Hello survivors. 

How are you doing?  Really?  Everything ok? 

For those of you time traveling it is the end of May 2025.  It’s an overcast, drippy, cool day here in New England.  Out my window I see the vibrant green of deciduous trees leafing out aggressively.  It always amazes me how quickly the forest explodes into this dense verdancy in the spring. 

It reminds me of the phrase, “Green Mansions”.  And now you are going to be forced to hear my Green Mansions story. 

At some point in school I was assigned to read a 1904 novel called Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson.  It was one of those breathless Victorian adventure novels, a bit like a more literary version of Tarzan.

My 10 word summary would be ‘white man goes to jungle and falls in love with mysterious jungle girl who talks to birds and it doesn’t end well for the bird girl.’

But here I am still remembering it 45 years later – so something stuck.  I took two things away from the novel, first was the vivid, loving descriptions of the deep, living, dark, dense Jungle and, the character of the Rima the bird girl. 

This story was made into a movie with Anthony Perkins (from Hitchcock’s Psycho) and Audry Hepburn in 1959 – which on the surface sounds good, but I guess it was a critical and box office bomb. 

In the 1970’s and again in the 2010’s DC comics introduced Rima the Bird Girl as a Sheena-like character who talks to birds.  So maybe we’ll see her revived in one of the new DC movies. 

Anyhow, that’s my Green Mansions story.  It’s funny how these books I read in highs chool still find their way back into my consciousness after all these years.

But you and I, we don’t live in the jungle, and most of us don’t talk to birds.  We live in the bunker hiding from the apocalypse.

And we are approaching the end of the series arc.  I have been ruminating on the creative process and more specifically, my creative process. 

This week I was workshopping one of the book two chapters with my writing group.  My writing group gives constructive feedback and I’m trying to learn how to be good at receiving constructive feedback. 

I realized that the manuscript had some problems.  Problems that looked to me like I just ran out of time.  I was forced to publish something that, while complete in the way it furthered the narrative, seemed a bit rushed and half baked, like I could have read through it one more time and cleaned some stuff up, but did not. 

But that, my survivor friends is ok.  It’s part of the process.  It is exactly why I created the podcast format the way I did.  To give me a deadline.  To force me to deliver something every two weeks. 

To get words on the page. 

There are a couple of lessons that I take away from this. 

The first is that a bad draft is still a draft.  If you don’t get it out and down on the page you have nothing.  If you force yourself to create something, even if it isn’t great, you still have something. 

And there is an infinite chasm between nothing and something.

The second lesson is that setting deadlines with hard-and-fast rules is an effective way to focus your creativity.  I made up a rule that I would deliver 2500-3000 words to be read into audio and continue the narrative every two weeks.  That held my feet to the fire.  And no matter what was going on in my life I got those words out. 

And for those of you with HR jobs that will soon be eliminated by AI, notice the classic SMART goals elements I’m employing.  The goal is discreet, measurable, and time bounded. 

2500 words every two weeks. 

What this does is keep you from giving up.  It forces you through those days and weeks where you don’t feel creative and you feel like giving up, and every creative session feels like trudging through a cold tar pit. 

If not for the structure of this podcast and the associated deadline I would have dithered and stalled.

And, my survivor friends, the final lesson here is the power of consistency.  I don’t care if it’s in your love life, your work life, or your health, consistency is the most powerful tool to achieve meaningful outcomes. 

Especially outcomes that take years of effort. 

The power of stacking up 2500-word episodes week after week accumulates to something special.  Sure, if you were to pick out a chapter from the manuscript at random you might be appalled at the amateurish nature of it – but strung together they create a thing. 

A big thing. 

And, I would argue, a good thing. 

Yes, we would all love to be inspired and brilliant every day of our lives.  We would love the words to flow like happy explosions from our fingers every time we sit down to write.  But if you wait for that you’ll never get anything done. 

To quote Vladimir Nabokov, “The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamouring to become visible.”

I promised to keep these outros under a thousands words and I feel we are rapidly approaching irrelevance. 

So – if you haven’t picked up a copy of the book – what are you waiting for?

If you are listening to this before September 2025 and you want to submit a story for the podcast feed reach out to me at my email cyktrussell at gmail.

You have left the bunker and climbed up int the tall and vine tangled green of the forest canopy looking for the bird girl but have only found the face of death starting back.  Pick a few leaves for the medicine crone and hurry back to safety. 

And keep surviving.