Discipline, diligence & discomfort

When you’re process-minded (and slightly obsessive) like me, figuring out exactly when to send the newsletter out can be a real shit-disturber. Originally this thing was supposed to go out every week on Thursday (because that’s Thor’s day); but since I almost always write it on the weekend, four days later almost always seems like way too long to sit on an evolving view of the universe as that selfsame universe continues to evolve.

Meanwhile, here I am gassed up on a Thursday (which is Thor’s day) and procrastinating the start of a new draft of Zombie Survival Camp, a spec horror comedy (?) that I swear I will actually beaver my way through at some point in my life, probably. And I sent a post three days ago and next week’s not till next week and, well, buh.

Obviously there’s no perfect time for a post, but some of them (like Monday’s) feel like they go out maybe a hair’s breadth too early; like if I’d hung it back to Wednesday, I might have clarified a number of my ideas in light of the continuously evolving flood of “the news.” But obviously, y’know, there’s not really a crackable code to any of that. Sometimes you just gotta hit “send” and start working on the next one.

I’m going to do some linking at the top here today, because these pieces feel both richer than the usual “these are neat, you should read / watch / eat this” type of thing, and because (like everything) maybe they connect to some of the stuff I wanted to write about more broadly, anyway. I don’t know. I never know where any of this stuff comes from.

You may have already read the first piece. It came out seconds after Monday’s missive, so it’s getting old by the time you read this (in internet time). It’s Mo Ryan’s thoughtful take on a thoughtless project, the Harry Potter show. It’s worth reading in full.

We are, of course, heading into what will be a difficult Christmas season for trans folk and their allies. This calls to mind something else about the Blue Wave that I wasn’t able to work into this week’s piece: yes, it’s all generally well and good; but buried under all the noise was the fact that for all the progressive wins — and, indeed, trans wins! — there were also a lot of anti-trans wins, too. It made it a bit harder to get swept away in (most folks’) relief about the whole thing last Wednesday. It is still a very, very, very dangerous time to be a transgender person in the United States, in Canada, in the United Kingdom especially, and in several places beyond.

Watching Emily St. James come out (I do not know her personally, but I have been reading her for as long as she’s had work online for me to read) and navigate relationships and motherhood and writing and a career has been one of the great inspirations of this era of my life. So I tend to turn to her when feeling grumpy, and I was very heartened to read this piece from her newsletter this week, which (to me) feels like it captures both the fraught moment we find ourselves in, for transgender rights and human rights generally; and yet, finds a bit of space for hope, at least for the former. Please, read and enjoy.

Something else nifty that was brewing in the early days of the week: several jurists from the Independent Games Festival published (with the festival’s permission, though not representing the official stance of the festival itself) a set of principles on the use of A.I. in games. These principles do, of course, apply broadly and deeply to all of my thinking about the place for these tools in most jobs, crafts, and art forms.

When feeling grumpy, I also tend to turn to Austin Walker, who is as clear-headed a thinker on the principles of liberation as they apply to the creative arts as anyone I (parasocially) know. Austin was nice enough to publish some of his internal deliberations regarding the IGF jury statement (he is one of the jurists who signed it) on his newsletter/blog. It’s quite a lengthy piece and (by Austin’s own admission) only lightly organized/edited, but if you can take ten minutes to work your way through the labyrinth, it’s well worth your time.

And again, if I went looking for hope in my doldrums, I couldn’t ask for better than this bit:

Finally: woof, James Gunn and Peter Safran got fired. (This one happened to near to publication that I managed to slip a reference to it into my earlier post.)

This was both entirely predictable and completely infuriating (and everyone writing about it in the trades needs to get Supergirl smacked clean out of their mouths, imho) but it sure built on what Monday’s piece was broadly about: the no “there” there-ness of all these venture capital idiots (and liars and charlatans generally), and all the horrible things they do, have done, and continue to do to the rest of us.

Discipline

I’m often accused of being quite disciplined. This will bubble up in regard to one of my steady practices; today, let’s assign it to my writing practice, since that’s what I want to talk about anyway.

I presume there are people for whom the premise of returning regularly to a creative pursuit is quite psychologically daunting. I presume this because of the discipline comments, above. The discipline comments usually come from someone who has the sheen of “I wish I could do that too.” The reason, then, that I bump so hard against the assignment — the idea that I am “disciplined” at all — is that nothing I do feels disciplined in any way that I can recognize as matching my perception of the word.

Okay, not “nothing.” But very little of it. Much, possibly most, of my writing feels (at best) habitual and (more often) like some kind of compulsion, like (sorry, gonna be gross here) a teenager who has to jerk off X times and take Y shits a day, or they’re gonna explode cum and shit everywhere.

A lot of the writing I do — the vast majority, I’d say — above all feels like it organizes my thoughts. This is definitely why I journal — another area where I am accused of being very disciplined — because once or twice a day, if I don’t capture my thoughts on paper, my head feels very disordered and unsettled, to the point of its being distracted — like, I can’t put something aside, in many cases, till I’ve had it out in handwritten pages.

The newslettblog, perhaps less so; there are definitely weeks where I don’t have anything I particularly want to pick apart, and given that I churn out one of these in those weeks anyway, I’ll herein accept the assignment: yeah, that’s disciplined.

But I dunno. Perhaps it’s a word thing. “Discipline” feels intentional and structural in a way that my commitment to my practice does not, in spite of my best efforts. It also feels resolved in a way that is, I think, highly dangerous to creative life.

There’s nothing resolved about this, and I feel like thinking so would lure anyone into a false sense of reliability that simply doesn’t exist in creative work. I haven’t solved the puzzle, settled the problem, or found the sauce. I’m fighting uphill pretty much all the time, especially lately; and nearly any other writer I’ve ever spoken to or even read about, has said the same.

Diligence

This is what’s had me thinking, of late, that the word I’d prefer is diligence. It is diligence to which I aspire — and the reason I aspire to it is that, my friends, I must assure you, I am failing at this pretty much all the time.

2026 has been particularly bad. It’s been a rough overall year for me, creatively. I finished one major project in the winter and have otherwise been facing some external pressures (largely around earning money and/or the failure of my writing to do the same) that have had bruising effects on my ability to sit down and do the thing.

That’s normal; every writer talks (and, usually, whines) about that. But the experience has worked a minor lesson on me, which is: if you’re going to do this life — this creative life, which I am — it isn’t discipline I need, but diligence: the willingness to keep working it anyway, persistently, effort-fully (dict.?), and carefully (i.e., “with care”).

This is a nice realization to come to, and a good target to strive for, but that doesn’t make the actual doing of it any easier. I’m falling down on the diligence all the time, lately. If I were more disciplined (ha!) maybe I could coerce myself into being more diligent. But I’m not, so I just keep rolling my eyes at those accusations of discipline, and try again today.

Discomfort

I think in an ideal world, the diligence described above would come with a real joy to it. It deserves to: being exacting and committed in this or any other framework is sort of its own righteous thing, and I love that.

But the truth is: creating art is uncomfortable. Doing the thing anyway when you don’t really want to or know how to is distressing. Eating vegetables? Straight-up bad. So it goes.

I have a lifelong problem with knowing whether the discomfort in a thing is the right kind of discomfort, if you will. The aforementioned Zombie Survival Camp has not been as fun to work on as its predecessor. Should I keep at it? Should I accept that the feelings are trying to tell me something? When is the discomfort just “the process” and when is it a warning sign?

Well, I’m never going to answer that riddle, at least not coherently. But I do broadly believe — or have for the better part of the last quarter of my life, anyway — that making ourselves easier with discomfort is not only a crucial life skill generally, but really, really important right now. After (at least) a couple of decades of being sold comfort and easy solutions in greater and greater narcoleptic doses, there’s probably no greater “life hack” (even the premise of the “life hack” is a narcoleptic comfort solution) than being able to sit with discomfort even marginally longer than the person, idea, or political project you’re trying to overcome.

This is a nice way of telling myself that my diligence problem might have positive attributive outcomes if I stick with it. It’s also a hedge on listening to my body and jumping out of an uncomfortable project, which, as you can imagine, can also have disastrous outcomes if taken in the wrong direction for too long.

Real coin flip, this life.

In sum: I reject discipline as a descriptor of creative practice. I reject the premise that any of this can be solved wholesale, regardless. I aspire to a kind of diligence that brings care and joy to my work, consistently. And I accept that my aspiration to such is bringing me discomfort and might lead me down some wrong paths; and hope that my experience of same will be useful in the long run.

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