How I wrote better and faster in 2022.

It’s the new year of 2022. Thinking back on it, the only thing I really remember thinking is “Things can’t keep going the way they are.” To be frank, I’m frustrated.

I’m frustrated with pretty much everything. At this point, Covid will still have teeth until the restrictions lift in my area in late April to early May 2022.

The isolation doesn’t bother me. I live in a remote area just outside of the town proper, and I get to wander freely across some 60 acres of fallowed land, so the restrictions have very little impact on me, save for when we make our mad-dash to do the groceries.

Anyway, I’m not quite completely socially isolated. Until my move to join my long-time partner in the UK, I’m living with my dad, and I’m grateful for every second I get to spend with him. *Wipes a tear from her eye, then promptly squashes those feels so she can get through writing this entry without being a complete sentimental marshmallow*

I had just finished a remote contract with my employer of 4-years, and was looking forward to a brief respite from the neurosis of the corporate culture. I was fully expecting to get called back in March. I wasn’t looking forward to putting my writing on hold (again), but it’s good money, and I like helping my dad with the household expenses – even if it means tricking him into doing the weeping tiles around the house just so he’ll take money. That project never happened by the way, due to some unforeseen complications.

In January 2022, I’m aware that I have time to focus on writing. I have about three months before work typically lands on my lap. I intend to write, but so far, as I mentioned earlier, it’s just been one series of frustrations after the next, and to be frank (again), I’m not exactly thrilled about my progress. I’m happy with the quality of my work, though it is in a dire need of a professional edit. I’m happy with the way the Awakening is unfolding. The problem: it’s not done yet. After 4-years, I want it to be done. Why isn’t it done?

The writing community I discovered this year has been beyond supportive. One successful fantasy writer admits that it took her 15-years to write her first book, but it only took a month to write the following book, and 3 months to write the last book in the series. This gives me hope at least, but I’m determined not to spend 15-years on book 1. My god! Just shoot me!

Things can’t keep going the way they are. I know this. I’ve been trying to force myself to write daily and keeping tabs on my word count. I’d get to the point where the words wouldn’t flow. Fast. I don’t have writer’s block (I could be in some heavy denial). I know what’s coming. I know what I’m supposed to be writing… But the words are never right. I’d write 3,000 words and keep like 100. Then delete those 100 the following day.

I have a chunk of money stashed, so in January 2022, I sign up for the Write Better Faster 101.

Life changing!

And this was only the start of an extraordinarily explosive year!

January: Write Better Faster

Laptop is open on a wooden desk, with a notebook and pen sitting infront of it. Study proceeds casually with a steaming hot cup of tea sitting off the side. — Spoiler: Write Better Faster 101 was a game changer!

I should drop a little back story here and offer a deep heartfelt thank you to K.T. Bowes, the phenomenally prolific writer of the Du Rose series, for turning me onto the Clifton Strengths. I took them initially to support her through a challenging period in her life.

The strength language gave us a way to understand and communicate with each other better. We were good friends before, but I think this strength assessment made us better supportive friends, better cheerleaders and advisers. I’m eternally grateful.

Because of her, I had taken the strength assessment. Then, in 2021, when I hit a heavy burn out, she gifted me a coaching package to help me get through it. OMG! Did it ever! I mean, it wasn’t an insta-fix, but that conversation went such a long way to help me manage my time and my expectations. It was so helpful that when I had the money and the course opened up in January 2022, signing up for the Write Better Faster 101 course was a no brainer.

It was a life-changing experience. Suddenly the ‘why’s I did things the way I did’ started falling into place. It was like I struck a Tetris! You know the moment, when you finally get that missing piece, slam it down into position, and the whole screen lights up and demolishes the mess of 5-lines of your screen, clearing the room, and releasing so much pressure.

February: Paying it forward

I was so impressed with the course that I advised a longtime childhood friend of mine to take the Live Better Faster version of the course. At the time, he had so many projects on the go that it was limiting his capacity to finish projects, which lead to angry clients. He’d get about 80% of the project done, then his motivation for the project would just peter out. I thought maybe this would help. A month later, he messages me: “Amber, I just made my most profitable month ever!”

I was proud of him.

The Write Better Faster 101 course was a major turning point for me. Through this course, I had gained understanding and acceptance. It was a strong foundation to build on, but I had questions about writing and strengths. I needed more. That’s how they hook you, you know…

March: To job or not to job?

Bills need paying, but am I moving abroad? Best to drum up a few more clients.

March loomed near on the horizon, and I hadn’t received a call back from my employer. Not unusual since I’m not always available in the winter months, often because I’m overseas.

This year however, I had started the arduous process of gathering the paperwork and filling out Visa applications to immigrate to the UK on a semi-permanent basis (I’m still not 100% sold on this idea, but I do want to be with my partner… so complicated much?). I expected it handled with a response by December (an assumption made based on the UK Visa guidance – there’s so many levels of wrong there I just don’t want to get into it because at the end of the day, it’s nothing they want to deal with because of a little something called plausible deniability.) Anyway, that whole thing is not going according to plan, and I’m waiting on a set of documents to arrive, which may take 8-12 weeks. So I’m still in the country…

Out of the blue, I get a call from my former Team Lead. I ask what’s going on. All he wants is my password to the phone they had assigned me in my previous contract. Given his abruptness, I have this sinking feeling that I don’t have a job anymore.

That’s the thing about contract work. You work the contract, and you’re done until the employer rattles your chain. Usually, the week before they need you to come in. In the past, this company has call on Friday requiring me to be in on the following Monday.

I have this sinking feeling just looming over me, and then I realize that I’m going to have a financially stunted year.

The first thing I do is contact my clients. I do a side-gig for a reason, folks!

"Do you need any work done? Any projects you were looking to tackle this year? Oh, the budget is tight? Covid? Yeah, I get it. No worries. Oh, you might be able to do something? Just maintenance? That’s something, at least. Oh no, I’m happy to do the work! Just so you’re aware, my fees have increased. Let me direct, shall I? You know the dude you were paying for X project? Yeah, him. I don’t know him, but just take a minute to think about his hourly rate and what you got out of that. Yeah, that’s right. He programmed it all from scratch, which is great, but it’s not user friendly, and he’s using the same CMS that I am. Which version do you like better? You still have his fees in your head? This is what I want $$$. You already know what I can do for you, and I’ve been doing work for you for years and years at a massively discounted rate. You knew what it was at the time, and if my fees don’t suit you, that’s fine too. Oh, you’re fine with it. Just means we’ll move slower with the project. Okay, that suits me fine too. Thank you, I look forward to working with you."

At least that’s how I imagine that’s how that conversation went in retrospect. The reality is I probably had a good panic cry, before turning to my biggest client and prayed hard that I’d be able to make end-meat with this one. All my other clients were killing projects to cope with Covid. Granted, this is my ONLY corporate client. My other clients were self-starters with already limited budgets and some rather unrealistic expectations, just like me. They were probably funding their side-hustle with the money from their day job, which they don’t have anymore because Covid.

By mid-March, I have something resembling an income secured. It’s not much, but I can help with bills and the growing cost of food. It’s enough.

But I’m still in this weird position where I don’t know when I’m leaving the country, but looking for work feels unfair…. And there’s this chance that I’ll have my chain rattled come June anyway, but I don’t think I’ll need it because I expect to have my paper work submitted soonish, and I’ll have an answer back by June, anyway. No worries. I just have to hold out just a little longer.

I feel really dumb writing that, I’ll have you know. But you know what they say, hindsight is 20/20.

April: Strength Intensives and
getting a handle on stressing myself out on life

I found peace of mind by leaning into my strengths.

Phase 1 done!
Phase 2 ON!

April rolls on by. I’m managing with my foundational practices from the Better Faster Academy.

I’ve joined their community.

I’m loving their Facebook group.

I’m using the sprinting sessions app they have to help motivate me, and I start posting a little something the group calls MTB (manuscript time blocks). I rapidly discover that my 30-60 blocks pale in comparison to what others are putting out. I feel frustrated, broken, insincere. I don’t leave the group. I aspire to do better, but I need help.

I enroll into a few Strengths Intensive, which are week-long courses that focuses on a particular Strength in your personal top-10 list.

I soon realize that I’m not using these courses for writing.

I’m using what I’m learning in these courses to manage my life, and adjust my mindset. That’s not a bad thing. In fact, a deeper understanding of what makes me tick and how I can gain positive momentum with these strengths has gone a long way in improving my writing life.

May: The expensive future

I’ve finally gathered all the paperwork and send off my visa application. I pay the steep sum of $3,000.00 and swallow the risk of a really expensive rejection. I schedule my biometric appointment, but the earliest available time slot is at the end of August. It’s fiiiiiiiine! Driving myself nuts is totally okay, and will not at all have a negative effect on my relationship with my partner (it hasn’t, he’s used to my constant worry). At this point, I have the inkling that the last time I saw my partner was June 2020, and the more time I spend away from him, the less I want to relocate to the UK.

He’s going to have his hands full… I’m so sorry.

June: Dude, where’s my job?! And Hello, Uncle Guy!

Nothing worse than waiting on a call that will never come.

June has come and gone, and no call from my employer.

I must have burned a bridge somewhere, I figure. Honestly, I’m kind of relieved.

If it weren’t for the financial stress, the uncertainty of what’s meant to be happening in my not-so-distant future was already making it really challenging to plan too far into the future. Thinking about accepting the job, then having to quit days/weeks into the contract because the UK gave me 30-days or less to relocate… ugh! I feel the guilt and the stress bubble up just writing this.

The pay was really nice, but on the flip side, I’m grateful that I’m not under the constant stress of meeting an impossible quota. In the years prior, I could meet quota within the first 3-hours of sitting at my desk. But the sudden shift in work priorities (specifically case types I was working) meant that I couldn’t meet their demands, which meant my name was removed from the short-list.

The emotional victimhood part of me screams that I was set up to fail, but the rational part of me tells me that the people involved really don’t hold a position long enough to single anyone out for career sabotage.

I’m disappointed, but relieved. I hated trying to write while working full time, but the money sure was nice… it was realllllllly nice. Like so nice, I could support myself for a year with a short 4 to 6-month contract if I budgeted for a spartan/minimalist lifestyle (and don’t take like a million online courses).

My dad takes his 2nd real vacation in some 25 years. He takes a full month off. He’s thrilled! I tell him to get as much sleep and chill time as he can manage, because just trying to do all the things will make things worse. All I’m saying here is don’t amp up the stress when you should be relaxing. Have a wish list, but make sure your wish list includes fun activities and some R&R.

I swear the following day, my uncle shows up at our door to come to live with us. Over the course of the month, he breaks the plough, digs trenches in the field, busts up the fences from the fence line my dad was removing, leaving these deep leg breakers that dad has since filled. He did install a window in the garage, and cleared a place for his RV by the barn… but all he did there was use the tractor to push the ruined part of the barn in on itself, further compromising the building’s severely questionable stability, instead of taking the time to clear the space of the clutter and generations worth of storage/trash, and dismantling the space safely. Now we have a mess of barbed wire, broken posts, and God knows what else? Is that a child’s swing set?! What the hell, GUY!

I laugh at my father’s frustration, but I’m also right there with him and all the WTFs! I thought having an extra set of hands around the farm would have been nice…

At least the farm equipment has been repaired and restored, ready for 2023, except for the broadcaster who's a little too generous with broadcasting. Let me put it this way: we bought enough seed to cover 12 acres. We covered 5 acres if we were lucky.

My dad and I do a few day trips to visit his old stomping grounds in Iroquois Falls. There’s this incident involving a road block where my dad mistakes me for my mom. She would have gotten frustrated and order the car around to go back home. I said nothing, often urging dad to try other roads. We end up turning around, hash it out, look at maps, and find a detour (I have nowhere else to be after all, so what’s a few more hours looking at scenery). He buys me a donut and peach drink to apologize, but we make it to Iroquois Falls without gauging each other’s eyes out.

We make an attempt to visit Crystal Falls, but it doesn’t exist anymore, not since the power company dammed the region and hogged the falls to themselves.

We visit grandma monthly now, not because she’s old or anything (well she is old, like 92 or something outrageous like that), but because we like the drive and we can escape for more than an hour now that mom has passed.

She likes the company, and I manage to weasel out what life was like for her in her youth. I’m still working at it, but she struggles with hearing, and English isn’t her first language. I’m perfectly cool with her communicating with me in French as long as I can communicate in English. There’s no language barrier if you both understand each other’s native tongue. But she’s stubborn and insists on answering me in English.

I love her to bits.

July: Vibin’ with the Summer

An emergency involving Guy’s adult daughter has him leave to help her out for the foreseeable future. He figures he’ll be back in February 2023 (Spoiler: He’s still helping her out in July 2023).

My dad spends July fixing all the things Guy broke.

Meanwhile, we explore some of the suburbs in the Sudbury area. We saw a pig farm! Oh, my god, were they woolly fat piggies! And we discovered two walking trails and three lakes.

I introduce dad to celebrating the week with an ice cream.

His sleep is improving. He’s happier in general, and he’s doing almost daily walks to ‘clear some gunk’ in his lung. He has a clean bill of health, but he’s aware and he’s not the sort of fool who wallows in their own bad habits.

August: Intensifying my strengths and the scary wait begins.

They said 12 weeks but what they meant was 26 weeks.

March through to the end of August, I’ve done 8 out of 10 strengths. I’m pretty much armed to the teeth with knowledge, and I’m starting to develop habits and patterns that help me cope with much of the overwhelm I’m experiencing with life, my side business, and writing. I’m getting better at balancing everything that works to my strengths.

Just the year prior, my motivation centered around getting as much done as possible. I was convinced I was a slacker, but after 2-3 years of measuring my task output, I know that’s not the case. If anything, my expectation for constant doing had really ruined my motivation in many areas of my life. The intensives helped me to reframe the things I enjoy in life, finding the joy in the tasks, and it really helped shift my mindset about some of the things I don’t enjoy.

At the end of August, I have my biometrics appointment to mark the end of the filling of my visa to the UK.

I’m a ball of nerves, but I’m glad my dad is driving me to Toronto instead of me trying to fly out and cab it across town.

We take the long way back home, and overall had a good time because after the appointment we didn’t NEED to be anywhere. It’s amazing how liberating not needing to be anywhere can feel!

September: Level up! New skill points acquired.

I celebrate my 40th character creation anniversary (birthday for non-gamers) with dad. We go out to this little restaurant in the middle of nowhere and then buy all the pies (I don’t know why). I allocate my skill points which arrived that morning by post (not really, but I like imagining that it happened that way), and take a minute to think about all the amazing things I’ve learned and done this past year. It’s been an amazing year!

October: HB90 and News Letter Ninja

I embark on my first HB90 quarter, overestimate my capacity to get shit done, but still end up alive at the end of the month.

October is on the horizon, and the News Letter Ninja does this joint venture with HB90. I’m connected to Tammy in my BFA group, and I love her work with News Letter Ninja. There’s some great foundational information her books.

But like with the BFA, I have questions. I need answers. Am I doing this right? Is chief among them.

I also believe in signs. Like something will go on repeat for ages, like the universe is pointing all of these signs towards a specific path. HB90 has been mentioned over and over again, on repeat for well over a year as a useful tool to help me cope with overwhelm. Ideally, it’ll work with strategic and deliberative strengths, and reduce the pressure of needing to do all the things right this second.

But it isn’t until the Ninja says she’s doing a joint venture thing with HB90, with a live QA with how to use HB90 to get your newsletter going that I break down and buy the HB90 course.

Life changing? I feel something here. It’s too soon to say life changing.

I mean, can a person have two positive life-changing experiences in a year?

Am I hogging them all?

Should I put one back on the shelf?

A lot of what she taught isn’t new to me. BUT! How she put it together resonated.

I’m a creature of old habits though, so naturally, I just prioritize my goals and then attempt to cram everything in the free time I have available. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that this is going to end in failure. So I do what I do best, made a spreadsheet to see just how off the mark I am with my expectations. Turns out… by lots.

Using the HB90 system, I made sure the tasks I chose were a priority and fit the metrics I had established (which was pretty broad actually), AND chose enough tasks to hypothetically fill the time I had available.

The theoretical math works out, but if you know me at all, my theoretical math and reality are rarely ever the same. This problem really stems from my expectations of how long something ‘should take’. You’d think after over a decade of project planning and generating estimates, I’d have a better handle on this sort of thing…

Now, I’m not planning a multi-facetted website with mobile users in mind.

I’m talking about doing a deep cleaning of my house, getting my newsletter into some sort of functional co-existence with my website.

Hell, writing these posts can take anywhere between 30-mins to apparently 3hrs. I probably should have broken down this post to bite-size chunks, saving me eons of work in the future… Apparently, I’m not wired that way.

November: Flu-vid?

I finish the News Letter Ninja course. I’m in a better position than where I started, but I have this sinking filling that getting everything ‘fixed’ is going to take an age (It does take an age. A year later, I’m just pulling together redesigned sign-up forms for my website.) I pull up my sleeves and decide I want to re-tackle the first part of the course as a conversation.

I end up doing the questionnaire twice. The first time with a fellow author who gives no shits about Awakening, so his engagement with me and I with him is limited. I don’t blame him. We’re probably the wrong match for this sort of work.

Round two: I call up a fan of the Awakening, who I know is writing her own book but at a leisurely pace. That one goes much better. 3-hrs of content of us talking books, genres, themes, and our work. It was fun. Now I have to grab the transcription and do a massive once over to make it go from unintelligible gibberish to something legible.

Then dad looks like shit. I tell him as much.

He’d do the same for me.

I feel his forehead. I tell him that going into work is a bad idea, and driving is a terrible idea. He has to go into the office the next day, the one day a month he has to do this and I sense he’s being stubborn.

I narrow my eyes at him. I point the death monkey finger at him. But I know there’s nothing I can do. I give him an aspirin, water, tuck him into the couch, and insist that he can go to bed early. We don’t have to watch tv or movies. He does the same thing I do and grumbles under his breath that he’s not sacrificing tv time with me.

I’m up all night worrying about him. He’s coughing a lot. It sounds wet. The door to his room is open, so I sneak-in in the middle of the night to feel his head. I do the silent whisper threat thing while he’s asleep. “You had so better not go to work tomorrow, or you’re grounded!” and skulk off to not sleep some more.

I pass out somewhere around 7:30am. I hear him get up, but I’m too exhausted to curse at him to go back to bed. He’s back some 30-mins later. I’m relieved and settle into a deep sleep.

When I wake, I discover I’m sick. Like so sick, getting out of bed is out of the question. But the bathroom is downstairs and I take a great deal of pride in not having messed myself in years. There was this nasty flu back in 2004 that I flat out don’t want to talk about. But this gives you a time frame…

December: Still sick

We’re still sick. Not quite in denial. We acknowledge it. We’ve loaded up on medicine and now we debate just how long we should be medicated before it becomes an addiction.

He stubbornly went back to work 3-days after he first fell sick. I on the other hand, was pretty much couch ridden for a solid week. I’m fatigue. I somehow managed to pull a muscle in my arm, so now that contributes to poor sleep. All the while, I’m working on wrapping up the major tasks I’ve started this past year. While I’m sick, I’m doing low thinking, low creative work – something I refer to as admin work. Hopefully, this fatigue state will lift in the next week. I’d like to not be tired anymore.

So I don’t look like a complete wimp, Dad is still sick too. We’ve been comparing notes. Fatigue is the predominate theme in our mutual misery.

As the New Year looms ever closer, I reflect on the things I’ve learned over the past year, and consider the skills I need to improve in the year to come. It won’t be long before I’m compiling my Getting Things Done project list, and deleting my to-do lists from Microsoft to-do.

This year has been fantastic! I’m looking forward to having fun new adventures in the New Year.