time icons over vintage background vector illustration
Whoa. I have never, ever been able to quantify the degree to which the time change from Standard to Daylight has thrown me off schedule like this. Oh, I knew it was a factor, but I didn’t totally understand the degree of impact until now. Some of this is also due to the change in daylight since we’re at the equinox–and, once again, I hadn’t quantified it until this year. Probably because until the last eight years, daylight hours hadn’t been a significant factor in horse time. I had access to an indoor arena with lights, so…the big change was being able to ride outside. Now I need to readjust my horse time–back in October I had started moving it toward noon because of approaching limited daylight hours, and had somewhat figured out how to work around that issue. Now it’s time to start shifting back to late afternoon because by May/June, I’ll want to be riding later, when the sun is going down. That works better for both of us.
But the weather this winter has also been a huge factor in keeping me unsettled. After all, I somewhat expect to have real winter in the mountains of NE Oregon. That’s a given. But we have remained cold and snowy a bit later than usual, and that also throws me off balance a little bit. Right now I’m out there looking for any sign of life from my bulbs, and there’s just not much. Too much snow and frozen ground–but I think it’s turning around pretty quickly.
I tell myself that nope, didn’t get much done this week. And yet…I look to see that I got two books up on Ingram (both republications). I started the process (with a new list) of transferring my newsletter from TinyLetter to Substack. I’ll be running the two newsletters in parallel for a while before I do the final move. We’ll see. I wrote and uploaded a new chapter of Federation Cowboy, bringing that book to around 38k words, and began work on blocking out the rest of the book for pacing’s sake. I’ve added some words to The Cost of Power, which has intensified the degree to which that story will deal with mind control programming.
Stuff is getting done. Just not as much as I wanted to have done by now, especially with Federation Cowboy. That book is a struggle, because I’m realizing that the amount of work that needs to go into worldbuilding in far future settings rivals that of a fantasy setting. Especially since this is a first book in what might end up being an occasional series, it’s a world where there are a lot of nonhuman sentient species and I’m trying to reflect the different ways they do things including speech, social patterns, and the nature of sentience itself. It’s a more complex world than I expected it to be.
All the same, even in spite of the assorted reasons, there’s another, huge factor. I find that I’m needing to do the work later in the day. Staying up later. My body still wants to be on Standard Time, and while that kinda works, I still do enough stuff where I rely on clock time that I need to shift my circadian rhythms to–ugh–Daylight Time. Doing writing work later in the day is not going to necessarily be a good idea in the long run, though we shall see. And I need to be able to do more active stuff in the morning as well.
Sigh.
Plus I need to get back to working out. I’ve been a bit too sloth-like the last couple of weeks.
So this is apparently the Week of the Wakeup Call. Let’s see if it really works.
