Managing my time has historically been tough for me. I’m used to living by other people’s schedules, and both easily distracted and overambitious. What seems to be a simple matter of time blocking to other people becomes this Sisyphean task of deciding over and over What My Life Should Look Like. There is a lot of Should packed into that sentence.
Making intentional quiet time helps a lot. It helps fight the impulse to try to live two or three days at once. I walked to a little bistro a few streets away last Thursday, with a notebook. I didn’t think about this blog at all, but I did eat a nice crepe.
At any rate, I am here writing this post now, on the Sunday I plan to upload it.

This week:

• My interest in Minecraft continues to develop.
• I am embarking on a writing experiment.

My brother in law plays a lot of Minecraft. He’s shared this hobby with my sister, who has shared it with me, because we live over 2000 miles apart and it’s genuinely lovely to be able to work on something together through the internet. I’m very late to this party. There’s a few reasons I didn’t get into Minecraft when I was a kid– lack of reliable internet access, lack of understanding as to what the game was or what you could do in it, lack of time to spend on it, the intimidation factor of the game’s (potential) complexity. And I love complexity.

So now I’ve arrived in this world, and I see possibilities opening up. It has been a very long time since I took on a hobby that wasn’t directly related to the writing or drawing that I’ve been doing for years. It’s a boon to be comfortable not knowing much about something I’m doing, and to be doing something so different from the ways I usually spend free time, something that exercises different parts of my brain than usual. I have a vision of a labyrinthine cavern base filled with flowers, lanterns, and books, possibly even with words in them because I’ve learned that you can write books inside this game. And for once, it feels very attainable.

Elaborating more on complexity and attainability: I have a passion project. One that’s old enough to be in elementary school now, and lives in two (retired) Tumblr blogs, one and a fragment (active) Discord servers, and two and a quarter paper notebooks, as of writing. It’s about a lot of things, but one of the themes at the top of my mind right now is this fractal vastness, worlds celled into worlds, machines too enormous and complicated to be fully perceived by the people operating them.

(Probably relavant to this line of thought that one of my favorite genres to play in these days is cosmic horror.)

So, I want a way to articulate this feeling to people (like my friends) that is smaller and easier than taking in this very slowly emerging grand narrative. I have a single notebook set aside, 192 pages. I have 56 days to fill it– specifically to fit this concept inside of it in the form of a single story. They don’t have to be 56 consecutive days, but that is the number of writing sessions I have to spend, and the amount of space I’m allowed to take up with this side project. I think I have a good opening in mind. We’ll see where I am next week.