NYC employees who are finally getting their required covid vaccines get a $500 incentive. For my flu shot today at Target, I got a coupon for $5 off of $20. I bought an $8 candle, sea salt + mandarin scented, which I'm currently burning in my office as, you can tell, I don't work on revising my book.
I'm in a sloggy bit of revision right now, accepting my editor's line edits before I can do some bigger revision—a completely anathema-to-me order of small-to-big, usually, but if I do the overhauls first, then I'll never be able to find the sentences my editor had wise tweaks for. And because I'm committed to writing in Scrivener, I can't just run through the word doc accepting changes, it's a convoluted two-monitor process that is even more of a slog to execute than to read about, I promise.
But so anyway, it's important work but uninspiring. It requires far less creativity than humility, seeing my editor's simplification of a sentence and thinking Ah yeah, that does work better, lots of Oh yeah that paragraph could totally be cut. And as I'm writing this, I'm realizing that maybe it's not the slogginess but the humility that's had me feeling the way I've been feeling the last few days: (whines) I want a treat.
Everyone says Oh the great thing about adulthood is you can eat candy for breakfast or whatever, everyone says The key to a healthy relationship with food is making no foods off limits, but the problem with being able to eat a chocolate bar whenever is then there goes a whole category of reward out the window. Also off limits right now: anything that costs money. And when I'm done with my sloggy, humbling work for the day, it's right into two hours of cooking dinner / eating dinner / hoping the toddler doesn't throw dinner on the floor / bathtime / bedtime. And then I lie on the couch and watch comforting TV while playing sudoku or something on my phone, every night. But it's every night, so it can't be a treat.
Which is why this $8 candle (62.5% subsidized by the CVS pharmacy) feels so important and so insufficient. And the available treat of looking at instagram in the middle of the day is just going to make the sloggy work drag on even longer. I just want to get to the good part, where I get to do some of the problem-solving, write some new words, put some new things together in a pleasing way. If I stopped whining about it (and checking instagram in the middle of things) this would all go a lot faster.
But it also might go faster if I had a treat waiting for me at the end of a day of work. If you have any ideas, lemme know.
Thank you for reading! Please pardon any typos or sentences that fade out half-way, they're what let me send this out free and weekly. If you enjoyed this newsletter and want to share it, or were forwarded this edition and want to subscribe, the link is tinyletter.com/jaimealyse. You can also follow me on twitter here, and when my book is done and ready to be preordered this is where I will tell you about that.