Welcome to the State of Overwhelm

The Official Home of Avoidance

This will probably be short because I’m officially in a State of Overwhelm. I visit that state a lot, but never more regularly than when I have a book releasing. Her Younger Man hits the shelves next Tuesday (7/25/23), and the closer I get to a book release, the more I withdraw from the internet.

I know—that’s backwards. And yet, it happens every time (like, almost sixty times now).

I don’t think it’s only a matter of the number of tasks a book release adds to my to-do list. While no single release can tank your career, the weight of expectations is always there. Financial expectations. Emotional expectations. Hopes. Fears. Data. And a lot of it’s out of our control at this point. When the to-do list grows and the weight of those expectations gets heavy, avoidance kicks in and it’s not that I don’t want to. I can’t.

And yet, I have to. I need to write and schedule my newsletter and make some graphics to post on social media. Every single time I end up here, I tell myself I have to use a scheduler, like SmarterQueue or something similar. Not only would planning and scheduling my book release be easier (and probably more fun) if I did it while the book was still fresh in my mind and I wasn’t worrying about the release yet, but it might solve the problem of my backlist languishing in some out-of-sight, out-of-mind black hole eighty percent of the time.

But I can’t do a deep dive on that while I need to do all these book release tasks while also getting my daily word count on the book I’m writing, so I promise myself next time. After every release, I add “figure out SmarterQueue” to my to-do list. But it’s not cheap, and there are instructions for setting it up to figure out and questions to get answers to and that task gets carried over from week to week until it eventually falls off the list because about halfway between releases, I convince myself I don’t need to spend the money or figure it out because I’ll just make a plan and stick to it for the next release.

Spoiler alert: Yeah, that never works for me. Here I am, once again giving Past Me a wicked side-eye for thinking that was going to work.

I am doing slightly better this time, though. At the start of July, I listed one promo/marketing thing for each day of the month, even if it was just posting a #weekendread. I wrote in the countdown days to Her Younger Man, and a few other important things. I included my backlist in a couple of places. I made a plan! And then I went into my Reminders app and made “Do promo from checklist” into a daily, high priority task. While I’m definitely struggling and would prefer to be doing anything else right now—taking an old toothbrush to my fridge’s gasket is not out of the question—that reminder waiting to be checked off so the icon number will clear makes me sit here until I get the promo task for each day done. (Sometimes using my compulsion to clear badge notifications against myself is the only way things get accomplished.)

And now I’ll wrap this up because I need to go make more release graphics because Past Me didn’t just take a day and set up SmarterQueue so I wouldn’t end up taking this detour into the State of Overwhelm again.

But first, I’ll just share my cover because fall foliage! Motorcycle! Sexy older woman who gets hers!