On Tennis and Writing Breaks

This Week In Writing, I discuss my prolonged break from daily writing and follow up on last week’s Substack article.

Photo by Matthias David on Unsplash

Tonight I played tennis for the first time in two weeks. I've played at least weekly for nearly a year and, until mid-March, was playing twice a week. This weather-induced stretch without play caught up with me pretty quickly.

To say I was rusty tonight would be an understatement. My service game was surprisingly on point, but everything else was missing. I outright missed far more shots than I care to admit. And now, an hour off the court, my body aches from tight muscles and angry joints.

Unlike my writing break last month, I didn't choose the tennis break -- the rain chose it for me. I missed playing tennis last week, but I have not missed journaling. And, yes, I still say missed because I've not started a new journaling streak.

When I ended the 1903-day writing streak, I gave myself two weeks and would return to it on April 1st. I journaled for two days in a row and have yet to go back since. Frankly, I'm enjoying the time away.

Instead of spending 45 minutes or so writing each night, I'm reading. It's been lovely. Last night, I was so engrossed in the book that I looked up, and it was 12:30 am -- it's been a long time since I read like that.

Life is about balance. I'm not ready to jump back into daily writing, and that's ok. Though, like with tennis this evening, my muscles will be sore when I start up again. I'll need to ease back in whenever it feels right again.

All of this is to say that there is no right or wrong way to approach your writing. Use my experience as a guide, but discover what works for you. Experiment, try, fail, adjust. Ultimately, that's the best advice I can give anyone.

We have to talk about Substack again

Last week's evaluation of Substack was inadvertently perfectly timed. The platform launched its Notes product on the same day. My first impression? Meh. I'll talk more about platform proliferation and where Notes fits in next week. However, the bigger story right now is the Substack CEO's horrifically botched interview on content moderation.

Avoiding content moderation seems to be the flavor du jour across centralized tech platforms, which makes zero sense to me. Hate speech doesn't deserve a platform. Period. Substack, Twitter, and the rest are quite literally giving a platform to hate. It's not ok and further emphasizes my desire to build the Ghost-based life raft.