#(...would probably help if i wasn't also using it as my primary computer though.

[oncillaphoenix]

someday i'm going to have the spare money to afford a tablet for drawing that's less than 10 years old and doesn't randomly decide to only register half my pen strokes. someday...

[not-poignant]

Hey Pia! I know you've spoken about this generally in the past, but I wasn't sure if you had ever posted anything specific. I am also struggling with trying to balance my desire to write, and throw myself into writing, with the physical and emotional limitations of disability. I really want to become more serious about my writing, but I don't want to hurt myself. What kind of 'hard limits' do you have to set for yourself to balance your productivity and how do you determine them? Thank you! <333

Hiya anon!

I’m definitely not necessarily the right person to go to on advice on this. Like, as we speak I’m currently wearing a wrist brace because my Guyon’s Canal and Cubital Tunnel Syndromes are playing up again from me...doing too much...outside of the limits of disability.

So in light of that, I’m shoving the rest of this under a read-more, because anyone who has been following me for a while probably knows that I am the last person to be a role model re: ‘how to work when disabled.’

To be honest, it’s really hard to strike up a balance. Like, really hard, especially if you have chronic illnesses of the kind that shift and change on a daily basis. What you can do one day, week, month, or year, you might not ever be able to do again, let alone rely on with any sort of regularity. Will I ever write 75,000 words in a month again? Maybe. Should I? Probably not. Can I expect that what I’m sticking to this year will be reliable down the track? No. That side of things sucks. One day I might not be able to write anymore and that’s just...how that goes.

I don’t write to a daily wordcount. This just seems folly for my chronic illnesses (of which the primary symptoms are whole body pain and intermittent inflammation, crushing fatigue and brain fog. Writing with brain fog is literally impossible). So I have a monthly wordcount. This means on the good-to-average days I can spin out words, and on the bad days, I have no pressure to attain a wordcount.

You won’t know how much you can do until you start trial/error, and reflecting at the end of say each two weeks, how you feel what you’re doing is balancing against how you feel, and your energy levels.

I’ve learned that it’s good to stop while things are going well. As in, don’t stop when you run out of words or have nothing left or are exhausted. I don’t always listen to this, but what I’ve learned is that if you stop before the well is dry, you’re a) less likely to feel like shit re: specifically writing the next day and b) you’ll generally know what you want to write when you sit down at the computer (notepad/ipad/laptop/whatever) again. This is good advice for anyone, but especially good for people who need to pay attention to spoon expenditure. Sometimes it can be good to use pacing - i.e. work out how much you can do without hurting your energy levels at all, reduce the number even more, and then try and stick to that. Googling ‘pacing / fibromyalgia’ is a good way of seeing how to get an idea of what your limits are.

Be prepared though, for this process to involve finding your limits, which of course means...sometimes getting sick because of hitting them. It might be that editing takes more spoons than you thought, or reading things for research (something a lot of writers do, and that I do) is draining, or posting things / polishing things for publication is exhausting more than you could’ve known. For me, marketing makes me hit the wall in about five seconds. There is no ‘safe’ level of marketing, if I have to market something outside of say, this specific Tumblr, I can expect to have about two weeks of not being productive at all. That’s just...the way it goes.

Which is why my ‘official’ writing Tumblr/Facebook/etc. are all dead. The cost is too high.

I hate pacing (seriously, I did a chronic conditions management course and it was my least favourite part. Like I said, I’m kind of not great to go to about this stuff since I frequently push myself too far and get really sick.) But pacing is very useful, and there are a lot of good guides about it now.

I tend to boom/bust with what I do. I do expect burnout? It doesn’t always come when I expect it, and sometimes it pounces when I least expect it and have been really careful with my output. So I think it might also help to have a plan in mind for if/when you do hit burnout. And also know the signs of you hitting a flare / burnout / whatever language fits here. Write them down somewhere, check in on that list sometimes. If your symptoms fit the list before you’re too exhausted to write, take a break until the symptoms lessen.

Also, plan ahead. Like, once you have an idea of your monthly wordcount - say it’s 10,000 words a month (that’s conservative, but not unrealistic with chronic disability), that’s 120,000 words a year. That’s one book. Or two very short books. Or one short book and a few oneshots. Or one book and one novella, etc. That doesn’t include time put aside for editing, or formatting, or anything else. 

And that assumes that your wordcount remains consistent. That there’s no unforeseen disasters re: health, or long periods of burnout re: health.

Think about what you really want to be spending your time doing, because you’ll need to stay accountable for stray words etc. if you have goals in mind re: wanting to be a writer.

Also, plan breaks. Like, idk if you already are someone who finds it easy to take breaks, but let’s say you hit your wordcount for the week/month/whenever, take a break afterwards. Don’t use all your energy towards the next project immediately, use some of your energy to take a break and recharge a bit.

Um, be patient with yourself (I’m literally giving you advice I don’t follow, lol), and also, it’s important to remember your overall end goals. Are they to make an income? What kind of income? (Realistically, most full-time writers who are releasing 3-4 books per year only ever make around $8000 a year (it’s gone up!), so it’s not a great career for like...income). Is it to have fun? Is it to prove something to yourself? Are you only wanting to write fanfiction, original fiction, or both? Like, all those things I don’t know from your Ask, but are good things to sit down and brainstorm answers for. Because writing for income may produce a very different plan vs. only writing for fun vs. only writing fanfiction.

And it also really depends on your symptoms too. Everyone’s chronic illnesses / and/or disabilities present in different ways, even if two people have the same illness. I’m writing this advice based partly on my restrictions, but my advice would be pretty useless for someone who might have a lot of energy, but is blind, and really just needs advice on what software/hardware they need to help them write. (Actually my advice might be pretty useless anyway, I am not someone who has this figured out - I am like, learning as I go, and usually the hard way. I would be great for ‘how not to fail at this - a lesson learned by example. Over and over again.’)

Personally, I would just...give yourself some time to feel out your writing limits and like, set an alarm or something every few weeks to assess how you’re feeling as a result of writing / editing X amount. If I were less of a workaholic, I think I would’ve done things a lot more slowly. But my personality is the kind that just likes to dive deep into things and deal with the crushing burnout / increased illness afterwards, and hope it doesn’t permanently alter my energy levels.

And sometimes I’m not lucky enough for that to happen. I’m as sick as I am now, in part, because of two decades of going too hard, and not pulling back fast enough (not just in writing, across all things). I think regular people are better at bouncing back, but I wouldn’t know, I’ve always been sick.

I should follow more of my own advice. ;)

[taco-calamitous]

Ha-HA! Have THIS long-ass shit on your page!