Tiny Steps Are Still Steps

Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash

A writing life doesn't always look like writing. Here's what my anti-hustle writing week actually looked like.

I’m heading back to the UK again this weekend. My mum still needs me, and that’s where I need to be.

In between, I’ve had two weeks at home — client work, boundaries held firmly around my time, and a writing life that continued to move forward in the only way available to it. In small, quiet, dippable increments.

Ten minutes here. Fifteen there. Two minutes to catch an idea before it disappeared entirely.

And you know what? Quite a lot happened.

I’ve been reading Pressed by Kory Kirby — proper reading, not research, just a book I wanted to be inside. I’ve mapped out a loose idea for a series of Anti-Hustle books for writers, which arrived almost fully formed on a walk with no distractions. I’ve been exploring distribution channels beyond the usual suspects and connected with two writers doing things their own rebellious way — I’ll introduce you to them soon. I’ve added to the fiction republication project, tidied some web things, and — this one made me smile — finished the sketch for Book 4 in the Lives on a Train series. Working title: The Eurostar.

None of it looks like a productive writing week from the outside. All of it counts.

Having a plan isn’t the opposite of anti-hustle. Anti-hustle requires some structure — it just has to be yours, not someone else’s template imposed on your life and your work. Mine involves a notebook and highlighters. Not a colour-coded productivity system borrowed from a YouTube channel. Just me, figuring out what actually needs to happen and when, in a way that fits the life I’m actually living.

I’m also in the middle of migrating my entire tech stack to a sovereign European solution — more ethical, more secure, more aligned with how I want to operate. The kind of work that lives under the waterline, invisible but important. If you want the thinking behind that decision, I wrote about it here.

Now, the bit I want to be honest about.

The new books. I’ve set publication dates three times over the last eighteen months and not met them because of life events. I’m genuinely grateful readers have been patient — more than I probably deserve. But I don’t want to keep doing this. Not because the delays aren’t real or valid, but because I want a process sustainable enough to make promises I can actually keep for my own writing in the way I do for clients.

That’s what I’m building toward. A timetable that accounts for a life requiring E, F, and G plans as well as A through D. One that doesn’t collapse the moment something more important needs my attention.

Which, this season, it has.

So this is me, catching you up. Still here. Still writing, even when it doesn’t look like it. Moving forward in the only way that’s honest right now — one tiny step at a time.

What have you been up to?