical, one of the most important goals my wife and I identified was for me to find sustainable ways to reduce my daily stress and irritability. September was the first month in a long, long time that I can confidently say I had more good days than bad, and felt happy more often than I felt irritable.

That said, I'm still a little worried about how I'm going to keep up these self-affirming creative pursuits in tandem with the demands of a day job, once we reach the point of needing that income again. The whole sabbatical, fundamentally, is about finding answers to that question, so I'm trying not to freak out too much about not having the answers right now; I'm not supposed to have the answers right now. But it's definitely a thing that's on my mind, every day.

Going forward, I'm trying to focus on patiently and methodically improving the skills I'm currently focused on: critical reading, creative writing, guitar and singing, and continuing to build and maintain healthy, sustainable habits and routines.

The biggest things coming up soon are:

• Getting The Deep ready for class critique by the end of October.
• Maybe preparing for NaNoWriMo? I haven't decided yet if this is the year I finally try this, and I also haven't decided yet how I feel about their recent AI controversy.
• Identifying some clear musical goals for the sabbatical.

I'm very happy to have finally broken out of the vacation mindset and turned around August's lack of focus, and I'm looking forward to October's explorations!