This, Distilled
Reflecting on my earlier thoughts about prioritisation
A progress report on earlier ideas and plans
Autumnal resets and the cult of reinvention
Training your body and doing the reps
Action as identity
Identifying the weakness in my creative practice
Challenging myself
Doing the right thing at the right time
Introducing TessaHedron: A Writer’s Handbook
Back in March, in a burst of energy, I shared some stream-of-consciousness thoughts on priorities and what it might look like to approach these differently. If you have a few spare moments, I suggest you read that essay before this one: they have ended up being unintentionally but amusingly sequential.
In that essay, I said this:
“When will I finish off the children’s book I started writing before being knocked for six by early motherhood? When will I set up the digital café or member’s club I have fully sketched out (as something very much in its own right, but also a precursor to a possible physical premises in years to come)? When will I launch the large-scale multi-year fiction project I have been developing, on and off, for several years (more than half my life, in one form or another, now I come to think of it)?”
Since then, I have indeed restarted from scratch and finished off a draft of the children’s book I mentioned, sharing it as my June notebook for Scribbles and Sketches.
I joined a digital members’ club not entirely dissimilar (though, also, not entirely similar) to the one I have been thinking about corralling for several years, and decided that I am not actually sure when or if I want to launch one (despite this now being the done thing, these days, in this post-social-media world). I currently have a few ideas about how I might progress this, should I decide I still wish to do so, but right now I am happy shelving that in the ‘not abandoned, but not right now’ pile.
And, thirdly, I have decided to launch my large-scale multi-year fiction project (which has, as I mentioned, been in some sort of development for more than half my life).
Mr previous essay provides some interesting insights into how my brain works. Sometimes, reading my own writing back, I am curiously impressed by how well I have managed to make sense of my internal machinations at times as, given all my ideas, there are many occasions when I have to battle with and wade through The Great Potential Overwhelm; but, then, I do have over four decades of experience of negotiating with myself on this matter now, and am (mostly, though not always) adept at navigating such waters.
Since earlier this year, I have taken some of my thinking forward in different directions, and have used it to recently rationalise how I might approach the nearing new year. I have always loved autumn as an instigator of review, refresh, and beginning anew. All those newly sharpened pencils. It has become quite fashionable in recent years to codify this approach, and I can’t count how many articles and thought-pieces (several of them excellent) I have seen suggesting how best to manage this.
I obviously can’t fault this approach, but there is something lacking in some of them for me, and that is the sense of doing the time and doing the work. Putting in the reps, as Arnold Schwarzenegger would say.
I can’t help but shake off the feeling that much of the cult of reinvention is attached to capitalism. I don’t know if anyone has ever tried to analyse and quantify the amount of supporting and pimped products out there attached to various approaches, but I suspect it runs into the billions. It speaks to a variety of different desires: the promise that you, too, could be a whole new person; the imagined thrill of being able to finally make sense of what it is you want to do; the planting of a seed that whispers that the reason you haven’t yet done what it is you (apparently) really want to do is because you just haven’t found the right system yet.
(Aside: this is not where I thought this essay was going when I started writing it.)
As I mentioned, there are many better, more honest, and less insidiously persuasive essays out there. These, I always think, try to encourage a genuine assessment of where the reader might be in their life right now. That includes noting what time they actually have available to do whatever it is they’re sure is their calling and reflecting on how time might be prioritised to allow the reader to pursue their endeavours. Some gently highlight how important the why is in all of this, perhaps hoping that those who want to be something rather than do something will realise that, that way, madness lies.
Most importantly (in my mind), some of these articles encourage the reader to be honest about their starting point; and, specifically, their reps to date.
I suspect one of the best pieces of advice that anyone can give another creative is to finish things, to see them through to the end. Even if, as has happened with me on a number of occasions, you know that you’re not happy with them and they need a complete rewrite (or even just to be shelved immediately afterwards). This isn’t to say to slog on with those projects you just know are dead in the water (sometimes only accepting this reluctantly, as there is often a certain drive and passion involved), but to persevere with those which have promise but are misbehaving.
Do the reps.
Both your body and your mind are exceptionally good at getting better at whatever it is you do often. If that is allowing yourself to be easily distracted or persuaded away from your creative project, then the more you allow that to happen, the more that response will become hardwired. If, however, you push back and push through, then the fact you are the type of person who can and does approach challenges in such a way becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Let’s just take a moment here to differentiate between allowing yourself to be distracted and being distracted by entirely necessary responsibilities. I personally think that it is little short of a miracle that anyone who works or volunteers (and here I include work in the broadest sense of the word, not just that which is societally considered acceptable and measurable) and has caring responsibilities of any kind manages to find any time to create at all.
Much has been written about the importance of habits; developing them, creating systems that work, automating as much as possible and removing potential barriers to prevent an individual having to employ willpower any more than they absolutely must.
With everything you decide to do or not do, you are sculpting your own personal identity, and in some ways that is so much more about what you do than it is about what you have already done. (Read Adam Bornstein’s commentary on this here (the section How to Make Exercise More Automatic). I honestly think Bornstein is the best example I have come across of someone who can translate peer-reviewed research into something clear and accessible for everyone to understand.)
I could include all manner of philosophical and psychoanalytical analysis here, but what it comes down to is that who you are is intrinsically linked to what it is you do and how you act. We always have a choice about how we approach life at least, even if (in more extreme situations) our hands are tied with regard to specific actions. And, when it comes to creative practice, we nearly always have a choice about what it is we do (within our means).
The one certainty is that we’ll never get it right every time, but there is value in applying the scientific method of trial, error, analysis to how we proceed and progress. And we change, we grow. Goalposts move all the time, both internal and external.
The reason I have found Scribbles and Sketches so much fun but also so rewarding is that I used it as a way to address a problem I had identified: partly, it was about completing things, but the actual reason why I wasn’t completing things as much as I would have liked was because I couldn’t let them go. I could never quite get happy enough with them. Not everything, obviously, as I’ve shared a lot of things over the years; but, certainly, some of the bigger things. I identified this as my biggest weakness and deliberately designed a model that forced me to create and release projects at speed, sharing them in the knowledge that they were notebooks rather than completed works. The quarterly approach also works for my personal circumstances. I know I can plan enough to see through an intense month of activity (sometimes preparing a significant amount in advance) if I only do it four times a year; and, at the end of the year, I have four significant notebooks completed and ready to either slowly fade into the ether or be developed into something else.
I put a lot of stock into it being the right time to do the right thing, whether that is having the time and energy to see something through or pausing because it isn’t working at that point. I put Runes aside for years before getting to the point when I realised that the perfectly legitimate reasons for not writing it had faded and all that remained was just to write it and write it now, or accept I should just ditch the idea (I don’t know how it managed to be that long, but then I still don’t really understand how my eldest daughter will be turning seven in January).
I honestly don’t think I would have got to this point if I hadn’t critically analysed where my own creative practice was suffering and coming up with a strategy to improve on that point. Brutal honesty comes into it a lot; not taking any nonsense or accepting any excuses from myself.
Just to stress again, there are perfectly legitimate reasons why you may need to cut yourself slack – especially in these troubled times – but there is a difference between kidding yourself and knowing you need to take a step back or have a moment. I do think, though, that even if I’m not writing what I want to be writing for an entirely legitimate reason, I have never regretted carving out a slither of time to do something creative, even if it is just doodling nonsense.
This critical analysis (brutal honesty, kicking my arse into gear) approach has done me so much good. I am now starting to feel able to tackle some of those things I shelved a long time ago; some of those misbehaving projects that I knew had something in them, but I couldn’t chisel away enough at the rough stone to see clearly.
So, returning to my large-scale multi-year fiction project, I am finally ready to share something. This isn’t to say I have it all figured out! I am absolutely certain something else will throw me off course, but at least I feel ready to start this project, now. And, crucially, to share it as I go, as the required commitment, accountability, and engagement really helps me thrive, creatively.
Back in March, I wrote:
“I made the leap to publishing my first seasonal notebook in a matter of hours. A brief fleeting idea arrived in my head and immediately convinced me of its value, talking me into just running with it there and then. I have loved each of my notebooks, not least because they force me to share, and everyone who reads them knows that they are designed to be more raw than polished.”
And so it was with this decision. After all these years mapping out ideas, writing, figuring out how I wanted to publish it all, there was an epiphanic moment when I realised that what really excited me about the whole thing was the idea of sharing some thoughts as I went. Showing my working. The sheer potential scale of my ideas was daunting, despite the thousands of words I had written. It is the entire process and the many ideas that I want to share as much as anything, to enjoy and surf the waves of accountability. As with Runes, I plan to start almost from the beginning again, though this time I will be re-reading and grouping the many, many notes and plans I have. Nothing is sacred, though.
So, I would like to introduce TessaHedron to the world. On Monday, I shared an introductory post, talking briefly about the genesis of the idea of TessaHedron and what I hope to do as I start my weekly updates on the project. This post is open to everyone, but I plan to paywall the weekly updates I share, for various (many obvious) reasons. I might share a brief, free post every month, with highlights from my weekly updates. TessaHedron: A Writer’s Notebook will not be chronological, sequential, or even possibly logical at times. It will very much be a way of me rationalising my own thoughts as I go.
I feel like, in many ways, how I have approached things creatively over the last few years has been building up to this. I have a model – a proof of concept – that is working for me, and this next stage is all about applying this at scale. The second-best thing about this approach is the fact I feel like the pressure’s off. I enjoy working publicly in notebooks, sharing early or semi-developed drafts, working through things as I go. Out of the nine Scribbles and Sketches notebooks I have completed so far, I know that I will develop at least three into something else – something more final – in time.
But the best thing about this approach? It is exciting to work like this and, above all, fun.
You can subscribe to TessaHedron: A Writer’s Notebook here. I’ll start sharing weekly posts from the 1st of January 2026. By subscribing, you will get access to the full notebook archive of everything that has already been published, as well as receiving all future weekly email updates. Until the end of 2025, it will be free to subscribe. After that, all future posts will be paywalled. Anyone subscribing during this last month of 2025 will receive a complimentary subscription from 2026 onward.
Supplementary Snippets
It will surprise no-one who knows me that I have, of course, sketched out other creative plans for 2026. In fact, I am even tentatively working on a three-year plan but, in line with a decision I made some time ago, I have no intention of sharing giddy promises until I know I can and will see them through.
If you’d like to read some gentle reflections on the need to slow and pause towards the end of the calendar year, Lynn Fraser’s recent post is quite beautiful.
If you’re thinking about your own creative practice and energy levels, I very much suggest you read Make Something Heavy by Anu Atluru.
Things That Didn’t Work: I am closing down my BlueSky account. I just didn’t enjoy it in any way, even though I thought I might. I had hoped (as many others had) it would be like those fresh, early days of Twitter, but instead I found it all gatekeeping and guarded thoughts. For me, there was a lack of authenticity and a sense of almost righteous and performative presentation. I am certain many others experience it differently – and there’s an argument to be made that I didn’t really give it a chance – but it proved a point I was musing that going backwards is never the way. The world has moved on, and I am a different person now. C’est la vie.
Find Me Elsewhere
My newsletter, Vignettes, will always include a round-up of the various digital haunts I have been frequenting over the previous months, as well as an indication of where I might be the following month.
I host seasonal notebooks under the banner of Scribbles and Sketches, four a year, each lasting a calendar month and following a single theme, which may be predominantly textual or predominantly visual.
I am currently hosting a year-long project, Simply This, featuring suggestions of fun and interesting things to do. Bursts of nostalgia, old-fashioned fun in its simplest state, and a not insignificant amount of cheerful daftness.
I am sporadically active on Substack Notes.
I have just launched my new project for 2026: TessaHedron: A Writer’s Notebook. I’ll be sharing weekly posts from January 2026, all associated with my fiction project, TessaHedron. It will be an exercise in creativity rather than specifically chronological storytelling, including all manner of things relating to worldbuilding, writing, editing, and distribution in their broadest forms. It’s free to sign-up until the end of 2025.