Preorders, plus my new personal ADHD hell

(At the end of this newsletter I will have some small spoilers for Picard and for The Mandalorian season finales. Stop reading after planner talk to remain pure.)

First, Barnes and Noble are doing a 25% off preorder deal from April 26-28! Use the code PREORDER25 when you check out! *

*I assume this is US only but I’m not sure.

When I finished writing the first draft of Chaos Terminal, I decided to give myself a shiny new Hobonichi planner. Hobonichi is a really sweet Japanese planner system so sleek that even the paper is special, no-bleed paper. I love it. The problem is, I don’t know how to use it.

As someone with ADHD, I fret when I have too many options. I am the person who puts her phone in the phone pocket of the special travel backpack while going through security, and 5 min later she panics because her phone isn’t in her jeans pocket. Or her jacket pocket. Or somewhere else.

Hobonichi has the following options to look at your year:

• Four years across two pages, just the calendar pages (too small to write anything, but if you wanna know what day Christmas falls on in 2024, this hooks you up.)
• Three months per page, each month in a column
• Month at a glance: full month across two pages, where you can write in special days.
• Month with each day as a column, one week across a two page spread
• Each day with its own page.

See more details of the planner at this Hobonichi site.

I tried to watch some Youtube planner porn to see how people used their planners, and once I got through the people showing me how they buy special stickers to make their planner even more awesome, I saw a lot of “ok this is a month in one column, I’ll have to think about how to use that.”

I started with a plan, but found out that what I figured would be the look at friends’ birthdays was really supposed to be a habit tracker. I then tried to track habits on days that weren’t already birthday-labeled. I failed at that.

Some of the features I just didn’t use.

And, where I just got bit in the ass, I didn’t keep consistent to where I posted things, and I ended up double booking myself because I put an interview on one calendar and a trip on another one. (Yeah. That was awesome to realize.)

I don’t care if it’s messy. I don’t care if it makes no sense to anyone else. I have to have all my shit in one place. MAYBE do a month at a glance and then a page a day, but nothing more than that. Otherwise I will not think to use the features all the time, and when I do use them, I’ll forget what I used each option for. It’s the too many pockets problem all over again.

I am the person who cleans up and then can never find anything.

It’s an ADHD mindset, and it’s okay. I just have to tolerate not buying a super sexy planner for 2024 and buy the thing that has worked best for me, the Moleskine weekly planner.

I just hate that people peddling solutions to ADHD people, things with lots of bells and whistles and pockets and stuff, don’t take into account that we often use what’s at our disposal right now. We’ll put the phone in the most easily accessible pocket. We’ll write the note on the scrap of paper on our desk instead of searching for the right journal. And we’ll open the planner to the calendar we used last time.

But hey, one of the biggest ways to create a good workaround for your ADHD is finding a solution that works for YOU, no matter what others say is better.

One thought on Picard’s series finale:

spoiler space

Picard had ridiculous plot holes where most of season 2 was just erased. Even Marvel doesn’t do such blatant retcons! But I loved the character development in the crew and enjoyed the series as a whole.

But most of all I loved the cook.

The cook had one tiny scene that was played for laughs. He’s not even in any of the episode reviews I’ve seen! He was so underused. A redshirt-ish guy whose credentials are “starfleet and over 25,” and he has this stricken look when Seven says “you’re the new pilot.”

“But I’m a COOK!”

But then, apparently he did a good job since the Titan was a badass throughout the rest of the episode. But we didn’t get to see him doing that, just Captain Seven’s leadership skills. Our cook turned pilot was a goddamn hero in this instance and deserves all the praise he can get.

I have never wanted to write fanfic more than that moment. I’m not exaggerating here. I want the cook’s story SO BAD.

You know, Lower Decks would do justice to the cook’s story. I’m just saying. Paramount, I’m between books now and available to write a script.

Usual end of newsletter stuff: You can find out where to get my books and podcasts over at Murverse.com and you can support my work at Patreon.com. I stream on Twitch and I’m attending The Nebula Conference and She Podcasts Live! in the next few months.