It’s dark but not black.
I’m sitting at the dining room table, and I’ve been here for a fair bit, working. I hadn’t really even registered that the sun just set. Leaning back to stretch, I’m hoping my back cracks while arching over the top of the chair.
I used to be very particular about where and how I worked but I'm realizing that's changed in the last couple of years. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, this year's really where things shifted. Sometimes I'm at my desk with my monitors, but I'm finding more and more that I just use the laptop itself without the monitors so there's only one screen to focus on at a time. That's also why I like working from coffee shops; there's only so much table-space so it really forces me to focus on one thing at a time. And I've come to love the social pressure of being around other people who are doing their own thing, but who won't interrupt me.
Of all of the places I like to work, though, I never expected the couch to be one of them. Yet, in the last year, it's become a regular feature. In fact, the number of times I've worked from the couch in the last 10 months is probably greater than every other time throughout my life, combined.
It's because I hadn't thought of writing as work.
I tricked myself without really meaning to.
Each night, I'd sit down to write this column after working on other stuff all day. Recently, I went through my writing from the past 10 months of The MAP Year Project to help organize things as I move toward manuscript editing. From my spot at the dining room table, I'm scrolling to the top of the doc I've been working in and I feel my eyebrows climbing up my forehead. My head's shaking back and forth and, before I know it, I'm nodding with a smile cracking its way through my disbelief.
156,439 words so far, with two months left to go.
Not including my essays.
Holy shit... it's real.
Can you think of a time where seeing the result of your effort made it feel... real?
onward.
For more on this daily column and The MAP Year Project, read the backstory here. And if you know someone who'd appreciate this, pass it along.