february 2026: watching the pot

hello, my dear readers, friends, fellow countrymen in this strange new world birthing itself in agony around us!

happy february! january went by surprisingly quickly and yet, not quickly enough. as i mentioned in the last missive, i’ve got a couple surgeries on the cards and both of them seem to be coming up sooner than anticipated—and yet, like january, not soon enough.

i’m the kind of person who, once i’ve committed to a course, likes to see it through, to act on it immediately, especially if it’ll give me results i’m looking forward to. (being able to move my arm without pain and having full range of motion is one such result.) when something is in my control, i’ll work toward it obsessively, hour upon hour to get it done. it’s not always the best case scenario, though, and i’ve made great strides in balancing my life better. it doesn’t work as well for long-term projects because you can only burn so bright before the flame gutters out. these are things i’ve learned in publishing and athletics.

this current phase of my waiting life is a little different from the usual, but when i look for guidance beyond the obvious answer that i already know, because surely there is a secret, better way to handle my impatience, some magic words of wisdom that someone i admire will utter or has already uttered that will make all of this waiting feel suddenly easy.

but all of the usual suspects—artists, coaches—mostly speak in terms of patience to get to where you’re going with the effort you can give each day. it’s a good kind of patience to build, as pointed out above. it’s how we achieve great things. it’s the only way to get from page 1 to page 600, the only way to go from running 1 mile to running 1 marathon. you show up consistently to do the little bit of work that you can do that day. the 300, 500, 1000 words. the easy run, the speed run, the long run. a dogged persistence, trusting the process. knowing that you can’t control the outcome but you can control the effort that may get you there.

that’s not the kind of patience that has me gnawing at the bars of my enclosure, though.

i’m talking about the kind of waiting where you have no control at all over the outcome. no effort you can do to make the goal come faster. just a date in the calendar. just a matter of time passing. and many of us are old enough to come close to that mortal brush of fear—not having enough time to do all we want to do in this world. not enough time to do what we want in a single day! so it’s seems silly to wish time away just to get to that distant date.

but when you’re waiting for something eagerly (or worse, waiting for the end of something you hate), all that time suddenly seems to crawl. you know what i mean—waiting for that email from an agent to respond with a request for a full or The Call. waiting for publication day, for people to finally read the opus you’ve been toiling on in secret for years. waiting for the edit letter. trying to recover from an injury or illness that, no matter our disillusioned grasping, truly can’t be fixed by us. we refresh the inbox, we gulp the supplements. (we may or may not do our rehab. ahem.) but none of these things actions moves the one true god and master of all:

time.

so there probably is some wisdom to be found farther back, much farther, like to the stoics, who were big on the idea of not having control over outside factors. i’ve always felt an affinity to them because of the way i live my life—strength to change the things i can, accept the things i can’t, all that.

but faced with the current waiting jag, i’ve been struggling more than i thought i would, especially because i thought that working in publishing had inured me to the pain of patience. i thought i could wait like a rock. like, when i was waiting for the sovereign and fate’s bane to come out, i wrote warmongers and got obsessed with moving this newsletter somewhere better. and the things i’m waiting for will hopefully change my life for the better. reduce daily burdens, make it easier to control other things. furthermore, they’ll be happening soon! within the month, even! surely i can be patient for two, three weeks! but the closer a thing gets, the harder it can be to wait for it. the excitement builds a sort of pressure in your chest, a mania in your mind.

the thing that i hold on to is that the time will pass regardless, whether i watch it or not. and that pesky thing about mortality is, there will never be enough of it, not really. like many of us, i’ve grown used to a certain instant gratification. i am trying to train myself out of it—embracing the slow making of things with my hands, injecting the aimlessness of the meandering way home, trying not to be annoyed by inefficiency and inconvenience. i’m also trying not to reach for the phone as an immediate sop to deaden the impatient screeching in my head; social media is unfortunately very good at making the time disappear from right underneath you, but it leaves me with a dull emptiness when i resurface, or worse, disgust at the world and the people in it, including myself.

coincidentally—or maybe not a coincidence at all—this waiting period comes when all of my projects are with their respective editors. all i have to do at the moment is create new messes. i’m trying to fill my days, hours, minutes with things that will make me the person i actually want to be. things that will, when this period of waiting is over, add up to something—and it doesn’t have to be a part of a project or a bigger bicep, but it may just be more joy. better relationships.

when the time has passed, i want something to show for it.

willing the time to pass is like waiting to live until the x, y, or z happens. but surprise! life has already started—whether you’re living it or not.

some things that i’ve been filling my minutes with:

• reading friends’ manuscripts, including august clarke’s next book, The Felicity Complex, about 6 women created in a lab to serve billionaires after the nuclear apocalypse (out in july 2026). I just started Pasha the Storm, about a fifty-something year old pirate lord blackmailed into one last job—so far, she’s horny and irascible, a woman after my own heart.
• reading some nonfiction, like Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? and The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by David J. Morris. trying to learn something new is always a good way for me to lose myself.
• buying books that i absolutely totally most definitely am going to read soon. especially big ones. i would like to tackle: lonesome dove. menewood. the golden fool.
• long runs. workouts. short runs. finding workarounds for the various aches and pains. surgery will definitely wipe out some gains, but going in with strength and good cardio health will always help with healing.
• studying the blade, of course. this, in particular, I savor as much as i can because i don’t know to what extent i’ll be able to do it later.
• double-fisting (or, as i learned from some brits, double-parking) critical role campaign 4 and campaign 2.
• reading newsletters from smart people i like, people who inspire me in some way or another. my favorites right now are the ones that aggregate interesting new rabbit holes for me to go down. (You can find a list of them in the sidebar of my website.)
• writing new posts here, like how to make your own receipts in your training and busting some myths about running.
• diving into music. listening to old albums from my high school days. focusing on the music. dancing to it. or not. sarah mclachlan has gotten some play time. linkin park. system of a down. enya, always. also just discovered a Scottish EDM band, Valtos. my little side project of fascination with songs about cheating from the cheaters POV, like The Weakness in Me by Joan Armatrading. if you have more to add, drop them in the comments!
• writing. yes, yes, working on new projects. i wrote a short story for an unannounced anthology. i am toying with a sequel to monster slayer already. also the next full-length book/series projects. related: playing solo rpgs. (i may also crack open warmongers a little early, but right now i’m trying to focus on reading books to augment it.)
• life admin. you will not believe how many things i have done that i was procrastinating on. some of them are even cool, good, fun things but things that required a lot of overhead work. well, they’re done now and i may talk about that later this year.
• student manuscripts have just come in, the first of the semester, so that’ll occupy me for the next couple weeks.

anyway. i wrote up a whole spread in my bullet journal, two whole pages of things i can do to live my life without watching the clock (too much). but if you have favorite things to do, i’m all ears.

until then,

stay sharp.

C. L.