Briony Hale

Monday.

December 11th, 2023

I don’t know how to write about grief.

The day started off normally. Productive, even. I was writing. I was working. I was functioning.

Sudden, unexpected, absolutely devastating personal loss.

I didn’t have time to prepare. Or maybe I did, and the denial was too strong. You know that everything alive, now, will someday die. You, too, will die. Everyone you love will die. But that doesn’t make watching it happen in real time any easier.

You read about other people’s experiences, about looking for someone who isn’t there anymore. It doesn’t make sense until it does.

It’s taken me a week to get off the couch, but the siren song of rotting in my own despair never stops lilting through the now-empty room. I didn’t know it could be this quiet in here, never noticed how much I relied on someone else to fill the void that was my life before.

I’ve started dabbling again, slowly. I know the words will come, eventually, but my God, in the meantime: it hurts. It hurts. I did not want this reminder that so much of what I have to say is tied, like the moon to the tide, to the constant ebb and flow of emotion. The sea is glass still, now, on the surface; underneath is a hurricane that cannot abate.

I can’t stop moving, or I might stop forever.

BH ❤
Letting Seasons Change

November 28th, 2023

The holidays are as busy as they ever are. My sense of time is distorted by the reduction in hours of daylight, made more nebulous by the inconsistency in my schedule. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for the time off, but I have to be more conscientious of the changes when I’m planning.

I’m still writing. Not necessarily every day, but at least every other day. I’m also working on other projects, trying to wrap things up around the house by the end of the year. I’m as prone to purging and nesting in the late autumn as we transition into winter as ever. The waning moon encourages this kind of shift.

It’s easy, when you’re focused on production, to have a sense of accomplishment. Write a thousand words a day. Write ten thousand words a week. Write fifty thousand words a month. The focus on production is a siren song for high achievers, but in taking the notion of publication seriously, one quickly finds a tremendous amount of work which cannot be so easily quantified.

I’m in the part of the cycle where you feel like a hamster on a wheel. You’re producing, and producing, and producing, but there’s not enough of any one thing to make a difference in your life. I know if I keep going I’ll get where I’m headed, but the forest is thick, the lights are dim, and I only know I have to keep going.

I’m staying cozy, prioritizing the people who matter to me, and trying to take advantage of this season of rest. I hope it will all be worth it.

Much love,

BH ❤
I’m Still Here

November 14th, 2023

Taking somewhat of a break, which for me means a massive amount of creation without trackers or deadlines. In truth I’m dealing with a lot emotionally, which is both normal for the holidays and an absolute drag on me physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and creatively.

I know this is a season of quiet, of rest, of reflection, of preparation for something else, but in the meantime I feel absolutely exhausted. I want more. I don’t know how to make it happen. I am more acutely aware of the relationship between emotion and writing as an art.

It’s slow. It’s hard. I’m still here.

Much love,

BH ❤
I Took A Break

October 30th, 2023

My love and I closed our long-distance gap for two blissful weeks, during which time I can honestly say I barely thought about the sheer amount of work I need (want? am volunteering?) to do in the next two months and, in many ways, the next few years. Now that we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming, though, I can see why so many people endorse the idea of taking breaks.

I want to focus on multi-tasking, which I know seems like a bit of a contradiction but I swear the right balance works. On the one hand I’m working on some longer form projects, but on the other, I’m really the sort of person who needs a lot of successes and accomplishments in a short amount of time.

Being the kind of person who took ten years to write a very literary 200,000 word novel would absolutely kill me. I would be so bored. Out of my mind. I can do shorter commercial fiction, but I think a lot of the ideas that I have–and I do have a lot of them–would be better suited as short stories than as novels, and I think that taking the time to commit to re-writing some projects and re-imaging others as such would go a long way to clear the clutter in my mind as well as feed a sense of accomplishment while I spent time on longer works.

I don’t know what the right balance is, yet, but I’m sure it exists and I can’t wait to find it… if only I could manage to keep house at the same time.

Much love,

BH ❤
Just a Check-In

October 9th, 2023

I’m busy. Less busy than I could be, but still more than normal. It’s a good kind of busy, though. Maybe this is my new normal. I don’t think I could be this busy all the time, but I could probably be this busy most of the time.

I got a copy of The Hero With A Thousand Faces, which I haven’t ~~had time to read~~ prioritized. Maybe I’ll get to it this week, but more likely than not I won’t be prioritizing reading until the next release.

I said I was going to be working on commercial projects and short fiction simultaneously. Only one of those turned out to be true the last few weeks. I’m not doing everything that I want to in a day, but I’m not beating myself up about it. I’m happy.

My love is coming to visit in less than a week. I anticipate getting no work done for the duration of that visit. It’s okay. Someday I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about The Process, about productivity and business and accomplishing things, planning and goal setting and task lists. Someday.

Today, I’m just grateful to have a life I can be this content with, even when things aren’t necessarily going my way.

BH ❤
Discombobulated

September 26th, 2023

I wish I had something more exciting to say, but I managed to get the first draft of book two ready for the initial read through which I hope to do tomorrow, and I pre-wrote the plotting for book three so that I could perhaps zoom through my draft at a reasonable pace instead of crawling along at three hundred word intervals every few weeks.

In short, everything is happening at once and I don’t know how to balance all the plates I have spinning.

Unfortunately, my life is most familiar to me in chaos. I need to spend some time, hopefully this weekend, resetting my home and my mind for the fourth quarter, but in the interim I have late nights and early mornings and no routine and I sincerely hope I’ll be able to report back in a week or two with much more consistency.

In short, I think I’m starting to understand the importance of routine in all of this.

Optimistic,

BH ❤
The Second Book

September 20th, 2023

I had fully intended to write about the drudgery of following up a first piece with a trudging second one, and until yesterday I could have. Yesterday was magic, though, the moments I live for.

I love the puzzle aspects of creating stories. I love thinking up strategies, genres, series, I love the ideation that occurs when you get a good concept in mind. The generation, the synthesis. It’s fucking magic.

There always, always, always comes a point in the middle where things go sideways. I get stuck. The 3,000 word count days become 300. It’s like being lost in the woods with a lamp and a general sense of I’m going that way to guide me. It’s slow, and it’s the worst.

It’s the moment the demons start calling. It’s the part of the process where voices in my head which aren’t mine get louder than I’m comfortable with. It would be easy, so easy to stop when I reach this point.

But I don’t. I keep going. Step by step. 300 word day by 300 word day. And what happens, if I keep crawling through this part of the process, is that eventually the forest thins, the words come easier, and there’s an inevitable moment when everything falls into place. It’s almost like a click, and when I feel that moment, everything falls into place.

I can’t say I want to do both drafting and editing at the same time going forward, but in this instance, I had fallen into the thick of it well before I had to edit. A day or two back into the process, and I’ve got the space I need to sort out the problems I was stuck on. The whole thing flows, now, moving more or less smoothly from beginning to end.

There’s still more work. I have about four scenes left to write. There will be big picture revision, rewriting, line editing, proofreading. Layers and layers and layers.

But the base is there. And that’s exciting.

BH ❤
I Thought I’d Feel Different

September 16th, 2023

I’m leaning in to the commercial projects. There’s an artist inside of me, somewhere, screaming, but every time a bill comes due the accountant in me tells her to shut up.

That’s a different post, for a different time.

I’ve known for some time that it was entirely possible for people to work, and make a living, on self-publishing, especially within certain genres. I don’t think I knew how easy it was. Oh don’t get me wrong, it’s been months of work on one project, on top of years of work on myself.

But it’s done. It will be out there in a few days, come what may, and I… I don’t feel anything. Tired. A bit gassy. Not the numbness of anhedonia but the contentment of everything just sort of chugging along the way I suppose it ought to.

I thought I’d feel different. I should have done it differently. I should have waited? For what, I wonder. For it to be better. For me to be better. How long I’ve let my self-esteem be determined by other people…

I want to do it again. Not tonight. Tomorrow. I want to rest, and wake with the sun, and spend the hours of my life with the people that I love, or the people that I imagine. I did it. I want to do it again.

Doesn’t that make one a writer?

BH ❤
Multi-Tasking

September 5th, 2023

Upon further reflection, I think perhaps I’m not as straightforward about why I’m starting to feel burned out. It’s not just the balancing act between the things I want to create and every other aspect of my life, although this is definitely contributing.

On the one hand, I want to create something for art. On another, for money. On another, for culture. I don’t know how to balance each, and the nature of things is that one really, really has to buckle down and focus in order to accomplish anything.

I’m not a sprinter. I’m not a marathoner. I’m a wander-through-the-woods-er, taking pictures of flowers and moss alike, trying to catch lizards, identifying every species of moth and butterfly I can find. A multi-tasker. A poly-potentialite, according to recent internet trends.

In any case, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that not every single idea that pops in my head needs (or deserves) to be a full-length novel, and I’ve been seeing people do some amazing things with short story collections lately. I suppose I’ll have to re-work things to see where they stand, if anything can be salvaged and reworked or if it must be culled.

I’ve spent my weekend taking a break, cleaning out parts of my home I’ve been avoiding and replacing mess with shelves. I hope a clearing and organizing of my physical space will encourage the same for my mental one.

Much love,

BH ❤
Some thoughts on productivity…

September 2nd, 2023

I clocked 24 hours of overtime this week.

It doesn’t feel like much. It doesn’t feel like anything in terms of productivity, but it feels like exhaustion in my body. I’m not slowing down on social commitments, I’m not volunteering less, I’m not doing fewer chores (not that I’m great at keeping up with housework to begin with). I’m cooking from scratch more, which is something I can honestly say I regret after spending a whole day making ravioli from scratch. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t better than store bought.

I’m trying to keep so many plates spinning at once and I think that I might be tired, but I don’t know how to rest. I’m beginning to see, in experience and not just conceptually, a divide between what is realistic to produce and what feels sufficiently productive. I know that this is very much a result of the society in which I live, of technology clashing horribly with the very real human condition.

Was there ever a time where everyone wasn’t too focused on making a quick buck to function? I try not to let it make me cynical, but it’s hard. Part of the problem is, I know, the nature of my mind. I want too many things at once. I’m not averse to hard work. I rather enjoy it. I just can’t manage to organize my thoughts and ideas and dreams and visions and goals in a way that makes sense, to me or in context.

I love creating things. I love striving for something. I put in 24 hours of overtime this week. One whole day of my week dedicated to a passion that might never result in financial compensation, for a love of the process and the hope that someday, it might.

I love what I’m doing. I’m also tired.

BH ❤