Author Journey (September 30, 2024)
I have come to a rather startling discovery. The secret to being successful in life is streaking… That’s right, streaking! If you aren’t doing it, give it a go. You’ll be amazed at how liberating it is…
Author Journey (September 30, 2024)
Favourite Moment!
Of course, I’m not talking about running around naked… well, unless you want to do it on a number of consecutive days. I’m talking about building up habits and changing things about your life that you want to change. We all have habits, some good and some bad. It’s how we function without being bogged down with every single decision. There have been studies that show people who have suffered brain injuries can still do things habitually. For example, one patient had no idea where they lived but was able to go for a walk and find their way home purely from the habits they had formed before the injury. So, it makes sense that if you want to incorporate something into your life, it’s best to develop a habit and one of the best ways to do that is repetition.
I’ve been running for twenty-seven days now and it’s starting to feel habitual. One interesting thing is that I don’t have a specific time that I do it or make it follow some other activity (which is a clever way to build on existing habits), but I am constantly thinking about when I will get my runs in. At the moment, I’m doing three shorter runs a day. I’ve never been a big distance runner so it feels more natural to do two or three kilometres at a time. The amazing thing about this is that having run every day for twenty-seven days, I have amassed one-hundred and sixty kilometres which is about one hundred miles. The really cool thing is that I don’t want to stop. If anything, I want to do more. Making it manageable has definitely helped. Now to see what other habits I can build off the back of this… I’m looking at you, fiction writing!
The Week That Was…
Last week managed to throw a couple of Real-Life Family Events at me, wiping out two of my evenings. The day job has been a little bit quieter as we prepare for the partial return to the office which my manager has admitted will likely see a reduction in productivity… Well, as long as they have a good reason for it… FML!
Anyhow, I started the week by finishing off As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I’ll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World and the second season of The Rising of the Shield Hero. Both have given me plenty to think about and I’m looking forward to putting those thoughts into their season reviews. After that, I started Gods’ Game We Play from the Spring 2024 lineup. I’m four episodes in and not really feeling it yet. For my runs, I jumped into Dorohedoro and have already finished all twelve episodes and the OVA which was originally released as six mini-episodes. I hope to review that as soon as the other two are written up.
I had hoped to get through another six volumes this week, but could only manage three. They were all from the Kaiju No. 8 series and that brings me up to date. Now, I have to wait for volume twelve which isn’t due to be released until February 2025. So, I’ll be jumping into another series soon, although I do have Parallel Paradise and Free Life Fantasy Online to get one with too.
Talking of habit stacking (that’s where you take an existing habit and use it to develop a new habit), I am going to look at writing once I get off the treadmill. Even if it’s only two hundred words each time, that would be six hundred words a day which would be four-thousand, two hundred a week. If it goes the same way my running is, I’ll be building on that in no time. To help facilitate this, I’m going to do another focused series of reviews on one series. I’ll probably do two episode reviews a week, so I can continue to push out season reviews as I finish them. I’ve got at least three weeks’ worth of season reviews coming so it’ll be sometime after that.
Anime!
- Spy x Family (Season One – Part One)
- An Archdemon’s Dilemma: How to Love Your Elf Bride (Season One) – Maou no Ore ga Dorei Elf wo Yome ni Shitanda ga, Dou Medereba Ii?
- The New Gate (Season One)
Manga!
- Parallel Paradise (Volume 4) – For the Darkest Dawn!
- Free Life Fantasy Online: Immortal Princess (Volume 3) – An Army Marches on Its Stomach!
- Kaiju No. 8 (Volume 7) – The Start of the Kaiju Era!
Goals
| Tasks | Goal | Completed |
|---|---|---|
| Anime Watched | 3 Episodes | 29 Episodes |
| Manga Read | 3 Books | 3 Book |
| Posts Scheduled | 7 Posts | 7 Posts |
| Chapters Written | 2 | 0 Chapters |
| Chapters Edited | 2 | N/A |
| Artwork | Cover | N/A |
Aspirations for the week!
I still need to focus on developing a scheduled post buffer. Having one week done ahead of time isn’t nearly enough. I spend most of the beginning of the week trying to get everything set up for the next week. Any slippage flows into the rest of the week and before I know it, I’m out of time. I need to get to a place where I know that I can leave a post to the end of the week or even just write one a day which would still leave me with plenty of time to write fiction. So, building a buffer and working on some good habits is going to be key.
I haven’t decided what I’m going to watch next on the treadmill, although I do have a ridiculously long watch list on Netflix so I shouldn’t have too many problems. At the moment, I’m leaning towards Komi Can’t Communicate as I read the first volume of the manga back in January 2023 and loved it. I think it’ll be a nice change of pace from Dorohedoro too!
So, there you have it – Habits and Buffers. That is going to be the focus of my week and possibly many more after that. Maybe next week, I’ll have come up with a way to show how my habit stacking is going. Anyway, got to run… thanks for reading!
I’ll ignore your very first paragraph though that’s one’s own free will to do that as long as it doesn’t hinder others. 😅
God’s Games We Play premise and artstyle have me unenthusiastic and feels like it’ll copy No Game No Life too much. It also happens to be written by the same author as Our Last Crusade series which unfortunately I completed watching the anime adaptation, only to feel it being so-so in terms of storytelling elements’ execution. Having known this is making me start to change my mind about Dress-Up Darling, and if I was forced to choose which of the two I would rewatch, I willingly choose the latter.
Anyhow, I wish you a safe return to the office and a safe workout of your running exercise. I think a sports anime series is a preferable choice for those who are on the treadmill simply because you’re doing physical exercise which is a sports’ most important storytelling element.
You can’t ignore that first paragraph… that’s the best one!
I actually finished Gods’ Game We Play last night and enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to after the first four episodes. It’s nowhere near No Game No Life though.
I have two weeks until the official return to the office and I’m already stressing about how that’s going to work with the school runs and life in general. All so some manager somewhere can pat themselves on the back. I’m not going to get over this… As for the treadmill, I just started Hunter x Hunter so that should keep me busy for a while…
Two thumbs up! Loved the hook for this post, it had Me raising my eyebrows and wanting to know more! You are so right, building habits is so important for maintaining balance in your life and making every day tasks just a little bit easier. It’s interesting that you mentioned that even people with brain injuries can preform tasks that they should struggle with if that task was a habit before the injury. My mom had a stroke at a fairly young age (in her 50’s) and she did struggle with a lot of things afterwards, but every so often she would seem oddly lucid or back to her old self for a moment, and it was always with things that she had done daily like clockwork.
Thanks. I do love word play, especially when it can be interpreted in a suggestive manner.
Habits are a fascinating thing when you really think about them. Apparently, it’s a function of the reptilian part of the brain and it learns procedures and enables the body to use them over and over again. Often to a fault as we see with bad habits. It’s an incredibly powerful ability if we can make it work for us.