Elliot Kessler

If you avid readers of my blog (yes, both of you) hadn’t noticed, I haven’t been writing once a week as I promised on my Instagram page. What happened?

By taking some time off and only doing this once a week, I let the door open for a little friend who annoys me to death and affects every aspect of my life. His name is Laziness. He’s been bugging me a lot lately, and all I’ve wanted to do is sit on the couch, watch YouTube, play games, and ignore all responsibilities.

So, if you’ve been wondering about my disappearance, that’s what I’ve been doing. I haven’t been away working tirelessly on a secret project. I haven’t quit. I haven’t gone into witness protection. I’ve been doing a whole lot of nothing.

That might make you wonder when the re-edit of “Liar’s Legacy” will release, and I can assure you that I have no idea. Maybe sometime in February. Probably sometime in March. We will see.

If you don’t want to get caught up in a situation like this, I have some tips for you because by not doing anything, I learned a whole lot of somethings. Mostly things about life and effort. With great power comes blah, blah, blah. But much of what I learned applies to writing and anything you want to do. Whether it’s your job, another hobby, or the carrier you want to have, I think this will help.

Opening the Door

My family has been listening to a book called “Don’t Give the Enemy a Seat at Your Table” by Louie Giglio. In the book, Giglio explains how to keep the enemy out of your life so you can do what is right and not be tempted to do what is wrong.

I will be talking about a similar concept, but I’m not talking about morality, and I’m certainly not writing a book. I’m talking about letting laziness creep into your life and what you can do to prevent it.

As P. T. Barnum said in “The Greatest Showman,” comfort is the enemy of success. I didn’t like writing every single day. It was hard, and I didn’t have time to watch TV or play games. I couldn’t do anything fun (aside from writing, of course). I was stuck sitting at my laptop, clicking keys, until an article appeared every day. That’s a lot of writing, and it started getting to me. I also didn’t have time to do the thing I started this blog for: write books.

This blog is important, but I didn’t start the blog to become a blogger. I started the blog to become an author. That is still the goal, and I haven’t lost sight of it. But I did realize that the blog was becoming more important than writing books, and I wasn’t doing what I set out to do.

A while back, I decided only to write one article every week rather than every day. I thought it would be a perfect way to write articles that were better quality and give myself time to write books, as well as something else I wanted to try out, but we’ll get to that later.

This gap that I created between articles was good. It gave me time to work on my novels, work on school, and study creative writing. The problem is that I didn’t do these things.

This isn’t to say I literally didn’t do anything for the last few weeks. I did work on some projects. I wrote a short story. I worked on school, and I studied my craft. But I didn’t fill the time that I had with these things. I only did them whenever I felt like it. There was a void in my time, and I didn’t fill it with what I needed to do. I filled it with leisure and recreation. In other words, I was lazy.

Filling the Void

If you don’t want to fall into this trap, you must fill your time with productivity. This doesn’t mean you can’t have fun or take breaks. But if you give yourself time to work on your projects, then work on your projects. Don’t sit around promising to get started again tomorrow like I have been doing. Get the work done now. In the words of the wise master Sensei Wu from Lego Ninjago, “never put off tomorrow what can be done today.”

Get the work done before watching YouTube. Write the article before playing games. Finish the outline before hanging out with friends. Get the stuff you said you would get done before falling into the same trap I did.

Conclusion

I wanted to write this article to warn against laziness and explain the lack of content lately. I apologize for not fulfilling my promises to you, and I will do better moving forward.

I appreciate the support you guys have shown, even though I haven’t been doing much. You guys rock, and I wouldn’t be where I am without you.

As for the thing I’ve been working on that I alluded to earlier, there has been a project in the works that I’m hoping to share with you guys soon. No, it’s not three brand-new novels. I’m not Brandon Sanderson. I filmed a couple of vlogs over the last couple of weeks and hope to repurpose my YouTube channel.

Instead of making fun animations like I used to, I’m going to start talking about writing and storytelling. I’ll have vlogs, video essays, and updates. It will be similar to what I post on this blog, but I’ll speak to your face instead of making you read what I have to say.

If you were there when I made those animations on YouTube, rest assured that they will be there, and I will not delete them (as though it matters to anyone but me). I’m simply changing the channel’s banner, icon, name, and content style. So, I’m changing everything.

I’ve been having a lot of fun making the videos so far, and I hope you have fun watching them and learning something about storytelling. Maybe you guys can teach me some things too! Who knows? I still have a lot to learn.

Thanks for reading! Have a fantastic day.