The Month I Made My World Smaller

The woods are absolutely beautiful at the moment. On my walk today I passed an old tree trunk covered in tiny yellow mushrooms, almost like little houses built against the side of a cliff, with a sea of brown and golden leaves underneath. And immediately my imagination went somewhere else entirely. I could see little creatures living underneath those mushrooms, sitting inside at the end of the day drinking hot chocolate.

I have no idea how that would work in a mushroom house, but apparently my imagination does not care about practical details.

This really is peak fairy-tale season for me. Last year, around this time, I wrote 30 or 31 short stories in a month. This October has been very different because I deliberately tried to focus more. I wanted to work on my fantasy novel, on Pangur’s story, and on some of the other writing projects that have been waiting for me.

What I hadn’t expected was that October would also teach me something about the circumstances in which I seem to work best.

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The retreat I didn’t go on

Originally, I had this idea that I needed to go away somewhere. Maybe Ireland. Maybe some sort of writing retreat. I had already cleared most of my calendar, so the plan was to travel, walk, write, and create that sense of separation from normal life.

In the end I stayed home.

And after a slightly restless beginning, the rhythm just settled by itself. I went to bed around the same time, woke up around the same time, wrote in the mornings and went for long walks in the afternoons. There were very few appointments, hardly any travel, and not much external pressure.

At some point I noticed that I wasn’t missing the retreat anymore.

Apparently, what I needed wasn’t another place. I needed predictability.

That has been interesting to discover because I’m actually very good at improvising. I’ve been doing that for most of my working life. Podcasting certainly trains you to solve problems quickly, and I have a very associative brain, so if something changes I can usually think of three other ways to make it work.