Before My Second Cup: 5/20/26

When It Rains...

After I hit “post” on my last Second Cup, everything was calm for a few hours. My husband and I did my easy run together while our daughter napped in the jogging stroller. I got through more pages of Dark Age and worked on some edits. And then, suddenly, our daughter’s movie paused. The pause slipped into a buffer, and soon we realized that we had an internet outage.

My husband works in IT. You might be picturing typical support work, but his skill set ranges far beyond the norm of his peers. In the past few years, he’s gotten more involved in very complex IT work.¹ So, for the first hour, after I handled general troubleshooting procedure while my husband finished some work, he came over and tried a few tricks he had to at least diagnose the issue. Without getting into the weeds of the technicals, he wasn’t able to diagnose much on his end due to the fact that our router was in bridge mode and couldn’t be converted back without the connection, and while in that mode, his hands were tied.²

After several talks with support, we got a technician appointment scheduled for the following morning. They didn’t arrive until 9 am and worked until noon. At the end of it, when our Internet was restored, we were informed that squirrels had chewed through the wires of one of the drops, leaving us—and only us—without connection. A bit disruptive to both my writing and Gabe’s work—more the latter than the former—but more disruptive to our very tired toddler who, in adjusting to her new toddler bed, has been having subpar sleep. She did not have endless energy to entertain herself as she does most days and was on a knife’s edge most of the morning. She is not a kid who needs movies; quite the opposite, she’s five times as outdoorsy as her brother was at her age. But on a day where she is just barely making it through the hours, being without a soothing distraction while Mom and Dad are trying to work is cruel torture.

During this outage, I also received a phone call just before the technician’s arrival. It was from AirBnB support, offering to help me review “rebooking options.” Rebooking options? What happened?

Though I have internet on my phone, my email doesn’t push-notify me unless it’s an email that gets sorted into my Primary folder. The employee on the line informed me that our host had gone to the AirBnB to discover that a pipe had burst. Due to the repairs for both the pipe and the damage, she had to cancel our reservation…

…three days before our arrival.

I had to postpone the call until the technician finished repairs. While waiting, I listened to more Dark Age and worked on the edits. I got less done than I would have liked; as mentioned before, our daughter was having a difficult morning and was in a delicate state, needing more comfort than usual. Our daughter is very cat-like: she’s sweet as can be… but she likes her space. She’s fiercely independent, wandering off and brushing past you most of the time, always having plans bigger than you. But when she wants affection, she is relentless.

She climbed me while I slashed my way through a few more pages and opened up Word to commit the changes to file. She added a few dashes of red herself—both on the page and on my arm as she scaled me like the face of a cliff. This was a stern reminder from the powers that be that writing must not wait for the perfect environment: it will never be perfect, even when it seems like it is. Eventually, you’ll wait so long for perfect conditions that when you finally sit down at that cozy cafe with your prepped playlist and favorite beverage, you’ll find that the words do not flow readily and steadily. Remember: practice makes perfect.

This Substack has helped tremendously. I have to sit down and get these posts out regardless of how my week has gone or how chaotic my morning is. If I know that a Monday or Wednesday or Friday is going to be jam-packed, I have to write the post in advance and schedule it. If I fail, I know it’s on me. I have given myself enough room to compensate for a little chaos, so continuing to make excuses when things fall short does nothing but spin my tires in the mud.

When our daughter was going through her reach, lift, clamp, stand routine up my hip, I remained unfazed. I typed in the changes I had noted on the manuscript without missing a beat. If I stopped then, threw up my hands, and sighed, “Well, it can’t be helped! I just can’t write with all these distractions,” I would just be giving myself an out to never get anything done. Sure, maybe there are days more relentless than others, just like yesterday was. Maybe I had the excuse to step away for a few: play with my daughter, clean up the house, make some calls… all of which I did. But I then thought, “Okay, since I took a break there, I need to trim the fat somewhere else.” I had a tempo run to get done, so the fat was trimmed from lounging time. I played a little less Diablo IV, put Do Not Disturb on my phone so I wouldn’t be tempted to open it and scroll, and got through the remaining pages.

A piece of advice I have for success: set a concrete goal. Many writers may have tried on the mentality I described above and found themselves succumbing to entropy. If you never have an excuse to not work, you may find yourself always working. I’m not advocating for that. My goal yesterday was to get ten pages marked up and five pages edited. Once I hit those goals, the world was my oyster.

I always go back to this old quote from Stephen King. George R.R. Martin had asked him, “How the fuck do you write so many books so fast?”

King replies, “Here’s the thing, okay: there are books, and there are books… the way that I work, I try to get out there and I try to get six pages a day. So with a book like End of Watch, and when I’m working I work every day, three, four hours, and I try to get those six pages and I try to get them fairly clean. So if the manuscript is, say, three hundred sixty pages long, that’s basically two months’ work.”

I always think of that phrase: “I try to get those six pages and I try to get them fairly clean.”

Now, at this point in his career, the man can get his pages ready-to-go on his own fairly reliably. He probably has had the same editor for God-knows-how-long and knows where his pitfalls are and how to swing to hit the ball right where he wants it. But, that’s not to say that us mortals down here are not similarly capable of getting our pages “fairly clean” if we commit a few hours to it. Something I’ll also add is that getting those pages—whether they’re two or six or ten—done and clean doesn’t have to be done in three or four consecutive hours. I’ve mentioned writing sprints before and have had good success with them. I think they’re best reserved for the less reliable parts of your day, and the sweeping up can be reserved for when you have bigger chunks of time—half hour, hour, what have you.

Take today for example: yesterday threw such a wrench in my plans that I have a fairly large to-do list today. However, I know I can knock out three major things today if I stay focused. And what I’ll find once I get them done is that they took less time than I had dreaded they would. I got up this morning and knew that my morning coffee time would be guaranteed, so I could get this post done day-of just fine. Afterwards, I’ll stand up, stretch, put on my shoes, and immediately run those errands. I’ll come back and take a walk with my family. I’ll do a few sprints to put a dent in the manuscript. I’ll work out and make dinner. I’ll set up for D&D. And any time I find between any of that is handed over to writing and editing.

Today being busy doesn’t mean today is a lost cause. Chipping away at work is still getting work done. Slow and steady wins the race—it’s true for writing, it’s true for learning, and it’s true for running. It can be hard to remember to stay steady when the waves get choppy, but you’ll often find that your sea legs are stronger than you thought.

When things get crazy—when squirrels chew through your internet cables and your bookings get canceled and your kids can’t sleep—just remember that manuscripts get written one word at a time. If you can find just five minutes for some words, you can get your book written.

Cheers,

S. Guild

1. While I’ll be the first to brag about him, I’ll never be dishonest about the depth of his abilities: he is that good. His ADHD hyperfocus is nothing but a boon to his love for solving puzzles and learning new skills for his job.

2. There could be more to this or could have been more done/figured out that I simply wasn’t in the room for, so take this all with a teaspoon of salt.