lowering the stakes

in

A desire, over the next several months, perhaps the next year – or, hell, whatever remains of my creative life, to figure out how / force myself to write fiction faster – not in a Walter B. Gibson two-novels-a-month-for-nearly-20-years (285/326) sort of way – but in a way that's at least moderately quicker than my current and past.

(I'd be stoked with a longer short story / novellete per quarter.)

Key part: perpetual mental effort to lower the stakes, as Rick Rubin puts it in his excellent THE CREATIVE ACT (excellent – though an index wouldve been far more useful than blank ruled pages in the physical book) –

"We tend to think that what we're making is the most important thing in our lives and that it's going to define us for all eternity. Consider moving forward with the more accurate point of view that it's a small work, a beginning. The mission is to complete the project so you can move on to the next. The next one is a stepping-stone to the following work. And so it continues in productive rhythm for the entirety of your creative life."

– and relegate the belief that I was defined by a single work (ref: seven-year-paragraph) to the shitheap of my personal creative history.