The Q2 Media Report: if in doubt, go sideways

“I haven't read enough” is a thing I say to myself with enough regularity that I know it’s code for my own imposter syndrome, and I still can’t fix it. How much is enough? There’s no answer to that. In April through June I’ve been reading contemporary world sci-fi and minor interwar modernists. I've read poetry pamphlets (my friend Sean’s new one is pretty great) and watched a handful of comedy specials. My cinema reopened and I've not sat through a single film without leaving the room and pacing up and down a corridor, not since early April. I’ve listened to a lot of the back catalogue of Hoy Hablamos. I started learning Scottish Gaelic on Duolingo, then got frustrated at the weird voice recordings and lack of grammatical explanation and bought an actual book for it. I’ve knitted three and a half pairs of socks. Three weeks ago I started Inverted World by Christopher Priest and Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter within two days of each other, and gave myself a headache. (They’re both great, but that’s a lot of brain.)

The book I was editing in March is still only half-finished. I’ve sat in plenty of cafes with it, and got as far as the end of Chapter 8. To be clear, that’s a better pace than it was. But it’s still pants - I was hoping to be done with it by now.

There’s a concept to which knitters introduced me, by which they say they're either a “process knitter” or a “product knitter”, or else some kind of mix of the two. It’s essentially asking what motivates you: whether you want to do something or you want to have done it. I enjoy reading, and often find the pressure to have read to be too much to handle, even if the pressure only comes from myself. With writing it’s more complicated. They say if you want to finish anything big, you have to get satisfaction from the process of it. There’s a sense in which the enjoyment of process is seen as the “virtuous” kind of satisfaction, and only hacks and pseuds race through to the end. I say there’s room for both things, and frankly at the moment I could do with a bit of product. What I could do with right now, to mix my metaphors absolutely shamelessly, is to pause, and turn around, and enjoy the view for what it is, rather than what it might be when I’ve sunk a few hundred more hours into it.

So that’s where I’m at, here at the end of June.